^ That sums up how I feel whenever someone drops group in the beginning, middle, or even after the dungeon is over. Or when someone pouts in a dungeon and refuses to pull or heal or dps for idiotic reasons. Or tanks who pull half the room when they can’t handle it and then leave group in the middle of the pull.

But it’s mostly the feeling of everyone’s a diva who must be doted upon that gets me. Grouping…it’s a team thing. So why is it so hard to act like it?

I’ve even seen some gamers shrug it off as “she didn’t know that characters are important” but it’s not about the characters, its about WANTING to hurt/upset her significant other. And intentionally hurting someone is violence.

Hijacking your partner’s toon for some laughs that you’ll both share is a world away from deleting someone’s characters to upset them! Unless they’ve never shared their password. Then it’s kinda creepy.

I like the email comparison, I see it a bit like that way too. Just because it’s not physical harm, it’s still a violation of personal space.

Enlynn compared it to burning notebooks of poetry, and I think that’s a close comparison. Characters are an extension of yourself, and you invest yourself in them. I still have a vague sense of loss when I remember that I lost my first ever pencil and paper RPG character, and that that little piece of me is gone for good. If someone had intentionally destroyed it, I’d have felt violated somehow. No matter if the character could be restored or if I had other copies.

I think it’s hard for people to realize how much she’s violated his space because ‘a GM can fix it’. Because the solution is ‘painless’ digital restoration, the act is trivialized. But let’s be honest here, it would be an entirely different discussion had she deleted something that wasn’t a video game: what if she had destroyed his digital art gallery or unarchived his self-help blog? What about physical damages, if she took a crowbar to an engine he built or burned a decade of his poetry notebooks?

She knew how to hurt him the worst, and she did. The world may think its silly to be so worried about the video game characters, but it’s not the characters, it’s the trust.