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Back in the day when the map was the screen you used to get anywhere, it always amused me that the Art Arena was basically a bighuge coliseum in the middle of a nice, pastoral, vaguely German village. More than once I had the mental image of either the drawings playing rock-paper-scissors with each other for supremacy, or the actual artists themselves (or their avatars, at any rate) duking it out with paintbrushes, using tablets and pencilboards as shields. It was fun. Now, though, it feels to me like the Arenas really are fights to the death.

Take the Avatar Arena, the only one I set foot in regularly. It's not a bunch of people playing dress-ups and taking their creativity for a run, it's slaughter. There's no way to win aside from having a cult of personality or 500 friends from the Chatterbox and their mules. Which in and of itself doesn't bother me, because the point is, as I said, to play dress-ups and get some feedback on what shiny item to buy next. What bothers me is that it's so poisonous. People leave comments like "I hope you die," or "You should have someone shoot you for that outfit because it's so ******** ugly it made me sick, you moron." What. The s**t. And in the case of moderators, we get extra fun when we ask people to not break the ToS while commenting, and they turn around and get all their friends to downvote our entries. I reiterate that the points are not the issue, but that people feel it's okay to embark on a malicious crusade because they got their hand slapped for doing something uncool and uncalled-for. I don't understand these people. THIS. IS. A. GAME. We're all dressing up high-tech PAPER DOLLS, for ******** sake. You're going to threaten to kill someone because they spent 1k on entering an outfit you personally don't like? Then you've got much bigger problems than what's on your monitor. neutral

I'm really getting worn out with the cutthroat, serious, this-is-life-or-death attitude I see these days. What happened to make everyone forget this is a game? I know it, and I more-or-less work here. Death threats over pixels? I dunno, it seems...needless to me.