My main character in World of Warcraft is an Enchanter. This is a profession that isn’t a great money maker, as it requires standing around in cities and hawking your wares in public chat channels. Most other professions craft some sort of item that players usually sell for profit on the ingame auction house. Enchanters actually have to interact with their customers, as we put enchantments onto our customers existing items.
I don’t like to spend a lot of my playing time standing around and waiting for customers. I want to go out and fight stuff! So it maybe wasn’t the best profession choice for me. Regardless, I’ve dutifully leveled it up, and been excited when I got new enchants to cast on myself and my guildies. But when in the cities, I always keep an ear open for someone asking for the services of an enchanter. Tonight I responded to a request to produce some Enchanted Thorium for someone.
This is an item, so I guess it’s one of the few exceptions to the “Enchanters don’t produce stuff” rule I mentioned above. We can make the Thorium, which takes a Thorium bar obtained through mining and some magic dust that us enchanters have, and poof, we magic it up. Similarly, we can make Enchanted Leather. These are required for some crazy end game armor sets. So I was happy to help, I was just passing through and figured, “Sure, why not?”
So the guy gives me the materials, I make the bars, we open a trade, he puts in some gold pieces, I put in the thorium bars, and we both hit the “Trade” button. A couple minutes later the guy whispers me and says “I’m going to report you, you didn’t give me the bars!” Um. Sure enough, I check my inventory and the bars are in it. I try to calm the guy down, obviously I’m not trying to cheat him. There’s no way I can do some crazy slight of hand and make him think we did a trade if we didn’t. The guy is claiming that I even got his gold, but he didn’t get the bars. It’s just really not possible for me to have manipulated that.
I eventually calm him down, drop the bars in the mail, and tell him it’s done. It takes a full hour for mail to arrive, so I wander off to quest and forget about the whole incident. Until I get another tell from him. “I’m going to report you, it’s been over an hour and still no bars!” I don’t know what to say. At this point, my game decides to disconnect. I’m thinking that looks bad, like an admission of guilt. Uhoh! But I get back on and apologize for the disconnect and tell him that I mailed it. I finish it off with “If you don’t get it by tomorrow, go ahead and report me if you want, I sent it to you. There’s nothing more I can do. Please let me know when you get it.”
After that he got quiet, so either the bars showed up in his mailbox and he felt like a tool for his accusations or he reported me and didn’t wanna pester me anymore since he felt like it was in bigger hands now.
This whole thing totally sucks. I was just trying to be helpful, and apparently there was some weird bug that caused the trade to not complete even though we thought it had. Now I have some person who’s out to get me out there. I really hope the mail got through and the guy calmed down. I don’t think Blizzard would really take any action against me on the basis of one minor complaint of me cheating them (come on, I bet people get cheated for real all the time by people who mean to swindle them - I don’t know that that’s even against the terms of service), so I’m not really worried. But the whole thing was irritating!