Prominent EverQuest II And Guild Wars 2 Community Contributors Find Controversy

Becoming a prominent and well-regarded member of an MMORPG's community is a hard-fought honor. The rare few who manage to achieve some level of fame and respect for the resources or services they provide are rarely willing to give up that privilege easily -- especially if they feel wronged by the game they love and have poured their heart and soul into, with little expectation of a reward.

Two prominent community members are facing just that kind of judgment today. The operator of noted EverQuest II fan resource site EQ2 Wire is claiming that they were banned from official forums for some less-than-complimentary language about the game. In their words, Daybreak "has an IT disaster every other year" and grousing about said problems got under the skin of one of the devs, who promptly had their accounts banned. (This account of events is corrected from an earlier version of this article that erroneously pegged the EQ2 Wire admin as being a part of a thread on the forums calling out said dev for their poor behavior.)

Meanwhile, longtime Guild Wars 2 content creator Wooden Potatoes has also found himself in some hot water after using slurs in a PvP tournament match. In the video discussing the incident, he (eventually) reveals that it was done during a match with some blatant hackers, figuring that was the only way to get a GM's attention. The hackers took advantage of his frustration and used screenshots of his bad language to smear his reputation and attempt to get him removed from the game's partner program.

To be fair to both games, we don't have anything other than these players' accounts to go by, so there could be more to both stories than we're able to verity at this time. In any case, it seems that as hard as it is to become a respected member of the community, it's almost as hard for game developers to properly manage these types of volunteers when sticky situations like these come to light.