Sunday, January 31st, 2010
Issue: 13   Editor: Nyxxie


COLUMN: Once Upon a Time... Aldarion
This article is classified as a column and involves writer opinion

‘Once upon a time on Bootleggers, a reset was announced. This reset offered new chances to people as every single one of them would have to start all over again. A guy, living in the land of wooden shoes, cheese, windmills and tulips, decided it was time for a different strategy. One account would not be enough to play this game properly so he planned to cheat a bit by creating dupes. The exact amount of dupes he created has not been discovered, as we speak, but he created at least two accounts. Uninspiring as he was, both had about the same names. Both of them started with “Don” and both ended with cheesy words, “zalos” and “Zero”.

He got himself into a well-known and well respected crew, Virtual Reality. He thought of other things too. To prevent that he would be accused of duping, he pretended as if both accounts were each-other’s best friends in real life. Overall, things were going well; both accounts ranked properly and it seemed no-one had even realized they belonged to the same person. One day, the guy made a mistake. He accidentally used the wrong account when he tried being a smart-ass in the forums. Oops.

He was accused of duping and to prevent he would be slaughtered by the Bootleggers community, he came up with the most complicated plan ever. He planned to fake a suicide which in return would draw all the attention away from him being a nasty cheater. He copied a suicide letter from the internet, committed suicide with one of the accounts and then posted this terrible story with the other. The Bootleggers community was shocked by the death of this person. A sticky topic was made, as well as pictures that paid respect to the guy that just ‘died’.

However, Virtual Reality wasn’t sure about this suicide. Some of them, including mylady, did some research and discovered that he wasn’t dead at all. As a result, DonZero – his other account – was kicked and killed. Later on, he posted a topic with another dupe in which he tried to find the witness statement, much to the amusement of several players, who clearly saw this was the very same person. The cheater realized he had lost and changed plan. He pretended as if all of it was a planned joke claimed he was responsible for “the biggest hoax in de history of BL.”’

So, there we are. I just presented you the scenario of the fake suicide of Donzalos. I very much like to think there is only one person involved, for the simple reason that it must be pretty hard to find two people as retarded as ‘him’. Apart from being disrespectful to anyone that had to deal with a situation like this in the past, it was also the least funny thing ever on Bootleggers. An ordinary tree is funnier than this. But the fake suicide wasn’t the only real life thing going on.

I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one that eagerly watched the game forum evolve into a soap opera. Day in, day out we were the witnesses of a cruel fight involving real life. I think everyone, apart from the few people fighting each other, felt this was completely and utterly pointless, rude and retarded. Even though none of the people involved came much further than “slut” and “whore” it was pretty amusing to watch. None of them showed a tiny glimpse of intelligence by simply ignoring the topic. The reason for that, I think, is down to real life being involved. No matter that this is an online game, if people start about real life it is bound to become a huge fight.

I saw someone post – in arguably the worst English I have ever seen – that he just wanted to hit the guy on Bootleggers or in real life. I’m sorry, but that is just terribly sad. Why would you want to hit someone in real life if you have a disagreement (or perhaps fight) on an online game? I reckon anyone being this fed up over the game might eventually end in jail (in real life, that is), so I beg to all of you, please, show a bit of intelligence by not reacting as an atomic bomb.

As we’re dealing with people rather than machines I think it would be good if the staff would pay more attention to this. I already saw Sean stepping in to remove some posts but I reckon that’s not enough. Anyone who involves real life in Bootleggers should be permanently banned. Sure, a little (innocent) chat about it can’t do much damage; however, as soon as things start to get serious the user should be banned. Considering the time it took the people I mentioned earlier to realize they had to quit the hideous discussion they held, I think this is the only solution.

And if you think of it, if this rule was introduced earlier on, we wouldn’t have had to deal with the fake suicide of some idiot. We wouldn’t have witnessed the ridiculously embarrassing fight on the Game Forum in which no-one was interested, apart from about four people. This rule, I’m sure, would improve game-play massively. The brilliant thing is, we would no longer be annoyed, and this could also be a mental help to people who think it is necessary to insult others by making remarks about their real life. Who’d ever think Bootleggers would be useful for that?

Thank you for reading my articles while I was part of the Buzz Team