Emotions and entitlement

Corrections to class balance, more commonly called "nerfs", are a deeply emotional thing. There is no such thing as absolute power in a MMORPG, your power is always relative to that of the monster you're fighting or to that of other players. Thus a nerf, defined as a change which leaves your class/build comparatively worse off, is affecting the victims deeply. It doesn't matter whether that nerf is really making your class impossible to play, or whether it just makes your class slightly less likely to be invited into a PuG that doesn't know better. We all invested hundreds if not thousands of hours into our characters, so even a small relative diminishing of our powers feels like a catastrophe.

This has two consequences for this blog: One is that I'm exactly as emotional as the next guy. If the class / build I'm playing gets nerfed, I'm getting exactly as angry as everyone else who gets nerfed. The other consequence is that whenever I discuss the possibility of nerfs to some other class, the commenters on that thread who play that class will react angrily. The most used search term for my blog last month, after "Tobold" was "death knights overpowered". And every single death knight posting on that thread said of course death knights aren't overpowered, while every single other class which in some way is in competition to death knights said of course they are overpowered.

Emotions, whether they are mine or those of other people, make some readers who aren't emotionally involved in that subject feel uncomfortable. That is normal, especially since the demographics of MMORPGs and thus blogs about MMORPGs is centered around young males, and dealing with emotions is a weak point for that audience. So my advice to you is to simply skip those posts. Trying to fight emotions with rational logic is doomed to failure (which is something you might want to keep in mind if you ever get married). Rationally I know quite well that my priest is still perfectly playable, but that doesn't make me any less angry.

But what I'm totally sick and tired of is people with a strong sense of entitlement, which is all too common on the internet. People telling me they have been subscribing to my blog for some time, and think that because of that I owe them something. WHAT? You've been consuming content for free I worked hard to create, and I owe you? Sorry, if anything, you owe me. Thus if I read comments like this one: "Way too many of these posts seem like a description of the bloggers emotional state atm. If you had a bad day at the office and need to vent, can you use your wife/kids/colleagues/shrink instead?" it makes me want to come to Anonymous' house and give him a piece of my mind. This blog is mine, mine, mine. It's my place to vent, it's my shrink. If you don't like it, get the fuck out of here, I'm not going to miss you at all. I'll even refund you all the 0 dollars and 0 cents you paid me for your "subscription". And yes, that is me being emotional again.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:31 AM Permanent Link