World of Warcraft has quickly become one of my favorite games to play while just relaxing in between reviews. But as many of you know from reading my blog, "A Rose By Any Other Name" have found out, I have had my name run-ins with Blizzard GMs. And each time I have changed my name without any complaint or fanfare. I do play on a number of servers but the one I have the most problems with seems to be Earthen Ring, an RP server.

The last time I just tried to keep my name so that you all could find me in-game and quest with me there. This time the issue revolves around my auction house character. I have had my toons on Earthen Ring for many months, and my main is a Shaman in the 60's now...I hesitate to give you the character's name for fear now of name reprisal. I have another small time toon on ER that is simply and Auction House toon. My main sends stuff to my AH toon and the AH toon runs it into the AH and sends coin back to my main. This system keeps my main in the field questing for the most part. But over these few months, I have made a number of friends that know me as both characters. They have them in their friends list and they will buy stuff from my AH character, Maverickcu, (for Maverick's Credit Union).

Now today, I get a note from a GM at Earthen Ring stating that I AGAIN am in a naming violation!! What the heck is this? I Read on and is says that my character name is in violation due to its being a non-medieval or non-fantasy name, (i.e. Slipnslide, Robotman, Technotron). Who is to say that Maverickcu is a non-fantasy name? You know, if this is the case, maybe they should just start naming our characters for us! I mean we don't seem to be able to do it to their complete satisfaction, and the server GMs seem to be able to do it SO much better, they should just ISSUE us a name when we sign up for the game! Hey! What are we paying for here? Are any of you running into this? This issue seems to be a little over the top to me!

When I see this kind of, what I would consider, abuse of authority, I better understand why I am seeing more and more private WoW servers popping up on the Internet. Sure, there may be significant abuse of authority of GMs there too, but in most cases, those servers are free. In this case people are paying to be told what names they can and can't use. Okay, I can see having certain naming rules, but I think that this is going just a bit overboard. And it does make those private servers look much more appealing than having to deal with someone telling me that my name isn't medievalish enough.

But of course, I'll go on and change it, just enough to maybe sound medieval enough to get by but every time I log on I will remember this and just a little bit more of the fun of this great game is taken away by the frustration of some picky person with a little bit of authority who feels he has to wield it like a mace against a defenseless kitten...because there IS NO REVERSING A GMs DECISION...ALL DECISIONS ARE FINAL! Well eventually, enough of us will feel this way that it will either effect their income and they will make a change or the game will just fade away quietly like others we have seen before it. But these GMs need to remember that we gamers are the customer, and the customers are the ones that keep the power turned on to the servers and there are no GMs without servers.

So GMs, if you really need to take your frustration of a bad day out on somebody, don't take it out on your customers, go get a baseball bat and kill a baby seal instead...at least then when it's all over, you have something to keep you warm when the last server is turned off.