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Sunday, May 13, 2012

"Stand my ground, I won't give in. No more denying, I gotta face it…"

Wow.  A whole month I've been stagnating on this.  Sure, I've been busy with school.  I just had my AP US History exam on Friday.  It's also the end of the year, and teachers are piling on the work like it's going out of style.  But, I've also been occupied with other things.  Namely, after being clean since last October, I dragged myself back into playing Minecraft.  And most of my free time has been spent playing on one server, Battle for Eldaran. Short version: it's a role-playing server in which some factions are competing to control Eldaran, others are just trying to get by.
A new player showed up a few days ago: qwerty200708, or ollieatsburgers as he's known on the Minecraft and server forums, or Jex as he's known in-game.  He and I got into a…discussion within five minutes of meeting each other. He wants to start a faction on the server called Tradia.  It's a trading kingdom.  Sounds good, no?  Well, from what I could gather during the discussion, he wants to use trade to make all the factions his friends, then he wants to overthrow Iordo, the most powerful faction on the server.  From there, he plans to have Tradia be the main faction.  I tried calling him out on some of the faulty logic in his plans, but he wasn't having it.  So, the pissing match spilled over onto the server website.  He started a thread that was the "blueprint" for tradia.  He and I (and even several other people) have been at it there ever since.  Since you need an account to view the thread, and just posting blocks of text would be dull and confusing, I'll just post screenshots of the thread.



He edited that post.  The original text was, "Combat is punishable by death," and, "Bribery is punishable by death," among other things.

A refute to his plans and what he told me.  I know it's melodramatic, but I do that sometimes.








An apology so I don't sound like a contrary asshole.







And an APUSH-inspired rebuttal to several things he's said.  (I honestly never thought that class would come in handy so soon.)














As you can see, he's upset and confused several people, including a couple administrators.  While I don't profess to be of flawless logic and reason in all this (the statement about SOPA is rife with personal viewpoint), I'm just going to stand my ground, concede where necessary, and point out all the ways this guy's an idiot.  His refusal to use weapons is insulting.  Like it or not, we humans fight for what we want.  And that fighting tends to involve weapons when what we want is a physical item.  Occasionally, we'll fight with weapons over intangible things too. To think that a simulated environment like Minecraft can change that is…deluded.  Participants of MMOs like EVE, Shores of Hazeron, and others are proof that, if you hand someone a gun and a player-run economy, they're going to use it to get what they want, despite the fact that it has no bearing on the real world.  I doubt this is going to turn out any different.  

"Well you can't buy me love
But I'll kick your ass for free
So why don't you take a vacation
And shut the fuck up?"