My little sister is eleven years old. If you know anyone that is eleven, then you’ll know what I mean. The thing that characterises a lot of children this age is the lack of self control. That’s what temper tantrums are all about. She hasn’t had one since I’ve been back, but it’s a waiting game. It’ll happen soon. Which is fine, it’s all part of the learning process. As we get older we learn about self control. Well, some of us do. Some of us also become social workers, but that’s too far out in left field for the purposes of this post. And with self control then comes social responsibility. Self control is the basis for every stage of learning. You can’t learn anything, or teach anything for that matter, if the students are not capable of exercising self control.

Tobold yesterday demonstrated a lack of self control. The type of self control that connects your brain to your fingers when you’re typing on a keyboard. If his brain had been connected, and he had been exercising self control, then he wouldn’t have written the fucking stupid pile of dogshit masquerading as a post that he did yesterday. It was news to me that social responsibility extended into a game played on the internet. I mean, have you been in a PuG group recently? But apparently it does. And what’s more, it seems that people who choose to play healers and tanks are being socially responsible. Which is really weird, because I thought that they were playing healers and tanks. Tobold seems to think that DPS have not only brought all their problems onto themselves, but that they are the actual problem in the equation. Their selfish behaviour has created the situation that we find ourselves in, where DPS have to queue for inexorable lengths of time, while healers jump in fairly quickly and tanks get in immediately. If he had half a brain then he would realise that Blizzard created the game that we play in. The players merely react to the conditions therein. And the reality is that tanks are not an attractive role for a lot of people, and even for those that do it, very few indeed wish to throw themselves into the horror of the LFG system.

Why? Because it is an anti-social mess where the sane do not wish to tread. Who created it? Blizzard. Well, that’s what I thought. Apparently us anti-social DPS mongrels caused it for actually, you know, wanting to play a class that we may actually enjoy in the game that we pay to play. Blaming the players for a games limitations is pretty fucking stupid. I thought that Tobold was better than this, but apparently not. But expecting the same players to then turn around and solve the same problem is taking wishful thinking to new alternate universes where small furry animals play hacky-sack while smoking cigars.

With self control thus comes knowledge and learning for learnings sake. I suppose that an experienced player would know when choosing a new character that they will stand a much better chance of having shorter queue times by choosing to play a tank. I challenge you to ask a person who doesn’t play WoW to read that sentence and tell me what the fuck I’m talking about. If I load up the starting character screen, I do not see a flashy neon sign telling me that tanks are under-represented and I will be skirting my social responsibility by not playing one. It’s just not there. But, thanks to Tobold’s wisdom, now I know. And in order to live up to my social responsibility I will have to re-roll a new toon and level him all the way to level eighty-fucking-five, and then willingly enter the hell that is the random dungeon finder, and then, and only then will I be a socially responsible gamer.

I’m sorry, I just can’t. I don’t have the self control.