As a long time patron of the official WoW forums, Palehoof’s contributions were recognised by Blizzard back in 2005. He was was of the first to be appointed a Community MVP. I was keen on finding out more about what exactly that meant, and how it came about.

On one very early Saturday morning recently, Serephim and I caught up with Palehoof to get the answers to all our questions and get a bit more insight into his perception and wisdom.

Saate: I think it’s probably appropriate for me to start up with one of the same questions I asked Warla. I usually find people do one of two things to react to special achievements which is to either cheer them on or talk them down to make themselves feel better. I think probably that’s true of Palehoof followers too, why do you think that is?

Palehoof: Well in all honesty I’d agree with your assessment of how people interact with you. In my case what I’ve achieved so to speak on the forums really has less to do with effort I’ve put in and more to do with right place, right time sort of thing. I believe that a lot of people express a great deal of animosity to me on the forums do it not out of envy but rather out of…it’s a catharsis really. These are people who are very emotionally invested in the game who’ve spent a great deal of time playing it.

A great amount of money involving themselves in it and you know when they object to within the context of the game they take it very seriously. At $15US over the course of say four years that’s hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So it’s perfectly understandable that people would be deeply emotionally invested in the game.

Now where I come in is here I am on the forums, in name only, but nonetheless some form of representative of the company speaking to people who are already angry at the company and I present a perfect target for them in that.

I really can’t ban them for what they do. What they say to me, what they call me, has no effect on their game experience and really is just a way for them to vent frustrations. So it’s a perfect opportunity for them, so to speak, to speak truth to power. They get to tell me off, call me names, and tell me how awful the game is.

They get to call the company names, they get to tell the company how awful the game is and they suffer no detrimental effect as a result of it. So it’s a catharsis, they get to blow off some steam, they get to say ‘yeah I told him, I showed him’. It doesnt change anything in the game, I had nothing to do with whatever they’re angry about and there’s nothing I can do to change whatever they’re angry about but at the end of the day they walk off feeling more satisfied that they’ve shouted at me and called me horrible names and accused me of sexual deviancy.

I pay the same as they do every month and I dont begrudge them that. In fact in many cases and you can see this as you read my posts on the forums I take great delight in certain kinds of my detractors. It’s a little embarassing when people respond to my posts saying I love you, you’re the best ever. Like..I love you too, I appreciate that, I may not be the best ever but it’s nice to hear. I never know how to respond to that so I tend to just not. As you read on the forums with glowing praise I tend to just gloss over it and just say ‘thanks for the kind words’, whereas people who attack me I really engage with them.

Again these are people who are emotionally invested in the game as am I and I’m happy to discuss with them and in many cases I can generally either talk them through whatever it is they’re angry about and we can come to an agreement, or I can just make them so mad they end up getting themselves banned. It’s been years though since I reported anyone for anything they’ve said to me directly – as I always say on the forums ‘my self worth is not reliant on the opinions of somebody I’ll never meet’.

 

Saate: Do you want to tell us about your forums history and how you came to be an MVP?

Palehoof: Sure, one of the things we often laugh about on the forums is that the quickest way to never be an MVP is to ask to be one. I was actually on the forum from Mid December of 2004, just after the game came out. I wasnt in the beta, I wasnt here at release, I was just kinda here close behind. Well I’m in east coast time and blizzard works in pacific time so as a rule I tend to get on the forums on weekdays at about 8am. Which is about 4 hours before blizzard gets on there.

It didnt take me long to see how blizzard staff respond to recurring questions, like stuff like new servers/class change/race change, you know the common things people keep asking about. I hated to see people getting upset and I particular hated to see people freaking out and you really see freaking out. They’ll post a question and say ‘why is this happening’ and they wont get a reason because its five in the morning in California time and it wont be another 4 hours until Blizzard comes on.

So they’ll bump bump bump ‘why are you ignoring me’ ‘why are you ignoring me’ and I hate to see that because they’re not ignoring you, they’re just asleep. So for the year of my participation in the forums and a lot of times I would post and respond and say “Hey its ok, relax, they’re still asleep or they’re still shaving, they’re not at work yet but here’s the answer they’ve given in the past”.

After about a year of that people started even posting @Palehoof threads asking me questions directly and it’s really gratifying. I’m a good deal older than – I would say – the majority of WoW players, I’m 35, so I’m not too old but I probably have a couple of years on most of my fellow players and seven years of military service have made me comfortable with…I wanna say leadership but in the forum case its really not leadership…it’s just a matter of I know the questions, and nobody else is going to answer you, so it didnt hurt my feelings to provide that answer.

 

The very first time I got on the forums, the very first day, I was reading the profession forum and saw an eighteen page long thread asking for sub forums within the profession forum for each profession. Fairly simple request, eighteen pages of “I agree” and “that would be great” and no response from Blizzard.

Now, a common mistake on the forum is to think a petition will actually get anything to happen but petitions are expressely and explicitly forbidden by forum code of conduct so what I couldnt understand with that particular thread was why are we not getting an answer, or why is it not getting locked. It seems reasonable that we should get one or the other – it is either a legitimate question or it is in violation of forum policy.

So I came to the General forum and – addressing the only forum member who everybody knew by name, a staff member named Caydiem – I posted a thread asking ‘hey, can we get an answer to this thread?’. Well as is the forum rules she deleted the thread because it referenced another one. So I reposted and asked why it was deleted and that was also also deleted because it was posting about a deleted thread and that is ALSO forbidden.

At this point I began to get somewhat irritated. We went around for most of an hour, I think I got to five or six threads where I was very carefully wording my post or you know…not referring to anything, not asking about previous posts and finally Caydiem took pity on me and explained that the request in the thread was not being addressed because it was something that would take too much coding and too many man hours. Then she locked the thread and removed it.

In the mean time I was absolutely livid at the treatment I had received. I didnt feel she had approached me in a professional manner. I didnt feel like she had addressed me in any way remotely approaching a customer service representive. I spent about an hour on the telephone trying to get in touch with her supervisor specifically to get her reprimanded if not fired.

I didnt actually get in touch with a supervisor, nor with her, but I did have it explained to me why each thread had been deleted and why they really try to discourage threads which address staff directly (‘blue response please’ and that kinda thing) because really you’re dealing with thousands of people who are generally in a highly excited emotional state and who in most cases will basically seize on any answer they can get.

So if they see one ‘blue please answer this’ with a blue response then pretty soon every thread will start with ‘blue please answer this’. The assumption has to be that since you’ve posted in the blizzard forum that blizzard will read it – don’t ask them to. If you don’t trust that they’ll read it then why are you even posting in the first place?

So at any rate I did learn that while I was trying to reach the community manager supervisor and at the end of the day I just gave up. I realised she was only doing her job and there was no sense in my persuing this and I just let it go. A year later she was the staff member that invited me into the MVP programme.

Saate: Wow

Serephim: Have you ever spoken to Caydiem, directly, and let her know that that was your intention that day when you called? to get her a butt kicking?

Palehoof: Oh yes

Serephim: ..and what was her response to that, if I can ask?

Palehoof: As I recall she typed /chuckle in a post and said that she felt she had made the right decision involving me in the MvP process. I think in many ways she knew just the same as I mentioned earlier she understood I was emotionally invested, I was angry and I was ignorant of the rules and, you know, the staff members are really not required or expected to explain rules that are already clearly posted and freely available to read so rather than explaining those rules she just held me to them.

It didnt take me long to realise that if I read those rules I really wouldnt have a problem being held to them.

 

Palehoof: A lot of folks ask or expect that the green font gives me sort of…buffed input to the staff members. While I do have email addresses that I can send specific questions to, only specific questions that are ‘how should I respond to this?’ or ‘how should I respond to that?’. On the rare occasion that I have directed a question of that nature to such email addresses the response has usually been ‘Just don’t respond, we will handle that’.

Serephim: How do you not lose your patience? I don’t know if I could bring myself to enter into rational and adult discussions with some people on the forums. Do you feel like its a waste of breath so to speak? of effort because some of them just want to vent without really caring about the answer?

Palehoof: There are a couple of ways I can go with that and I’m usually satisfied with any one of them. Most commonly I think that people who are asking questions are asking them sincerely because they’re not aware of the situation or are interested in the answer. In that case I think everyone deserves to get an answer to their question.

There’s no level, there’s no class, there’s no server that guarantees perfect knowledge of the game. You might meet a level 80 who doesn’t know where Mankrik’s wife is and that’s not stupid, that’s just ‘that guy never did that quest’. If a level 80 Knight-Captain was to ask where Mankrik’s wife is I will absolutely tell them where she is and suggest that if you read the quest text it’ll direct you to her.

Meanwhile there will be three other pages of people telling them how retarded they are but they’re not. Maybe this is their first horde character, alliance don’t do that quest. In many cases I think questions being asked come from a sincere place – they wanna know why this is, or how this is done. No matter how angry they are they’re going to get their answer from somewhere.

Saate: Did you get to pick your forum avatar?

Palehoof: No unfortunately not. When the MvP program first started in November of 2005 MvP’s got a light blue font and no avatar. We were told we would be getting an avatar in the near future but you know how that can be, the ‘near future’ is a very subjective term.

So for some time were were all posting with the standard avatar just with a light blue font. They redid the forum hierarchy maybe a year… year and a half later, I forget, and I think we got the avatar a little earlier than that. I don’t think we’re entitled to pick our own but if we were I think I’d pick a mechanical toad or some kind of cybernetic tauren I’m sure. The devilsaur is pretty cool though, I call him Dino-bob the Avasaur.

Saate: When you’re in-game and doing your various things, do people often realise you’re THAT Palehoof? Do you have a big reputation on the server?

Palehoof: I’ve been on the server since the day it opened so I like to think I have a reputation more for myself than for the forum participation. I do ocassionally join a PUG and someone will say ‘Oh, hey its our MvP’.

I have to remind them that ‘hey P stands for Poster and not Player!’. As I often say I consider myself a good hunter but I am by no means an exceptional one and I would never recommend my own talent spec or my choices as a hunter as things that people SHOULD do.

There are many things I do as a hunter that I would say work for ME and that I’d recommend but I certainly dont like being announced as an MvP in a pug. It sets up all sorts of unpleasant expectations.

I have a sense when I’m on the forum that in many cases I’m arguing with the same two dozen people and being praised by the same two dozen people. Especially the general forum, it moves so fast that it’s kinda hard to get a sense of it but if you really pay attention the general forum moves fast because the same people are participating in most of the threads.

So you get people who…you really know each other as far as the forums go. There’s less of a sense that you’re involved in a community of 11 million other people and me and the 14-16…I’m not really sure exactly at this point…lets say the other 20 MvP’s….There’s 20 of us out of the 11 million people who play the game. So I never have an expectation that people will know my name.

Thanks very much for taking the time to meet with us!