Taking the heat

[kate]

The statement in bold has no factual evidence to back itself up. Throughout your post you are just assuming numbers. I'm not saying your numbers are wrong, because I obviously don't know what the numbers are either. But if we all just keep assuming that we're not pissing enough of the player base off, then we might wake up one day and have lost our ability to play the game how we want to play it. If we piss enough of WoW's player base off, then maybe Blizzard will implement (or not implement) features into their next MMO that will stop multiboxing indirectly.

You're absolutely right that I have no evidence, and in fact, no such evidence can exist unless Blizzard were to release the numbers to the public.

However, in my experience as a human being, I often see people getting pissy and ranting about things and threatening to quit and then they do not. Also in my experience as a human being, I see people enjoying a thing and paying money for it, and, when the thing gets changed to where they do not enjoy it they stop paying money for it. Based on those factors, in my experience, it's much more likely for boxers who can't play anymore to quit than it is for angry pissy people who get stomped once in awhile to quit. Is it possible I'm wrong? Surely. Is it likely? Who can say without real numbers? But this is the way my experience in the world says things tend to go. I do not have any experiences with the opposite thing being true (people quitting in droves over one bad experience while other people stay in droves despite the thing they enjoyed being made literally impossible). It's a perfectly reasonable conclusion for me to draw, and the opposite conclusion wouldn't make sense based on my experience of the world.

You seem to be drawing the conclusion that I am advocating for people to not give a shit and be jerks or whatever. That is not true. I like it when people behave nicely and wish that everyone would. However, I do not feel that I have the right to place any kind of expectation on people to behave nicely when they have not explicitly given me cause to believe that they will give me reason to expect that. Just because someone else multi-boxes (like I do) does NOT give me the right to say "Hey, you're representing me now, so behave how I would like you to behave" because that individual has never consented to representing me. Conversely, nobody else has the right to put a burden or expectation on me to behave in a certain way because they are under the mistaken representation that by my multi-boxing I am somehow consenting to represent them.

tl:dr version: People shouldn't be jerks, the world is a better place when they aren't, but if someone who has something in common with me wants to be a jerk I'm not going to bother losing sleep over it or trying to correct them unless we have that kind of relationship.

Edit: Just as I think the world would be a better place if everyone behaved nicely, I also think the world would be a better place if people stopped trying to control other people's behavior when the relationship between those individuals contains no consent from either party to be controlled.