Amazing! My Mini Was “Stolen!”

Well, I did have to add another bag to the already strong cup to delve into your letter!

Your experience is, alas, not entirely unique. We’ve heard many complaints from players regarding “stolen” Minis since we began hosting the Amazing Mini events. However, the two situations you described even caused your hardened Etiquette columnist to raise her eyebrows! What nerve the first woman had in order to justify herself by saying “I like to win and I saw it was a winner anyway.”

Before I go on, I must stop and applaud your clear-headedness on these matters and your ability to deal with them in an adult way. Good job!

These events are supposed to be fun, and being featured in the Amazing Mini section of the What’s Hot page in the Mini Mall is definitely a nice little shot in the arm, but it’s not worth stealing someone’s Mini over! That’s just bad manners, and I’m so sorry you had your parade rained upon by her bad behavior. Of course, when something like that happens, you almost have to laugh at how socially inept some people are. Ultimately, however, her behavior is a reflection on how she feels about her own world. I imagine she has few true friends and people don’t throw a lot of trust her way.

On to the situation you wrote about. Obviously, her approach was ill-mannered. While I do understand she may be new to these events and has not yet learned that sometimes the duplicate Mini scenario can occur innocently, accusing you of stealing hers without first trying to fully understand what happened was in poor form.

It’s understandable that she might be upset by the situation. In her eyes, her Mini was her own and to see it show up under someone else’s name obviously upset her. However, we all do ourselves a huge favor by cooling our jets before we shoot off a nasty e-mail. It would have been better for her to cool down, and then if she still felt the need to deal with the situation, she could have delicately crafted a more inquisitive than accusatory message. Something like: “Hello, congratulations on your win! It looks like we both entered the same Mini this week! What a coincidence. What made you think of yours?” would be friendly enough to elicit an equally friendly reply allowing you to explaining yourself, and would not only likely satisfy her curiosity, but open up a door for future friendliness.

But, she chose to accuse first and play the “pity” card, which both rained on your parade, and didn’t do much for her reputation. If, in the future, you should experience a similar situation, rather than explain or defend yourself, you might say something like “Welcome to the world of the Amazing Mini shows! Congrats on your first couple of ‘wins’. Sometimes players do end up with very similar Minis on the same day, and it looks like that’s what happened with us. I hope that you give the Amazing Mini shows another try, as they are a lot of fun!”

This will hopefully cause her to realize that these things do happen on occasion and she might (*might* being the key word) make her realize how petty she’d been to make the accusation in the first place.

You are a kind friend! What this abuser did was simply recreate the same screen name, only instead of using a lowercase “L” in “leprechaun”, he or she used an uppercase “i”, and unfortunately it looks exactly the same on Pogo. So, while it looked like she was saying it, it was actually a completely different account.

The best thing she could have done in that situation was to file an abuse report for “spoofing”. However, she also did the right thing by not giving the abuser any attention whatsoever. She essentially took all the joy out of the effort, and while she may have been upset behind her screen, the abuser is left empty in his or her efforts. Kudos to her for not playing into the scheme!

In some cases of severe stalking or harassment, players with a screen name that has several lowercase “L”s or uppercase “i”s, will be wise to go ahead and create their own “spoof” accounts so that this trick cannot happen again. In the case of “Louielaleprechaun”, it would mean creating: Louieialeprechaun, Louieiaieprechaun, and Louielaieprechaun. It’s a bit of a drag to have to do that, but it only takes a few minutes and it does protect your identity from being spoofed.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken the liberty of sending the spoofed name to our Customer Support department so that they may take appropriate action.

I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years, and I stand by my advice, and I’ll explain why. If I accuse you of cheating in a game room and you say nothing, I may assume that your silence means that you are, in fact, cheating, or that you are using some sort of automatic playing program. Your denial does two things: it let’s me know that you’re an actual person and that you do deny my accusation.

Furthermore, if others are present, you’re letting them know the same.

Finally, a polite denial gives the accusing player the opportunity to step back and apologize for the accusation in the first place. Sometimes even nice people get so emotionally wrapped up in the outcome of a game that they say things that they normally wouldn’t. While it’s rare, on occasion someone will recognize they’re own poor behavior and will attempt to make up for it.

So, in the interest of clearing one’s good name and giving the accuser an opportunity to redeem his or herself, I do think a single message such as “I’m sorry you lost, but I don’t cheat – I just play the game well” is the polite way to respond to an accusation.