Methinks a fool is talking

The Maine GOP is trying to corpse camp State Senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz with a website of screenshots of things she wrote in a forum for her World of Warcraft guild.

Most of them are out of context, like how she likes playing as a rogue that stabs people. There's also the occasional vulgarity, disparaging remark about her political opponents and one reference to her left-wing guild jokingly calling itself a socialist guild.

If the occasional joke about fantasy combat disqualifies Lachowicz for office, I'd hate to hear what they would think of the things I did for fun during the four years I played World of Warcraft.

*I started an importing business in Hellfire Peninsula selling Nethergarde Bitters, a plentiful item sold in unlimited quantities in another area, at 40 times the original cost to players undertaking a specific quest, taking advantage of the arbitrage. I wrote a script advertising my service and a second script defending my business's right to exist, as the opportunity cost of fetching the items hurt my customers more than my 39,000 percent markup.

*I encouraged my friends to create a "hit list" of players on our faction that we disliked. I would later promise those players gold and other rewards for help in a simple task to trick them into letting a warlock summon them into a special arenas where players of the same faction could fight each other. Five or six of us would ambush them the moment they arrived.

*When a joke vendor was introduced that sold useless amulets I found I could make a quick profit by selling them to other players at a markup. Instead of providing refunds, I offered buy them back for a fraction of what my marks paid. It was cheaper than buying a fresh one from the vendor and I ended up selling the same worthless necklaces over and over again.

*I adapted a classic con scheme to take advantage of greedy marks. I found a rare item worth about 80 gold and had a friend put it on the auction house with an instant buy-out price of of 200 gold. I then went around and asked if anyone had a copy of the item, offering 300 gold for it. A victim thought I was too lazy to check the auction house and they could make a fast 100 gold off me. He asked me if I was serious and we struck a deal. I saw him walk over to the auction house to buy it, then over to his mailbox to pick it up, and I signed out and never responded to him again. We kept the gold he paid the auction house and we were never caught.

*I spent nine months infiltrating a guild I disliked using an alternate character. I convinced one of the officers if he can beat my friend Eric in a duel I would pay him money and if Eric one I got to be the guild leader for a short while. Eric floored him, as I knew he would, and I cleaned out every coin and item in the guild bank. I then filled the bank with cheap blacksmith hammers and labeled the partitions "hammers" and "more hammers" and posted screenshots on the official forum to mock them. They all quit the guild and I was immune from any punishment, as I never told them the name of my main character and the Blizzard staff do not get involved with issues involving guild banks.

*In the same spirit that Lachowicz's guild called itself socialist, my guild billed itself the world's only all-gay white supremacist guild. We knew other players got the joke, but after viewing ColleensWorld.com I'm not sure the Maine GOP would get the joke.

It was never really about enjoying the profits, it was about the thrill of taking it. I loved to swindle people in the game, but that doesn't mean I am untrustworthy in the real life. It was a safe, controlled setting that didn't hurt anyone and it has no bearings on how I act in the real world.