My wife and I have played LoL off and on for the last year and enjoyed it. But as much as we enjoy it, there are aspects of the game and especially the community that often drive us away for months at a time. While there are of course some really nice people who play, the majority of players are absolute dicks. They will talk shit while winning, losing, before, during, after, it doesn’t matter. They will use all manner of racial slurs, profanities, and just grossly immature gutter talk for no good reason. If anyone on their team makes a mistake, they will flame the person horribly. Oftentimes, the person being flamed didn’t even make a mistake. Sometimes its as simple as they didn’t do exactly what the flamer wanted them to do, and this necessitates a disruptive verbal assault.

If things go badly, they are likely to just quit the game entirely ruining it for everyone else. When they do this early, it means everyone is screwed for up to 25 minutes since that’s the minimum time before you are allowed to surrender.

We have also noticed that very, very few women play LoL. We have met a grand total of ** 2 ** people in the game who even claim to be female in RL. That’s shocking. I can’t help but think this fact is connected to how loathsome the community is.

Despite everything I’ve just said, the game itself is fun. That’s why this community issue is such a shame. From what I have been told, both DotA and HoN are even worse than LoL in this respect.

What is it about this type of game that lends itself to such despicable behavior from its members? Is it the genre itself or something about the current games in the genre that attracts and cultivates such horrendous behavior from its members?

Do Decapitated Heads Briefly Remain Conscious?

Dear Cecil:

In the answer about the guillotine in your online archive, you say that “the fatal blow induces immediate unconsciousness.” In actuality, the human head does remain conscious fifteen to twenty seconds after decapitation. This was proven when a scientist condemned to the guillotine in the 1700s told his assistant to watch and that he would blink as many times as he could. The assistant counted fifteen to twenty blinks after the head was severed, the blinks coming at intervals of about one second. So the head does remain briefly alive.

— Joel Brusk, via AOL

Dear Joel:

Click the link for the full response. It is VERY interesting.

• 10 more posts for Dec.
• At least 20 posts in Jan 2011.

All I ask from readers:

• Share the blog link with some friends.
• Post comments!

WordPress 2.9.1 is available! Please update now.

So I click the link, choose the [Upgrade Automatically] option, and eventually it gets to this:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.9.1.zip.

Unpacking the update.

It churns for a few minutes, and then stops. But it is not upgrading. I’ve always done the automatic upgrades in the past, and all my recent plugins upgrade just fine. What are my options at this point for trying to get this update completed?

To fill these opportunities, I am looking for some new writers who would like to write articles, reviews, analysis, guides, etc. about MMO or Nintendo Wii games.

The system is very flexible. You would get to research and pitch your own articles, and there is no minimum commitment. I have some writers who write 20+ articles per month, and some who write one article every few months.

Bright Hub pays an up front per article fee, and also gives the writer a significant share of the advertising revenue generated by their articles. The revenue share continues indefinitely. I’ve been with them for over a year, and it is a good system. This is an excellent opportunity to make some money writing about your favorite subject (games!) before the holidays.

If you are interested, send me an email at mhartman@editors.brighthub.com.

Thanks!

Muckbeast on twitter

Threshold RPG on twitter

Primordiax on twitter

MMO Gaming Dictionary – Combat Terminology

MMO Gaming Dictionary – Character Terminology

MMO Gaming Dictionary – General Terminology

Then I created a place where people can go to post their own new ones:

Add your own!

What do you all think of the idea, and how are we doing so far? What else would you add?

Windows Live and the AOLization of the Internet

Most of us hated the way AOL did that, and yet site operators, forum moderators, etc. are going right down this same path. Then along comes Microsoft, and takes it to a whole new level with Windows Live.

It would be easy to just blow this off as Microsoft trying to create a new AOL, but what bothers me the most is that this is part of a larger, more negative trend internet wide. External linking, traffic exchanges, link swapping, etc. were once time honored methods of sites helping each other grow. Now people are so obsessed with their own page views they think SHARING traffic is losing traffic. This is a terrible philosophy that is rotting far too many communities at their core.

When sites share traffic, they gain traffic. That’s how the internet works. Lets not obsess over ad clicks and pageviews so mindlessly that we forget what made the internet special. The ability to read a story, click a link for more details, return to post your thoughts, click another link for a similar story, etc. is what makes reading things on the internet so much fun. We forget this at our own peril.

I hate having to do this, as I worry about real comments getting flagged. If you post a comment and notice it not showing up, please email me: muckbeast ** gmail ** com.

A few questions and the picture itself after the jump.

The censored version of the picture:

For the fully uncensored version, click on the picture. You might have to click on it a second time to make it full size.

This raises a few questions:

1) What are good ways to improve blog traffic?

2) Do you have ANY idea what is going on with all the foreign google sites linking to my link of the Avalon Hellgate picture?

3) Should I care?