T'was a dark day in Azeroth

Yeah...I play World of Warcraft. I play a Draenei Shaman. Its part of my "me time" when I'm taking a break from work. For the 12 of you in the world who don't know...World of Warcraft (WoW) is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG for short. Meaning, you can interact with thousands of people from all corners of the Earth from within this game. I have a large group of real life friends who I play this game with...so really, its the geek equivalent of going out to a bar and having a drink. Recently, I've been rethinking my involvement in this game. Mostly due to the ass-hats that populate the world. Don't get me wrong, the majority of this games population as a whole are nice genuinely good people. But there is a percentage of players (mostly in the 8-15 age range) that think its cool or adult to spout random obscenities like a Sailor suffering from severe turrets. Some are considered, by law standards, adults (and I use that term loosely to describe these individuals). I recently had a run in with one (usually, I'm good about weeding those people out through a rigorous screening process). It was a dungeon run with 4 other players...3 of which I run with on a regular basis, so i knew them. The other was a stranger, but the others knew him. About half way through our run, he starts to berate one of our group members (as a joke, I think) and then openly call all of us a derogatory term used to describe homosexuals (no, I won't repeat it...especially on my blog). I then stepped up and and told him that that was enough, I'm leaving because I'm not going to take this sort of verbal abuse, joking or not, from a childish individual when I'm supposed to be having fun...and then I promptly left. I come to find out that he was someone from another guild who I have run with before...and who has made comments and statements within runs and he is a part of the same community of people that I thought was a safe place to be from these sort of individuals within the game. I didn't recognize him because he was on an alt character. So now I'm just upset that such people exist, that someone thinks they are being clever or "adult" by randomly spouting obscenities at another person, but they are ok because the repercussions of such acts almost don't exist due to the anonymity shield of the Internet. So, no one can enjoy anything because there is some childish individual out there who will inevitably ruin it for everyone. I just can't even begin to fathom why such people even exist...to ruin things for everyone else...why people lie, or cheat, or are just there to make everyone else miserable for no real reason.

Wow...that was long and rather depressing. I promise I'll draw my cat doing something cute/stupid next time.