Paladinsucks.com closed!

Almost anyone who reads various blogs knows by now that as of a week ago Paladinsucks.com has gone on "Indefinite Lockdown". This sucks for many of us Paladins as that was a place where we could all get together and call a sort of home. Maybe there were some other good bastions (I've heard Elitist Jerks' forum was one such place), but I couldn't see them since I'm behind my work firewall.

Anyway, originally I was going to post on why I thought it closed, but I realized it was a bad idea because some people might read it and start spreading rumors. Not good, so I put this post on hold. Recently my brain clicked on something related to it, which is what I'm going to post about:

Despite being saddened by the closing (even temporarily) of this blog, I think it has a good side effect: Vaelin is no longer posting there. Vaelin has always been very pro-Ret spec, and I can sympathize with him, one of my best friends is a Ret specced Paladin. He would post occasionally over on Paladinsucks.com, and whenever I noticed him posting it was always for the good of Ret Pallys.

That was up until about a month ago. Around the middle of March he found out about Warrior Priests of Sigmar, from the upcoming game Warhammer online: Age of Reckoning (aka WAR). He made a few other posts that month, but then took a big break towards the end of the month. Then he didn't really post again until the middle of next month, when he had let his WoW account expire. At this point I feel that Mastgrr should have removed him from posting on Paladinsucks.com.

But he didn't. Vaelin's previous views of "All for one, one for all" and the betterment of Ret paladins to make them equal with Holy and Prot spec paladins were gone. In his own words, he had seen the light, and the Devs didn't care about Ret pallys. So he basically took the stance that if Blizz didn't care about him and his brethren, why should he care about anyone else. Suddenly Holy paladins were no longer brothers who preferred a different playing style, but instead "the enemy". If you signed up for being a paladin with anything other than Ret spec in mind, you were a traitor.

Thus Paladinsucks.com became a rallying point for those who hated everyone who was not a Ret spec paladin, and specifically Holy paladins, and the WoW Devs. Now, I can't say that Holy paladins helped with this. Both sides were being quite vitriolic towards one another. With every post by either Mastgrr or Vaelin being filled with people fighting over which side was right, instead of just each trying to fix what's wrong with their build and live in happiness.

My problem with Vaelin isn't that he wanted to play however he wants (smashing faces), where he wants (in raids, in PvP, wherever). My problem is that instead of fighting for Ret paladins, he fought against Holy paladins, and also gave others a rallying point for similar views. This made him no better than those that opposed him, and accomplished nothing.

And he hasn't stopped. He made a blog for Warrior Priests in WAR, and his most recent post was him asking for someone to go to BlizzCon and get his or her pic taken at the Con dressed as a Warrior Priest. This will solve nothing other than insulting the devs, if they realize what it means. As a blogger on a major paladin site, maybe he could have gotten the devs to work towards fixing the Ret tree. Instead he created an opposition that was so blinded by hatred that they would be ignored.