Free Candy For Everyone

I’ve mentioned a few times that the reason I started up a priest on the World of Warcraft server Dark Iron was because I read about it on Penny Arcade. The guys from PA have several Alliance guilds on the server and frequently engage in large scale conflicts with some Horde guilds championed by the comic PvP Online. Apparently Ctrl+Alt+Del (CAD) was also engaged in this battle, with a guild called the Rapscallions.

I like to read my web comics, laugh at the jokes and not engage in too much thought about the people behind the product. I like to think that these guys are all cool, funny and worth supporting with my reads and my money, when I choose to buy an actual paper product from them. Turns out that’s not true.

There doesn’t seem to be a complete account of what happened, but apparently the CAD author, Tim Buckley, recently decided to quit playing WoW. He handed over leadership of his guild to another player and that should have been that. But then it seems people were trying to draw him into some of the politics and drama of guild mess by sending him some emails. Instead of responding in a rational fashion, it seems he got drunk, logged on to the game and kicked everyone out of the guild. He deleted the guild’s forum too. There are a whole lot of very upset people talking about it on the forums.

Here’s the thread on the official WoW forums where people are talking about it. And here’s a really good thread talking about how Tim Buckley’s infamy isn’t restricted to just this one act of mania. Here are a few quotes from the thread:

recent-vintage wrote:

Straight from the horse’s mouth, he banned about 200 members from his forum, because one member made a derogatory post, and the other questioned, so it snowballed into banning of tons of posters, and deleting an entire sub-section of a forum.

Waluut wrote:

He’s like Darth Vader. One princess pisses him off and he blows up the whole planet.

There’s a great long post from Scott Kurtz, the author of PvP Online. Here’s an excerpt:

We’re really mad at Tim, not his fans. Due to bad experiences we’ve all had have associated with Tim. For you guys, it’s the way Tim treated you in the fourms. It bothers you to see that he’s continuing to experience success with the work that you can’t enjoy anymore because now you’re looking at it from a different perspective after learning what a cocksmoker he is.

Look, I get it. I really do. It fucking kills me to see Tim succeed. It eats me inside like a cancer. And as irrational as that is…as bad and petty as that makes me look… I’m willing to admit that. Tim is convinced this is due to my being jealous of his success, but that argument breaks down when you examine my feelings towards Penny-Arcade.

Those fuckers are 10 times as successful as myself (or Tim) will ever be. Not only do I feel ZERO jealousy towards them, I’m actually PROUD of their success. Those guys impress the fuck out of me. They really have created a unique media company and they’re brilliant in the way they operate it.

There are no shortages of people in the world who do better than I do. I don’t hate them. I wish I had the same success, but I don’t hate them. Certainly not with the same intensity that I hate Tim. And I do hate that fucker.

There’s also a thread on the Panda Attack forums here. From that forum, here’s a picture of the kicking out in action - Exanimus is Tim Buckley’s character:

Ultimately, this is a sad turn of events. I don’t know about the details of the situation at the guild, but the people from the guild on the forums all agree that Tim seems more interested in the appearance of things than the actuality. He viewed everyone in his guild as a fanboy whose role was as a “yes man” - agree with Tim or hit the road. If anyone posts anything in his forum he doesn’tt like, he removes the post. One time, as mentioned above, he didn’t just delete the post, he deleted the thread and banned the accounts of everyone who had even seen the thread. Or so the posters claim - I’m not sure if that’s even possible! But all accounts agree that he tends to do things because the big boys at #1 Penny Arcade are doing it (starting up a WoW guild), not because he actually wants to play a game and hang with his fans.

I’m now conflicted. I’m definitely not going to buy his books, which I had been intending to do. But I don’t really want to stop reading his site. I might take down the links in him in my sidebar, as I don’t need to direct anymore traffic to his site (because my readership is really impacting his bottom line, LOL). But I do enjoy his comic, in general. I like the fact that he has continuity, with a storyline that plays out over several weeks. The characters are cute and amusing. But I don’t really want to support an egomaniacal madman. I most definitely will not be subscribing to his animated series, which was also something I had been considering (he’s starting up a monthly animated version of his comic strip, but you’ll have to pay for it, since he’s contracting out to an animation studio to do it).

And hey, does anyone know if Tim Buckley is his real name? Not that I’m planning to track him down or anything, but Tim Buckley was a musician (and the father of Jeff Buckley, both of whom died tragic deaths at young ages before they had realized their complete potential. Jeff Buckley’s album Grace is fantastic - too bad my copy seems to have disappeared. Arrr.)