Arenanet: behind the mask. Trolls and griefers?

Today I log into Guild Wars, and find an entry in the announcements...


So I check it out, and find nothing more than a bunch of trolls trash talking each other, making racist videos of each other and mass bullying a certain player. The fact that Arenanet would put this in the login announcements (which is reserved for rare important news) is nothing short of disgusting. I made a new guru account, and posted a response to that thread. Within a minute, it's deleted, followed by this...


Interesting. You're trolling big time, and accuse me of trolling when my post was about pulling you up for trolling. Here's a copy of my post...

Terran wrote:

Nice example you're setting, Arenanet!

I saw this advertised on the game login, and checked it out. All I see is a bunch of bad players on all sides trash talking each other to pretend they're good. Here's a hint: If you want to get good, get some standards. Good players fight with honor, bad players fight with pride. How you win is more important that winning. Understand what competition is all about. Have you ever wondered why the level of play has gotten lower over time? If you support this toddler crap, then you are the reason why!



Sigh. I'm disgusted in the lot of you.

There are no words to explain how wrong and disgusting this is. Intelligent players worked out early on that something wasn't quite right with how the game was 'rebalanced', and most of them left after they quickly figured out that they were not just catering to trolling and griefing, but encouraging it and even advertising the tools to do it. Under the surface of the marketing propaganda, Arenanet themselves have a dark history of this kind of behavior. Here's a little sample from Isaiah Cartwright, one of the head staff at Arenanet. Notice the lack of guilt and moral code, speaking about his griefing not in a past tense but the present. Click the 'What got you into gaming?' button on the top right, or skip forward to 5:30...


If it walks like a troll (he's fat and waddles like a penguin, and prides himself on doing 'epic cartwheels'), talks like a troll (he has poor English and grammar skills, it seems Mr Cartwrong can't write), and looks like a troll...


Then...


A word on trolling and griefing: Normal people just don't do it, and they don't make excuses for it either. Internet anonymity is a safe haven for psychopaths who would otherwise be held in line with consequences (prison, being cast out of the group, or getting your ass kicked). Under internet anonymity, your true colors come out. If you're an asswipe on the internet, you're plainly and simply... an asswipe.

Now they have removed two of the links in the original post. You can see proof of this in the second post quote... until they remove that too. The links lead here, here and here. This is a sample of the kind of crap I'm talking about here (and the comments are FAR worse), be patient and watch after the minute mark...


This is the kind of 'community' they have built, a typical example of how players generally behave, taken from all chat in a mere minute of time while I wrote this post...


And a month later (after guru gets their asses handed to them), the same thing continues...