I’ve trawled through the gripefest to discover whats been pissing people off this week and boy, do we have some good-uns.

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Oh shit. Chernobyl didn’t have anything on this absolute meltdown.

The STOP BOOSTERS! crusade was led by a very angry Mage who was having an absolute fit at anyone who dare to disagree.

OP was super pissed at people selling boosts in /2.
They felt that it should be done more discretely like in the good old Vanilla days, where advertising was purely done by word of mouth and you just knew of some bloke and whispered them. (apparently)

They suggested that they make a specific channel for Boosters so that they were not advertising in /2 therefore allowing the people like themselves to sell other things in Trade and have their message stick around longer for people to see.

They also insist on calling the company ‘Activision Blizzard’ like this thing is all Activisions fault and Blizzard couldn’t stop them.

Things got fun when they started to call people dumb, adolescent nerds, unable to read etc…

Then they dropped this clanger…

Trade channel is for trading anything and everything…

This was swiftly picked up and it was pointed out that selling a service is selling something defined by anything and everything. But these replies were swiftly kicked down with the OP saying that anyone who thinks that has zero brainpower.

The biggest victory (I’m going to call it a victory in this because oh my fucking got, this OP) came when someone linked the blue post from 2018 that said boosts were not allowed to be sold in the group finder anymore, they had to be sold in /2.

Which then prompted the OP to put down their pitchfork.

TRADE CHAT IS UNREADABLE followed in the same way.
Trade is being spammed and they are irritating the OP.
But the OP also takes great pains to say that before everyone gets their bull shit on, they can afford to be boosted but they dont want to play a game where you are just carried.
Oh and can anyone suggest an add-on to instantly block these sad people?

One of the more ‘helpful’ people suggested Badboy add-on which they use so they don’t need to see these peasants selling boosts.

However, again the blue post seems to have done and r/whoosh moment and completely eluded the OP.
As for them wanting to report players who do use the /2 channel which is Blizzard authorised resulted in a Blue popping in to remind them that the sellers are not doing anything wrong, and if you go around reporting people constantly for things like that, you could actually end up on the receiving end of a time out.

Why do people have so much of an issue with selling boosts in Trade?
Before people were geared enough to be able to complete dungeons with four people, the spam consisted of people wanting to sell or buy all the herbs or ores… Or selling mounts constantly…
Blizzard have told boosters that the only place they can sell their runs is in /2 and Trade is like the market, you have everyone vying for your trade. Why should it be segregated or silenced?

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This one caught my attention purely due to the title, I was wondering what the plea was.
I was expecting some dramatic issue to have arisen that was really detrimental to peoples enjoyment of something.

Alas, it was not that.

The OP was sending out a plea for everyone to stop using add-ons that announce your interrupts in dungeons and raids as a /say…

Their issue was that the chat bubbles then go over things that they need to see, like health bars to target things etc. They even went as far as saying that if you have the add-on and it announces your interrupt in /say, it means that the OP is unable to interrupt as they cant see the nameplate of the mob.

Wut?

This however was not one that was going to result in everyone abandoning their add-ons of choice to pacify the wail of the OP.

Many reminded them that the chat bubbles can be switched off, by the OP. Which is going to be 10000000x easier to do that to rely on every single player who uses an announcer to switch it off.

But one said that the chat bubbles display more information than just the interrupts and the OP shouldn’t have to turn them off.

But what else do they say apart from the chat from NPC’s and Players that would make them provide something that is not in the chat box?

Apparently, not much.
If a boss ‘says’ that some raid mechanic is incoming then it brings that up too, but only because they are saying it.

I like the add on. I can see who is pulling their weight instantly. Who isn’t and who was quicker than me when mine doesn’t go through!
I don’t see the harm it does to anyone else and it is certainly no worse than someone just using /say during encounters for the sake of it.

What was more interesting was the extent that people were not willing/able to see the flip side of their argument.

There were people saying that you can get WeakAuras to show you the interrupts, allowing you to put this information in a grid to the side of your screen rather than use /say…
But to the same extent, there is an in game option that allows you to see whats been said in a grid to the side of your screen. The chat box. 

And those who were saying that Weak Auras were better for the interrupts as they showed the cooldown too, were saying that they wanted the bubbles for the boss fight information, like who has what Decrees on the Azshara fight.
But, surely switching off chat bubbles and using DBM or BigWigs or ever WeakAuras would be better than that?
They are telling people to stop using an inferior add-on for interrupt management while they are refusing to stop using and inferior raid warning system?

In the end you only have limited options for your chat bubbles.
You can have no chat bubbles, all chat bubbles or exclude party/raid chat from the bubbles.
They don’t show anything amazing that you cant get from a proper raid management add-on, will still cover up everything and even if you have exclude party/raid there will still be that person who insists of doing /say or /yell to talk to everyone.

For me, I want to be able to tell everyone that I have done my allocated interrupt without having to yell over people on discord.
I don’t want to have to hope that everyone can remember who has what interrupt so they can see what ones have been used on the WeakAura tracking them all and therefore know where the interrupt list is currently at.
/say
Fuck that shit.

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This one literally took minutes for it to be deleted from the forums…

I was thinking that something was up when I couldn’t get any of the reply drop-downs to open up and scrolling to the bottom failed to refresh the next set of posts. I should have taken a big old screen shot of the post but I really thought that it was as troll post and would just be funny reading what the replies were. The the OP seemed to double down on what they were saying and I started to do that “oh? OH…” thing when you realise that something might actually be more serious than you first thought…

Anyway.

The OP is called Whiteknight, a male Human Paladin. I DGAF about naming them as this is such a clusterfuck of a thread and the name is kinda important.
They commented on a thread about being surprised that you managed to get a name back in December 2018, so they didn’t make this char recently just for the purpose of trolling via this thread.
I had to have a look at their post history to see if they had a history of trolling with the char…
What is interesting is that they have levelled this char to 10 to be able to use it on the forums, so there has to be some reason to do that and not just leave it as a ‘name placeholder’ char?

This post, the OP asked why men play female characters. Is it to catfish other people? Are they not able to play a male character? Do they have some sort of masculinity defect?
They then went the whole nine yards and stated that men who play female characters are “really mentally ill”

With a char name like Whiteknight people assumed that the person was just trying to bait a response, most of the comments were “haha nice try” or the that’s bait gifs…

Then they replied again…

They doubled down and laughed at all the people who were fixated with their name but reminded everyone that they had failed to come up with an actual reason as to why someone male would play a female character. They then doubled down on the mental illness by saying that they only reason you would do it as a 40 year old is because you have a sick perversion/fantasy/etc…

Wut?

This is when people really started to get concerned that the OP wasn’t actually trolling. This person might actually think like this…

It kinda reminds me of the threads that popped up before ‘trolling’ was a thing and people did actually have legitimate outrage/concerns about people playing characters that had different genitalia to themselves.
Like this one from back in 2013.

Even then, the comments were pretty much the same compared to the ones in the main thread. Which the gist of it is as follows:

• Why can’t you play anything? Does it make you have a bestiality fetish if you play as a Worgen or Panda?
• I bet the OP started hitting on a female character and then found out it was a dude playing it and things got weird on voice coms?
• (If the OP is actually male) How do you deal with playing games where the only playable char is female?
• (If the OP is female) did you think you were having some happy fun times with another woman and then learned that you were talking to a man and got creeped out because you had a ‘girly’ conversation with them?
• (If the OP is female) How do you deal with playing video games where the playable char is male??? As that would rule out a vast majority of them!?!
• Female models look 1000000x better than the male counterparts that generally just look like meat hunks with zero brains.
• Women don’t always get hit on playing a female char as you don’t know who is playing it…
• It’s a fantasy game, not an extension of myself?

This topic has been done to death

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But there is a light at the end of the tunnel as to what the definitive answer is.

Interestingly, there were actually honest-to god-research papers on this. Here’s one amongst many others…
Martey, R, Stromer-Galley, J, Banks, J, Wu, J & Consalvo, M. (2014) The strategic female: gender-switching and player behavior in online games. Information, Communication & Society. 17 (3), 286-300 
(I do have this downloaded and have access to all the other papers through uni up until June 2020 if anyone might be interested)

The abstract of this one reads as such:

As players craft and enact identities in digital games, the relationship between player and avatar gender remains unclear.
This study examines how 11 in-game chat, movement, and appearance behaviors differed by gender and by men who did and did not use a female avatar – or ‘gender-switchers’.
Drawing on social role and feminist theories of gender, we argue that gender differences in behavior align with the social roles and norms that establish appropriate and inappropriate behavior for men and women.
Thus we complicate questions of ‘gender-switching’ by examining not only player gender, but also player psychological Gender Role as measured by the Bem Sex Role Inventory to examine how gender does – and does not – manifest in digital worlds.
Analysis revealed that men may not necessarily seek to mask their offline gender when they use a female avatar, but there is evidence they do reinforce idealized notions of feminine appearance and communication.
Movement behaviors, however, show no differences across men who do and do not gender-switch.
That is, selecting avatar gender may be less a matter of identity expression, and more a strategic selection of available multi-modal codes that players take up in their navigation of this digital space.

I liked this paper as it actually used WoW to do their research, implementing a quest via an add-on that grouped people up to do puzzle quests and so on.

They looked at how people spoke to each other, was it as they would irl or as they think their avatar would?
The looked at the type of char being made, ‘traditional’ or ‘different’, ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’.
They looked at how these players moved in comparison to others in the group, did they stand close to them or far away, did they stand closer to a certain type of avatar, etc…?

The researchers found that men playing female characters don’t do anything untoward, they don’t behave shockingly differently. If anything, playing a female char just makes them more chatty and ‘nice’ as opposed to just giving directions to the group.
Men playing male characters back peddled more than women or men playing female chars. Men playing males also stayed a little bit further out from the group. Males playing females jumped more but women playing females and men playing males jumped around the same amount.
Men and women created hotties when making their female chars. Male chars were a bit on the ugly side, but lets face it, males in WoW are fugly as hell anyway.

So really, it boiled down to men make female chars because, why not? They don’t really behave any differently and do not use them as an extension of themselves or hide the fact that it is a bloke sat behind the monitor and keyboard.
Like in all parts of life when you have to interact with someone that isn’t face-to-face, you are going to get some wankers who try and scam you. After all, the confidence trickster is one of the older ‘professions’ that still hasn’t gone away.
But to label all men playing female chars as mentally ill is really something else. As the research showed, they don’t change their behaviour to try and catfish people, they don’t have an issue playing males, they just want to play a female…

And frankly, I would take this peer-reviewed papers reasoning over a screeching forum poster any day of the fucking week.