Be Special, and Proud of It!

WARNING: I am about to swear a lot. You have been warned.

You've never seen my angry. I hope you never do. What you are about to see is not me angry; I've calmed down quite a bit since reading the post in question. Let's just say I'm glad this guy wasn't physically in the same room as me while spouting this bullshit. Because, seriously? Them's fightin' words.

To summarize his post:

"My name is Euripedes, and I'm very insecure. It makes me very angry when other people think they are better than me. This is because I'm so afraid that I don't measure up, that I have to adopt a life philosophy that says everyone is equal. I never saw The Incredibles or read Ayn Rand, so I never realized that if 'everyone is special, then no one is.' I think that I, Euripedes, am so special that I have to tear down anyone else who thinks they might be special. I am so special that I am the only one who gets to be special! Also, I blow goats."

First off, the very idea of specialness being a bad thing that needs to be stomped out makes me physically ill. I'm a Humanist, and humanity shines its brightest when you let it shine. We advance as a species because of special people, not because of the writhing mass of consumption and conformity that they emerge from, the mass that Euripedes thinks they should be mashed back down into without hesitation.

Secondly, let's look at two quotes from his post side by side:

"Let’s get this straight here, Ulduar raiders. You worked hard for your epics. You raided long hours, painfully wiped, had triumphant wins and bitter defeats. You dropped Yogg-Saron before the nerfs, beat Hard Mode X before Y was nerfed. People being able to get the same level of loot from much easier content in no way diminishes that. "

and

"You can try to say you are, act like you are, but you aren’t. You may be better than the majority of other players, be able to clear the hard content better and faster than 90% of the guilds out there. How does that warrant your skills being worshiped? How does that warrant keeping the peasants in-line and the grand overlords (namely, you) in positions of, essentially, royalty?"

Euri, you fucking hypocrite. So which is it? You can't say "stop caring about loot, it's just perception, it's not important" out of one side of your mouth, while the other side says "loot is so important that it makes you ROYALTY IN MY EYES, and the only way to rectify that is to give me the same loot for free!"

Again, for emphasis: you fucking hypocrite.

And how about this quote:

"An elitist attitude means you want to deny the lesser mortals stuff on sole merit that you are better than they are. Frankly, this disgusts me on a level I didn’t even know was possible."

You can't possibly mean this, Euri. You're saying baseball pros are elitist assholes because they expect to be allowed to play on the Red Sox while you are stuck in your work softball league. You're saying that Donald Trump is a douche (ok, he IS a douche, but for other reasons) for daring to think that he deserves his millions while you don't. Why doesn't he just hand all his money to you!? I just. Can't. Figure. Out. Why. Can you? Why don't we hand out Olympic medals to everyone who watches the Olympics on TV, and give trophies to all the NASCAR spectators while tsk-tsking the drivers for being big enough assholes to think they deserved something for actually running the race?

What Euri is actually saying is that he thinks he is entitled to everything nice no matter how little he works, and seeing other people have things he wants makes him jealous. The jealousy is exacerbated when others believe they have actually earned what they have. He is so insecure about himself that he can't handle other people having anything he doesn't have, but can't reconcile this fact with his own self-image. He must make himself believe that cutting others down is noble, because otherwise he has to face the fact that he's being a bitter, petty douche.

So everyone: ignore bitter, petty douchebags like this and let your fucking freak flag fly. Be special. If it makes you happy to have the most minipets, then take pride in that! Do not, under any circumstances, take Euripedes's advice and actually feel ashamed that you dared think you might have some quality that is rare in others.


Update 1: Larisa has a very thoughtful post up on this subject, where she espouses a more healthy attitude: "You [geared-out 'elitist' raiders] weren’t very much noticed in the first place. At least not by me. You were faceless before the next patch and you’ll stay faceless after the next one, unless you do something about it." I'm very cool with that. I just don't like it when people go out of their way to care about it while claiming others shouldn't care. If Euri actually doesn't think gear matters that much, then I encourage him to stop caring so much about it.

Larisa also talks about how, if you want to be really special and "sparkle", you can do something original and unusual for your server's community, like organize a cool event. Or even just wear items for their looks rather than stats. Or, best of all, just be such an all-around-cool-person that everyone knows your name. Sounds great to me. If you do something to earn your specialness, then you deserve it. :)


UPDATE 2: In case there is any doubt about Euri's intent, or that I misinterpreted him, here's his clarification in the comments of his own post:

"I take issue with those thousands of raiders who are against this change solely because they think they should be the only ones with access to gear of this quality.

If you’re against it because it ruins progression, or this or that or the other thing, that’s fine, that at least makes sense.

But being against it only because it grants gear to those less skilled than you are?

It’s that attitude this post was directed against."

So his "clarification" is to say, flat-out, that he thinks gear should be distributed with a complete disregard for skill. It's a major stretch to interpret it any other way. He doesn't seem interested in leaving us room to give him the benefit of the doubt.

And just for the record, I do think that skill should be a factor when rewards are given out. I do think that only the best players should have exclusive access to the top quality gear.

So am I an asshole for that?

I do think that allowing someone to grind faceroll heroics and receive exactly the same reward as a raider got through skill, practice, effort, and other expenses is offensive. I am NOT purely against the idea that 5-man players or time-limited players should be able to advance their characters. I like the idea of being able to get higher tier tokens in 5-mans. I just have a quibble with the way the execution of the change rewards purely time spent grinding a mundane and trivial task, when it should be rewarding an effortful application of skill.

UPDATE 3: Aaaaand things get more confusing! Quoting Euripedes' follow-up post on his blog:

"This… doesn’t make sense to me.

Awarding “last season” raiding gear for easy stuff makes sense. I’ve iterated why this post and last.

But awarding current season raiding gear for the same (relatively) easy content?

That, to me, is fundamentally wrong."

So why is it fundamentally wrong? How is this consistent with your other statements?

In the same post, he also tries to clarify who he was aiming the post at. Here's a summary:

"The post was directed at a specific set of people who have an issue with the change, an attitude that was summarized best by occam99:

Funnily enough, the people who have that attitude ARE the ones who feel that they should be worshipped for their gear…and that’s what this is all about. “Hey, I have T8.5. Obviously I’m a better person than you, which means that you don’t deserve what I have”.

It is ass-backwards, and supported by the fact that in WoW, we are all anonymous. If someone says to me, “I have a Jaguar and you don’t, therefore I am better than you, thus you don’t deserve the same things as me”, I’m gonna punch him in the throat.

It’s THAT kind of raider the last post was leveled at.

If you are NOT that kind of person, then that last post wasn’t directed at you.

Is that clearer now?"

Not much. He still doesn't come out and say what he means. From what I can gather, he's mad at people who are assholes. I can get behind that. But he keeps saying it wrong. He keeps attacking people who think they deserve things for being better at something. Apparently, he means to attack people who are rude enough to rub it in others' faces. Not once does he say this explicitly, though. Which just makes me think that he's actually mad that other people have nice things and dare to think they deserve them and he doesn't, and he's just looking for some rational way to couch his anger so he doesn't look petty. This is supported by how inconsistent his other views are. He needs to clearly parse out that he's mad at the "asshole-superiority" part, and not the "deserving" part.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone thinking they deserve better rewards for doing better. Now if you meant "better person overall because I have epics" rather than "better at the game and therefore I have epics" then that's a different story. He does quote the phrase "better person", so I can only assume that it's THAT idea that he is so mad about. When other people have something nice and think that therefore they must be better people overall than you? That makes them an asshole. I'm with him on that. You just have different priorities or skills, and put them to use in different ways. Doesn't make either of you "better people".

BUT

There's nothing wrong with them thinking they deserve the reward and you don't. Why attack that idea when supposedly all your mad about is the fact that they think having something nice makes them a better person? Separate the two ideas instead of mashing them uncerimoniously together, and it would get rid of the confusion. Make a post attacking assholes specifically, instead of adding in the junk about who deserves what. That's where the confusion came from, and why my criticism still stands.