Article submissions

I got a very strange e-mail, an anonymous "article submission". Two pages of text, neatly paragraphed. Correct spelling and grammar. Written in a newspaper article style, the text could have appeared in any newspaper without appearing out of place. I'm not going to post that text. Because while the form is perfect, the content is pure drivel.

The article is labeled "Adventurers Wanted: Disabled Need Not Apply", and claims that Blizzard is preventing disabled persons to play by removing macro functionality from World of Warcraft. In reality the only thing that Blizzard did was removing some very small part of the macro language, preventing macros that made intelligent decisions, like Decursive, as well as making it harder to program bots. But the article writes it up in a way as if Blizzard removed all macro functionality, and did that only to prevent disabled people from playing the game. And the author even gets George W. Bush into his argument that Blizzard can't do that.

I was wondering where the article came from, a reply e-mail asking for some sort of name or identification didn't get me a response. I have a faint suspicion that this was written by somebody in the business of using bots to farm gold. Because I can see how removing a macros ability to make intelligent decisions can hurt the bot industry. And this being people with lots of money, they could have afforded some hack to write up a text that looks good and defends their position with fake political correctness.

Fact is that the change to the macro language does absolutely nothing to the interaction of disabled people with World of Warcraft. If they can move the mouse and use the keyboard sufficiently to just move around, the existence or not of intelligent macros doesn't make any difference to them. The weak and the helpless have it hard enough without being used as a facade for spurious argument.

I don't generally accept "article submissions". This isn't a newspaper, this is a blog. If you can write articles, open up your own blog. If you send me a link to your blog, I will read it, and *if I like it* I might post a blog entry with a link to it. I also regularly write articles based on suggestions from my readers. Your e-mails and comments are always welcome. But please don't try to use me as publishing platform for some pseudo-political game article.