On being wrong

I was levelling up a new character today in WOW, a feral druid.  As I levelled up I have been exploring the new Looking For Group tool that lets people queue up for a random dungeon and assembles groups from many different servers together to do dungeons.  This has been massively successful and mostly I really enjoy myself even though I rarely end up having anything more to say to my groupmates than "Hi" and "Good run, thanks".  One particular run today was quite strange though because I ended up grouped with 3 people who seemed competent and 1 who did practically nothing.  I was tanking the run and after a dozen pulls or so one of the group members named Graypoupon had done less than 10% of the damage I had, which is wretchedly embarassing.  I said

Graypoupon, you have done less than 10% of my damage so far.  Either get your ass in gear or get ready to get booted.

Some people don't mind others in the group who absolutely suck and others are driven crazy by it.  I am in a small minority I think in that I have very specific pet peeves about underperformers in my groups; if someone is new or has bad equipment or simply isn't optimally set up I really don't mind it.  In fact I regularly whisper them to offer assistance and usually people are really happy to get suggestions when phrased nicely.  One thing that drives me nuts though is people who simply don't try.  I don't mind if you are unable to contribute for whatever reason but unwilling I just can't stand.

Graypoupon then tells the group that she has not trained her weapon skills at all and thus can't hit anything.  While this is an excuse in that there is no way for her to do better given her circumstance it is still terrible because she could have easily gone out and trained up herself instead of expecting all of us to kill everything for her while she trained.  That expectation of being carried along by others really irked me and I ended up in arguing with the other group members about my original statement as they felt I was being too hard on a newbie - they refused to understand that being new is ok, being a freeloader is not.

After the run Graypoupon made a character on my realm, logged on and said:

I hope you aren't such a @$#% to your guild as you were to me.  No surprise coming from an uptight, over-geared, fine young man as yourself.  (She didn't actually say '@$#%' though)

Then she logged off before I could reply.

Rage, anger, VENGEANCE.

I made a new character on her realm and sent her a series of messages outlining my thoughts on the matter in rather terse yet professional language.  I made much of the fact that I spend so much of my time assisting others in playing and how showing up to a group event totally unable to help was exceedingly poor form.  She was AFK at the time though, and didn't respond.  I hopped back to my realm and continued going about my business.  5 minutes later I see a message pop up from her on my screen and I mentally prepare for an outpouring of venom but instead:

Well I can't say anything to combat that, sorry for what I said.

Wut?

A person, on the internet.  Getting mad at something, and then apologizing for overreacting when they were shown to be in the wrong?  Unbelievable.  Showing up to a dungeon run unable to fight is poor, and calling me out when I protest isn't great.  However, the ability to admit being wrong to a random person on the internet who has seriously insulted you is a rare thing.  It makes me feel really good about the whole situation, which is I suppose a good argument for saying "I am wrong" now and then - maybe I should look into doing that sometime.