Instant karma's gonna get you
Today's story comes from the realm of Smolderthorn, home of one of the U.S.'s top Horde guilds, Nightmares Asylum (obligatory note: Blizzard apparently doesn't let you use apostrophes in guild names.)
Our tale begins in Karazhan this weekend, where the guild Clockwise was just learning the instance. They didn't have enough people for a full group, so they invited in some puggers to help them down some bosses. Unfortunately, they weren't able to kill too many bosses, so they left half of the instance for the next day. One of their puggers, who was a member of the medium-level guild Dies Irae, invited in some of his guildmates' alts to clear the rest. Dies Irae claimed they didn't know it was another guild's instance at first, but only decided to kill Prince after Clockwise's guild leader got angry at them and told them to get the bleep out. Whatever the cause, no one disputes that it ended with Dies Irae's alts clearing Karazhan on Clockwise's raid ID.
Now it gets interesting. Apparently Nightmares Asylum decided it was time to stand up for the little guy and get Dies Irae back. So Monday night, they asked one of Dies Irae's members to help them on a quest. Suddenly, the DI member was promoted to leader and kicked out of the group as Nightmares Asylum members ran inside their Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Cavern instances. (SSC, by the way, was completely clear except for Lady Vashj, who Dies Irae was planning on working on -- Nightmares Asylum apparently no longer runs SSC.) Nightmares Asylum then proceeded to kill Vashj, made a screenshot of her dead with their raid members forming the letters DI, and -- this is the best part -- tracked down various Dies Irae members and disenchanted the Vashj loot they would have gotten in front of them. Man, I feel bad for that rogue who watched the Fang of Vashj dissolve. DI claimed not to care, since it "gave them another day to PVP", but the attempts to report Nightmares Asylum say otherwise.
So who's in the wrong here? We don't know the full situation, but both sides have given their account. Dies Irae says they didn't intentionally steal the Kara ID and only cleared it after being provoked by the other guild's leader, while Nightmares Asylum was malicious in their thievery. Nightmares Asylum defends their actions as karma and standing up for the little guy, and it's pretty obvious they didn't do it to get the phat loots. Ethically, they're both probably wrong, since stealing raid IDs is pretty nasty, but I can't help but feel a soft spot for Nightmares Asylum after this. They may have done a vicious, petty thing, but they did it with style.
What do you think about this situation? Should there be a way to remedy the "stealing" of raid IDs, or should people just be careful who they accept raid invites from?
