JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY! [Author: lum]
Background info: http://www.drtwister.com/ultimaonline/let-src.html
(By the way, why doesn’t Origin just give Dr. TwisTer access to the Seekrit Counselor channel? Oh, that’s right, he doesn’t need to, half the channel sends him a log every time IronWill farts.)
When I started this page, it was, believe it or not, to provide some sort of balance to the constant OSI bashing going on. L’affaire Senith was still raging (what, all of two weeks ago?) and it seemed like Pick On The Smurfs Week every web site I visited. So I vented a little on how I thought all parties were equally stupid, Dr. TwisTer picked up on it, and away weeee gooooo. Good thing my job basically requires me to sit by the phone and wait for stupid people to call.
Of course, I had no idea that the entire support staff of UO would take this time to go collectively mad.
It all started when someone deigned to tell Tug over at UOA Central that his proggy wasn’t ever going to be approved since it encouraged automated macroing. We all laughed at that one. Come on! Everyone macros! The game design is built around it!
They weren’t joking. Folks are really being booted for macroing. I haven’t heard of folks being banned for macroing yet, but surely that’s coming. I personally have pretty consistently gotten Connection Lost’s for the past couple nights while placidly sitting in Skara Brae with my newbie miner trying to work my strength up so that I can carry more than 10 pounds at a time.
MDK got banned. Now I know, everyone in MDK was a waste of bodily fluids. Still. Collective punishment is just wrong. It’s like saying my guildmates need to be banned because I write a web page that liberally uses the word “fuck”. (Lum watches his hit counter suddenly zoom up tenfold from search engine hits.)
And now all the sordid little bitching and moaning among the Counselor/SRC/Seer/GM cliques is out in the open. As LadyMOI would say, “Woop! Woop!”
This has many layers of sadness. I’ll just exposit a little by telling you my personal experiences with all of this.
A guildmate of mine had something weird happen. I won’t explain exactly what, but it was of such a nature that combined with everything else going on this week, he was VERY paranoid about being banned for no apparent reason. (It probably would not be a big surprise if I told you he was macroing at the time.)
A close friend of mine is involved in the UO Support Program, and has access to all the Seekrit Channels. So I was able, through him, to very quickly gain access to folks who could try to find out exactly what was going on and why. It was all pretty much straightened out quickly and efficiently, like customer support is, y’know, supposed to work.
The nature of what happened was interesting enough that I thought it would merit an update here. But I didn’t want to antagonize the people who had just helped me out (not to mention pissing my wife off), so I chatted for a second with the support person he was talking to.
I wanted to explain who I was, what page I write for (he had never heard of it, but assumed it was a TwisTer clone – gee.) and to clear what I was going to write with him, so that anything that shouldn’t be public knowledge wouldn’t be. You know, polite stuff. (Believe it or not I like to think I’m a decent enough sort in real life.)
The response was one hundred percent stonewall. You will not misquote me, what you thought I said was wrong, I don’t appreciate you doing what you’re doing, especially with the issues the support program is having right now.
I got pretty pissed at this point. Issues?, I said. Lately the players have been having a few “issues” as well. The conversation closed at that point, unsurprisingly.
The hell of it is, the person I was talking to, up until that point, I thought was a friend.
We are the enemy.
And that is an issue that needs solving way before any of that other petty bullshit.