Achieving frienship and world peace (online)

My word this has been a long time coming. I want to start out by saying mad props of huge proportion to Mr. WiNG for being patient with how late this article is and I owe him many sticky, moist love sessions. Onwards to the article!

This will make a lot more sense soon.

As some of you may know*, I’ve not been too well as of late. Not well to the extent that I’ve actually warranted some hospital time and some hard hitting medication. “How hard hitting?” I hear you ask with sarcastic anticipation. Steroids, that’s how hard.

Not pansy buff-out steroids either, I’ve been on strip-the-god-damn-calcium-from-your-bones steroids. That’s not the bad thing, though; that would be the fucking withdrawal. Irritable, random attacks of rage, insomnia, lack of appetite- I’ve been absolutely everyone’s bestest friend for the last couple of weeks. It’s been in this troubled time that I did a teensy experiment with people online (without their knowledge, of course) and today, I report to you my findings. “Why is this important?” I hear you all ask as if you have something better to do with your time.

Because this is something that a number of admins don’t want you to know.

Yeah, that got your attention. During my time of high irritability, I noticed my private message output on UKCS had increased quite a bit on the servers. Basically, we like to have things sorted out peacefully (where possible) so we send each offender** a little pop-up message telling him to stop acting like an asshat. It seemed as if, out of nowhere, swarms of annoying kiddies talking in broken English had flooded the servers.

But when I talked with some of the other admins, they hadn’t noticed it. How?! They were EVERYWHERE. They were coming out of the walls, they were coming out of the god-damn walls, how could the rest of the team not notice it? I chalked it up to my being online when none of the other admins were around, and basically continued holding in my rage at each minor asshole offense: typing ‘hahaha’ after killing someone, spamming trade requests in the chat… stuff which is annoying as hell but not worthy of any punishment.

Then something caught my eye, something that an admin not filled with rage probably wouldn’t have noticed:

Player1: Haha, Player2 is sucking balls today :P
Player2: Lol Player1

A player taking an insult as if it’s nothing on a public server when the players aren’t regulars?! Impossible. Im-fucking-possible. That one little scenario completely threw me. What’s worse is that Player1′was able to keep saying things like that and no one was annoyed or offended. Hell, even I wasn’t getting riled up by it and I was baby-eatingly angry at everything. What sorcery is this?!

Then it hit me. That thing at the end of his sentence, the pee-face: it must have subdued everyone. I kept telling myself that it couldn’t possibly have been that easy; no emoticon could have that effect. Nothing has that kind of power through a text based form of communication. I did what any sane man would do: Told no one about it and checked my forum post history.

It turns out that, subconsciously, I also used this ‘pee-face’ whenever I was joking around on the forums. It had never even registered to me before that it was almost universally used as a symbol to tell your head-reading voice “The stuff you just read was a joke/sarcastic.” I couldn’t accept it. There’s no way that one thing could completely change the context of a sentence like that. I then vowed that I would not use this pee-face in my posts to see if there was a difference.

Oh boy was there a difference. Suddenly, it seemed like people were being much more hostile to me and my normal line of joking actually incurred mod wrath at one point. Here’s this one example from the UKCS forums:

Forum User: What would be the best offer on all hats apart from Bill’s and Max Head?Looking to offload them since TF2 honestly makes me want to hang myself these days.
Binerexis: This does beg the question of ‘Why not just stop playing TF2 for a while’. {PEE-FACE SHOULD HAVE GONE HERE}
Forum User: I don’t know if you try to make me angry but you succeed so many times. Please refrain from posting in any more of my threads unless you have something relevant to say.

If that forum user happens to be reading this, thanks for clicking the link in my signature! Also, I’ve never done/said anything to out-right make you angry but I have noticed the lack of pee-face in all my posts to you. Therefore, I apologize for any and all misunderstandings we’ve had.

Also, I fucked your mother :P

*Shoutout to my IRL friends especially Rick and Jake as I owe them a shoutout.
** The technical term is ‘asshole’ for those in the admin biz.