NOTE: THERE ARE NO LEGION SPOILERS IN THIS POST! 

It’s taken me a little while to write this post for a few reasons. The main one being that I’ve been quite cross. I wanted to write this post with a clear head, but it has definitely taken a little for it to clear.

So. Here we are.

Last week the Legion alpha started showing up, and a couple of days later that invitations were sent out to the usual suspects to try out the Demon Hunter starting area. As expected, the datamining started immediately. And so did the trolling.

The community seems to fall in to one of three categories:

1. Those who do not want to hear or see anything at all about the new expansion until the day it is released.
2. Those who don’t mind either way.
3. Those who want to know what is going to happen and actively seek out spoilers.

I fall in to category 1. I don’t want spoilers. The whole point of an MMORPG for me is that is has an immersive story that you are a part of and that you play out (with story is the key word here). I like to learn about what’s happening in the world of Azeroth on my own. I want the gasping moment of realisation when something exciting happens; the tears when someone dies and the elation when an enemy is defeated.

Many other people do not feel this way. they fall in to category 3 and want to know what’s happening now. Which they are entitled to. What they are not entitled to is disrespecting those  who don’t want to know what’s going to happen until they’re actually playing it. What’s not ok is posting story spoilers on social sites or in trade chat in game where anyone can see them, regardless of whether or not they want to. What’s not ok is being a trolling dick.

This is not ok: (there are old school Star Wars spoilers in the below clip, so don’t watch it if you’ve never seen a Stars Wars movie and plan to one day)

Some people (like Homer) do it by accident out of ignorance. Other people do it on purpose. And it’s not cool.

What do I do?

So here’s the dilemma. Many of the people who deliberately post spoilers take on the argument “stay off social media and websites if you don’t want to be spoiled” to which I say “screw you, buddy”. I’m not the problem here – your shitty behaviour is. Wowhead and mmo-champion have big buttons for me to press if I want to see a spoiler. If I don’t want to see it, I don’t. But when you post these in public spaces, you are taking my choices away.

It’s just not realistic to expect someone to stay off twitter or facebook or out of trade chat for months at a time. And why should I live in an isolated bubble because of someone else’s poor behaviour? Sure, there’s the option of blocking/unfollowing people who do post spoilers, but you’ll need to see the spoilers to know to block them, so you’re getting screwed anyway.

I’ve been pretty lucky to have not seen any spoilers in my twitter feed. (Thank you lovely twitter followers!) But others aren’t so lucky.

So you now have a choice. You can bury your head in the sand and set yourself up in a cave in the hopes of avoiding any spoilers; you can shrug it off and say “what will be, will be”; you can get angry about being spoiled, or; you can get spoiled on your own terms.

Or you could do this:

To the people posting #Legion spoilers, we here in Aus get Star Wars several days before you. I plan to DM each of you to tell you the plot

— Mark (@froo) November 25, 2015

For trolls, one of the biggest highs they get (and the reason they keep trolling) is because of the reaction they get. The bigger the reaction (the angrier/more upset you get) the more they do it. They feed off those reactions. So I made a conscious decision that I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

Getting spoiled on your own terms

I had to make a decision. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay off social media etc. until Legion came out (and to be quite frank, I’m offended by the notion – it’s blatant victim blaming “well you shouldn’t have been in that place at that time anyway”). I also knew that the chances of me staying spoiler free were slim to none (the server I’m on is terrible for that sort of behaviour). I came to the conclusion that if I was going to get spoiled by trolls, that I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of them getting a reaction out of me. So earlier this week I told my boyfriend what I planned to do, and very quietly went in to our room with my iPad and read the spoilers. And that was that.

My boyfriend has not read all the spoilers. He unfortunately has had some part of the story spoiled for him thanks to some leaky tweets, but he’s still trying to avoid the rest as best as possible. I will not tell him what I know. And I will not tell you what I know. Which is why I’m doing this post. I wanted to give you some food for thought about spoilers to help you make your own decision about how you want to handle them. If you fall in to categories 2 and 3 above, you don’t really have a problem here. If, like me, you fall in to category 1, you’ve got some decisions to make the main decision being how you want to handle yourself if you do end up getting spoiled.

My spoiler policy

Alternative Chat (as usual) had some good advice and suggested everyone make a spoiler policy for their blogs. So you can read my spoiler policy right here. This will let you know what I will and won’t be posting on my blog over the coming months.