Swift Justice? (Updated)
on July 20, 2011 at 2:18 amUpdate: Swifty has released a video since his unbanning thanking people for their support and saying that it “made a huge difference”. Pretty disappointed, but not too surprised. Watch the video here.
The banning and subsequent un-banning of Swifty has been a very hot topic amongst WoW players over the past couple days, and it’s been fascinating to watch different opinions emerge over whether the ban was warranted, how the reversal came to be, and how much Swifty was responsible in the first place for the events that unfolded. And as much as I’m still trying to piece together truth from rumor, I wanted to weigh in on a few points because A) I have a blog and I don’t use it enough, and B) if Athene can swoop in and turn a bit of heated drama into some easy pageviews for his network, then so can I.*
The one thing I actually won’t attempt to state with certainty is whether Swifty should have been banned, or if the ban should have been permanent. As I said before, I wasn’t present at the event and multiple people have stated that he wasn’t in attendance for the complete duration, so I’m not really sure where his leading of the mob spam began and ended. Well, correction: We certainly know where it ended, thanks to his YouTube vid addressing the ban. I do know this, however: If three servers go down because a group of players can’t put facts together and realize that they’re inadvertently ruining everyone else’s day, then Blizzard is probably going to take action, and it’s very hard to take ignorance as a serious response to the problem. Even if Swifty wasn’t there for the entire event, did he know what had happened in the past? Did he continue to propose moving on to a second or third server himself? Was the event specifically being done to promote a third party product? If it was, did that help nudge the discipline in a more serious direction? (And yes, these are real questions I’d like answers to, not just rhetorical speculation.) The problem is, it’s very easy to laugh about a server going down, but it’s not just a simple reboot and resuming life as normal. It’s also responding to a huge spike of inevitable support tickets due to the outage, including lost items and progress. That’s some serious stuff when it comes to time and resources lost that could have been spent on more pressing issues, and shouldn’t be taken that lightly. If you, as a content creator on the internet, make your money by being able to play a specific game, shouldn’t you take precautions to not be associated with behavior that has the potential to put your account at risk? Before claims of hypocrisy come to pass, I’ve participated in fan events in game for Legendary, but it’s only ever been on beta servers with lower turnouts than what was witnessed here, when there wasn’t any planned testing in progress. Other streaming on live servers has been done making precautions to not easily be found or to encourage a large population influx. So it’s something that is thought about before bringing an event online, especially when it’s live on the air.
Anyways, fast forwarding to the real point of this. Swifty gets banned, Athene voices his support, the community gets riled up… and then apparently loses its mind in ways that I am completely crushed to have to witness.
Translation: Herp derp.
Let’s just cut right to the chase: It was some of the dumber gamer rage that has graced an MMO, even when compared the recent EVE Online riots, given the actual motives stacked side by side. Absolute childish behavior cloaked in the excuse of trying to right wrongs by an apparently oppressive regime when Blizzard took actions to keep its servers from breaking further. It’s one thing to be upset and rage on your own site or forum, it’s a whole different issue when you decide that the enjoyment of the game for others is of lower importance than your own vulgar self-righteousness. If Swifty’s ban caused you to be upset, then the reaction by a subsection of his fanbase (and those who joined in for lulz) should outrage you by a factor of ten. The spamming going on inside the game achieved absolutely nothing but to be a disruption for people who couldn’t care less about the ban, which I had to find particularly interesting considering that a disruption to the game is the whole reason why the ban was made in the first place. Remember the citizens of Vancouver watching as some of its own tarnished the city’s reputation with incredibly dumb riots? We got our own little non-violent microcosm right here for all to see.
Swifty hasn’t posted a video since the ban, but I really hope the next one sets aside a moment to condemn this kind of behavior that was committed in his name. There’s absolutely no excuse for it in this situation, and I’ll bet you all the money in my pockets versus all the money in your pockets that it did nothing to advance the case for letting him off the hook. All it apparently achieved was to cause Blizzard to reexamine its chat system and make fixes that prevent spamming in the future, and while that’s awesome (and probably overdue), I’ll be interested to see if the changes ended up being overkill because they rushed it out, and thus saddled us with an overprotective setup that feels like Slow Mode chat on Justin.tv.
It comes down to this: If you really do want Swifty to succeed and be able to continue down the path of producing content you enjoy, don’t behave like this. You are not helping his or anyone else’s cause. It simply reinforces the stereotype that others in the community work incredibly hard to dispel in the name of making your way of life a bit more accepted and supported. Stop it. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Is it wrong that i heard TotalBiscut’s voice the entire time i read this?
Very well-spoken, Chris.
What’s sad is that a lot of these nimrods will feel that their actions were the cause of the ban being lifted. They’ll never once consider that it would have happened anyway… and even if Blizz says so (won’t happen), they’d say it was a lie.
Very good read. I had no idea about this whole Swifty whatever thing until WoWhead mentioned it, and I’m still not sure what all happened, nor have I found anything to answer me.
I can’t believe people’s reaction to this. It’s like little bubbles of hate just starting popping all over the place.
I’m pissed off as a member of a RP server (who actually RPs, the very idea…) that now the chat system is going ot have these restrictions. I honestly can’t say how different it is, because my game time ran out last week. Maybe it won’t affect me, and I’m not so blind as to write it off completely. Ever action has a reaction, and anyone not seeing a reaction like this happening after all that spam… well, they’re blind.
Anyways, my thoughts. This is why we can’t have nice things, indeed.
I can think of very few instances where Blizzard hasn’t gone a little to the extreme with some sort of fix or correction to something. And unfortunately too, I’ve seen plenty of instances like the community’s reaction to Swifty to be surprised by some of their actions either. Like most of the internet it sometimes seems folks are just looking to lose themselves into something – whether a cause to get someone unbanned or a volatile emotion like rage and anger. =/ Hopefully more folks step forward like you have in your post to condemn and call out the behavior as having been childish, selfish and rude.
Excellent post with very good points made. Thank you for sharing your perspective with us.
Well spoken. Wish I could +1 it XD
Ill be honest and say that the ban really pissed me off. Mainly because I at first did t think he’d get through the proper channels to appeal his ban. The uproars I found quite amusing, not taking part in or having the chance to take part in them myswlf though.
While the main motive for Blizzards unbanning was that he is such a wellknown stature, and that even a lot of their employes take notice of his and Dara Mactires videos, you’d be a fool to not say that the riots sped up the process!
In retrospect, I do think they would have unbanned him anyway, just after 24h or something. Its obvious that they pulled the trigger to early. They also had to take a chance with the unbanning. The riots caused many servers to be unplayable, and a lot of them even crashed multiple times. Blizz couldnt ban every person in those riots, so they took the chance of unbanning Swifty to make it stop. And it did. Its obvious that ppl who stay in a city macroing massive shouts and spamming them most likely are a few years younger than what the normal readers of this blog is.
To finish up my essay (lol) I wanna say that, I dont know all about Blizzards serversetup. Whst I can me possitive about is that they have some sort of auto restart, so that the realm will never be offline for more than 5minutes. I understand how thesw crashes ruin for ppl who just bought something on AH, in the middle of a raid, BG or whatever. But I have trouble not laughing about that, since I come from a private server who had a lot of disconnect problem early in its lifetime due to overpopulation. Now, however it has better uptime than a lot of Blizzards servers. My realm ln retail has crashed numerous times by itself, but I will not say that is suffice to let Blizzard ban themselves
It seems that not many of you watch Swiftys vids, or the livestream, or did any kind of research about it. They group of 5k ppl did intentally try to crash the servers, upon requests from Swiftys guildmates. Swifty was merely taking his turn in hosting the giveaway when it happened, and they blamed him.
Well well, good read however. Personally, I think these riots were great just because they put strains on Blizz servers, so they actually had to take actions. Just like a reallife riot would. It is now forever gonna be remebered by the ppl who witnessed it, even though it was only half a day xD
+1 (good idea Ithrelor) Excellent.
Haha Swifty just released a video THANKING people for “showing their support” and said that it made a huge difference.
So much for condoning spamming, he just endorsed it.
Interesting read. I agree the rioting — with Swifty being used as a reason for some & probably just an excuse for many — is stupid & childish.
Too bad Blizzard couldn’t just ban everyone involved in the riots, I think that would have been a far better solution.
It bothers me that people act like this. I’ll never understand it. Things like these really make me embarrassed to call myself part of this community.
Really? You’re going to sit there and state that it’s unfair to Blizz for having to spend time maintaining servers and returning lost items and responding to tickets?
11.5 million subscribers. $15 a month. The issue with servers going down shouldn’t be put back on us, they have the resources to deal with this kind of thing. To deter people, a temp ban would be effective. We all know what the community is like, and noone likes missing out on a week (or month maybe?) of their addiction. Permaban for this was too much.
The fact you’re denouncing the community outrage is ingeresting, are you failing to remember half the player base doesn’t even have hair downstairs yet? What do you expect?
Personally I think this is very reflective of how society works today. Granted IRL you won’t see people just constantly shout and cause their world to fall apart, however it does reflect on many riots in the real world. People flipping out in Vancouver, people flipping out over the Casey Anthony Trial (though I’m sure the vast majority had never paid attention to the trial till the verdict), and many, many others.
People tend to just hop on the band wagon “for lulz” as Chris put it. To be honest when a few of my guildies were talking about how ticked off they were, I thought they were honestly talking about someone from the guild. I hadn’t realized that some big YouTuber/WoW-player had actually done this (mostly cuz I’ve never seen his videos till just now in Chris’s link). However, even I was subscribed to him, if I didn’t know the full picture I wouldn’t voice an opinion of what he did. As for the people freaking out, that’s free game and believe me it’s sad to see how so many reacted. My server was pretty clean as far as I know, but I still get annoyed when I hear about this kind of childish stupidity that just makes us WoW-players look pathetic in the eyes of anyone else.
Then again, I would’ve loved to see how people reacted during the little bit of time that the Corrupted Blood Plague bug occurred…
Well said that man!
As for hearing Totalbiscuit’s voice when reading that post, I did not detect one iota of misplaced sarcasm or derision, not a jot of self interest, sabre rattling or QQing.
What’s that you say? People were acting like total idiots and douchebags on the internets? Making complete asses of themselves? How unprecedented.
Seriously though, the legion part of the masses has never been civil or intelligent. These people didn’t spontaneously come into being in response to the drama; they had those accounts before and they still have them. They were playing before and are still playing now.
Their herpaderp just seemed louder because they happened to be saying the same thing for the duration.
Behavior like this, (not on this scale though) and the fact blizzard folds and gives in to whining and bad behavior in general is why I am currently not playing WoW.
So basically – not everyone is equal when it comes to administrative actions, hmm?
If you are Swifty, you can do just that little bit more and get out without a scratch, which John Doe wouldn’t be able do.
Regardless of where you stand on the matter, the reaction to the ban was juvenile.
Player reaction to the ban was nothing but justified. It’s up to the community in these situations to kick up a stink if the quality of the service they’re paying for declines as a result of an injustice like this. The customer is always right. If something doesn’t go the way the community wants, it is absolutely our responsibility to let them know.
It’s a simple fact of life. Had Blizzard refused to unban Swifty I speculate two results: they would have either had to deal with continued or perhaps even increased community backlash in the form of spam and server outages, a big chunk of subscription losses, or both. Obviously it wasn’t worth that much to Blizzard so the most logical course of action was to repeal the ban.
The same applies to EVE. CCP instituted an ethically questionable system of pay-to-win = Community backlash = Reconsideration of the system. Had the community not stood up for itself I’m sure CCP would have continued business-as-usual.
The provider of a service should ALWAYS be at the mercy of the people paying them for the service. All of you Blizzard bleeding hearts looking down your noses at the community make me laugh.
Who the hell is Swifty and why should we care for him? From what I gather, he is someone that posts videos about WoW. And?? So do countless other people.
Why do people care so much about this person? (hint: they don’t)
People joined in the “riots” because they were “riots”. It had little to do with the message, people like being a part of something – good or bad.
If blizz felt it appropriate to ban this person, then they should have stuck to their guns. Some posters are saying that blizzard would have had to deal with “server outages, or a big chunk of subscription losses”. This is just not true. After 2 days people would have forgotten, and gone about their lives. People aren’t going to quit playing a game that they enjoy because some self-righteous, self appointed, self important vlogger tells them to.