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Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him
D1gital_Prob3 writes with this excerpt from a story about David Myers, a Loyola professor who spent some time studying superhero MMO City of Heroes/Villains:
"... he aimed the pointer at his opponent, the virtual comic book villain 'Syphris.' Myers, 55, flicked the buttons on his mouse and magically transported his opponent to the front of a cartoon robot execution squad. In an instant, the squad pulverized the player. Syphris fired an instant message at Myers moments later. 'If you kill me one more time I will come and kill you for real and I am not kidding.' ... As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules — disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular. At first, players tried to beat him in the game to make him quit. Myers was too skilled to be run off, however. They then made him an outcast, a World Wide Web pariah that the creator of Syphris — along with hundreds of other faceless gamers — detested."
This isn't research, this is trolling.
There is nothing novel about it.
There is nothing to be learned.
You're just being a dick.
Nobody give this fucker any research money, any PHD, or any book deals.
Get used to it or get out.
I piss off bigots.
So, a researcher enters a foreign land. He obeys the strict letter of the law, but ignores the customs and rules of polite behavior. Even more, he specifically sets out to break those customs and rules of polite society. The natives push back, telling him that he is being rude. He continues to break the customs and rules of polite society, offending large numbers of people on a regular basis. The natives seek every legal avenue and socially acceptable method to drive him away. He continues to offend. Some natives start pushing what is social acceptable, and skirting the edges of legality.
Wow, color me surprised. Those nasty natives! How dare they try to keep you down!
Perhaps as followup research he can start referring to people of other ethnicity using racial slurs.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
This summary seemed very biased, cherry picking out sections that made it seem like the Professor played outside of the intended purposes of the game by saying he avoided 'custom sets'. After reading the article it seems to me he played it exactly how anyone who had purchased that game would expect to play it. He chose a side, in his case hero, and set out to do battle against other people who had chosen the side of villian. I am not familiar with the game, but it would seem to me that would be the obvious way in which to play the game and how it was meant. From the article the professor says both heroes and villians sat around chatting and only going against computer opponents, which would seem to sort of defeat the purpose of a game that lets you choose a side and everyone has this choice. I know if I had picked up this game I would be pretty pissed if I started playing it just to realize I was only there to be buddy buddy with everyone no matter their affiliation and only go after those designated as computer threats.
After being "chilled" by players threatening to kill him, he then goes and publishes his personal information. Brilliant.
That said, I I think Sirlin would have something to say to the scrubs complaining about his tactics.
Myers, who bought "City of Heroes" when it hit store shelves in 2004, quickly learned that players ignored the area's stated purpose. Heroes chatted peacefully with villains in the combat zone. Instead of fighting each other, members of the two factions sparred with computer-controlled enemies..
What kind of silly carebear game is this? Try Eve, where the time it takes to rid yourself of such nonsense is measured in the time it takes to warm up a railgun.
Not a typewriter
This is not a new concept, it has been covered in one episode of South Park where some guy kills everybody in WOW and the kids get together to defeat him.
I mean, if it has been covered in South Park, I would guess this occurred in other games before. Still interesting to see the similarities with the South Park episode although....
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I'm guessing you're an MMO troll yourself with an attitude like that. A subtle but no less interesting point you may have missed here is that in virtual worlds the rules can be set by the players themselves. The developers in this context are enablers, rather than Gods passing down "rules".
God I hate gamers.
The Jackson banter is more news worthy than a troll calling himself a researcher. Get a life!
If you read the article, it mentioned that he just took a different stlye of battle, instead of the socially accepted standard of sending robots at their robots, he just killed them directly. He did not insult them, just took action different from the normal battle.
Some of the tactics used by this researcher remind me of the full court press in basketball. The rules of basketball allow a full court press, yet to do so never crosses the mind of most players. Playing one side of the court at a time is convention. The full court press is extremely effective, yet if you use it, the other team will no doubt call your win "cheap".
Still, when you are the underdog, and must win at all costs, the press is your only option. I sympathize with those who use it (and recognize that it isn't easy to pull off either).
If people complain that a tactic is cheap, it's really not the fault of the player, but the fault of the game. Past slashdot postings are full of examples where players exploited loopholes in city of heroes (remember the article about player-created missions?). With this in mind, I think it's obvious that City of Heroes was poorly designed to begin with. Game designers should never assume players will be on their best behavior.
MMOs are nothing but overglorified IRC clients.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
just because a game developer didnt prevent something doesnt mean that its within the rules. the game developer doesnt play that game. even if s/he/they do, they constitute a near zero percentage of the game's players.
any mmo you play are played by thousands of people. thousands of people create its environment, make it run, keep the machine running (raiding, pvp, crafting, trade, events, everything). they are the world there, and they set the social climate. noone, including the developers, can do shit about this. if developers force any player base into something they do not like, they QUIT. and go to another game. it happened many times, for many games, including some top, up-and-coming, much hyped titles.
therefore, for all those badass/darth maul wannabee morons out there - you wont be able to freely be a badass asshole even in a mmo game - regardless how hard you argue that 'its within the rules', any assholery you commit is going to get added to your reputation, and eventually you'll find yourself changing your realm AND your character's nickname. people doesnt give a shit about what's within the hard rules of the game or not - they have their own opinions and judgments - noone can change that, neither a badass wannabee asshole, or self-righteous developer.
so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
Read radical news here
What seems weird is that he was upset that people were punishing behavior "out of the norm" on one hand, and on the other hand was touting that he was merely following the rules. Huh?
The folks in the game creatively and organically decided to set up their own customs opposed to the rules - Twixt seems more like a street preacher who hates everyone because they don't follow the rules like he does.
Is he a cultural anthropologist (probably not, given that anthropologists are trained to work within the social framework of existing cultures as much as possible)? If not, I'd LOVE to see a cultural anthropologist do a write up on what happened here.
MMOs work by social contract. NCSoft can try to tell people how to play, but unless they ban people for playing incorrectly, people are going to play the game in a manner they enjoy. It really isn't going to work if you tell people to enjoy themselves in a certain manner.
The researcher's experiment demonstrated this quite clearly. It's remarkably bad form to harass the guy outside of the game, but I expect this was a small minority. It's perfectly acceptable for a group of them to gang up on the guy and try to defeat him.
I think players in City of Heroes wanted conformity, instead competing for individual ambition like in EVE Online.
without any real research. He needs to read Richard
Hamming's talk: You and Your Research
The professor seems surprisingly disappointed by the scorn heaped on his not-mainstream behaviour. He tries to liken it to cliques in high school, but the reality is he didn't just not follow rules, but he actively tried to destroy an existing social fabric and actively molested participants. He tries to paint his behaviour as 'following the rules, but independent' without the most important piece of information 'also, I actively antagonised people.' This is akin to painting himself a geek when really he's a bully (to follow on his high school example)
... in virtual worlds the rules can be set by the players themselves. The developers in this context are enablers, rather than Gods passing down "rules".
If those user-driven rules are so important for the gameplay, they should just pass them along to the developers so they can add them to the actual rules. That's what we in the real world call "Laws". If they don't like the way things are they should go play somewhere else. Stupid whining babies...
When my Karma level reaches 0 I feel in piece with the Universe
I don't understand your complaint. There is no question that Twixt broke no rules.. only social convention. Must we all conform to social convention?
...how much government funding he got during the 4 odd years he was "researching" this. Not a bad job to get paid to play a video game for four years and be an utter prick while doing it, while maintaining the rationalization, "it's all for science." Maybe someone should be researching why sociology professors are so willing to live off the public dole like this...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
So he gets to play MMOs all day and be a cock in them, AND he gets paid for it?
Shit, all this time I've been doing it for free....
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
A player was being irritating, which is within the rules.
The rest of the players turned him into an outcast, which is also within the rules.
I don't see the problem here.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Not all rules can bet programmed in. For example, camping. You can't make it impossible to camp, but in a lot of games (read: not all) it ruins the fun.
If the admin says no camping/playing cheap on his server, go to a different server, 'stupid whining babies'.
Wow, someone on the Internet said he would kill you! This is a death threat to take seriously, all right.
Having read the full article, it appears as though the "researcher" did nothing more than hang out in the combat zones in CoH/CoV and teleport the oposing faction in to a line of guards who would instakill anyone who got too close. (making the line "but he was too skilled to be driven off" extra hillarious).
He would then troll the general chat with stuff like (direct quote here):
I couldn't make this shit up if I were trying.
His grand conclusion?
What's this guy's next "research" project? Going down to the bus station and punching old ladies in the nose?
This guy wasn't doing research, he just wanted a tax write off and a grant to do nothing but sit around and be a dick on the internet.
Since the average age of these games is 24, they are the same whiny millennials he sees everyday in class. I bet some parents called up and asked him why he was so mean to their kid who was just hanging out with their friends in their nice little game, and then asked why they only got a 98% on the last test.
He's really just studying the behaviors of a community and what happens when you go against the established rules.
To take it out of the video game - think of a company buying a plot of land and build a baseball field on it. Instead of playing baseball, people have decided to use the field as a place to sunbathe. Along comes this person that wants to play baseball on the baseball field. Unfortunately, it's been taken over by people who are doing something else in it. The majority doesn't want to leave. The individual just wants to use the field for what it was built for.
So who's in the wrong there?
But who joins City of Heroes to "live in a society"? I've never played, but I thought about it. It wasn't so I could live in a society, but so I could have super powers, choose a side, and then run around kicking the asses of people on the opposing side with said super powers.
When I was a kid, I didn't play Doom so I could learn about demon culture. If I want to live in a society, video games are not the appropriate place for that.
In the sports world, there are many instances of coaches and players using strategies that, although effective, are bad for the game for one reason or another. Sports leagues that deal with this effectively, like the NBA, are doing OK. Leagues that do not, such as the NHL (sorry Canada), are circling the drain. Once upon a time in basketball, teams started holding the ball for minutes at a time as soon as they got a lead. So, the NBA instituted a shot clock forcing the team to shoot the ball within 24 seconds. As players got taller, coaches started camping 7-footers under the basket. So, a 3-second lane was added to forbid any player from standing under the basket for more than 3 seconds at a time. Years later, the 3-point line was introduced to increase the value of long-range shooting and encourage players not to all crowd around the basket. The NHL started going down the tubes when teams like the New Jersey Devils used the horrendously boring "neutral zone trap" and "clutch-and-grab" defense to win Stanley Cups over more skilled and exciting teams. The NHL waited too long to do something about it, and as a result the Stanley Cup finals are now shown on a basic cable bicycle racing channel. If legal play can ruin the game, the rules need to be changed. Pure and simple. You can't trust the players to "be nice."
The Institute of Incomplete Research has determined that 9 of out 10
I weep for higher education. Here we have a man with a Ph.D. and a teaching position, and he doesn't know the first thing about culture. Is he lying when he says he was stunned?
The professor was disturbed that game rules encouraging competition and varied tactics hardly mattered to gaming community members who wanted to preserve a deeply-rooted culture.
Again, how can an educated man be so ignorant? Ah well, I suppose he's like the Ph.D.s at my mom's job - the ones who regularly send her email hoaxes, viruses, and Howard Dean campaign contribution requests.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This appears to be Professor Myer's paper detailing his "Twixt" character and its actions: http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/F99%20classes/Myers_PlayPunishment_031508.doc. As annoying as this kind of research is, it provides some significant insights into how people behave. Just look at the go-along-to-get-along attitude that is prevalent in most organizations. Individuals who try to "play by the rules" are ostracized, even to the detriment of the organization's mission.
the actual paper (word format, ugh).
the guy's blog
It sounds like this "professor" really never learned the details about what he's playing.
In this particular game, player vs. player combat is for the most part consensual. The speed of travel in the game is so fast that the only way to kill someone is for them to be willing to slow down and have a fight to the death. The developers go to greath lengths to minimize the ways in which one player can interfere with other players.
Being killed by a player has no penalty in a PvP zone, you're just sent back to the entrance of the zone. However, the computer controlled "cartoon" enemies in the zone will inflict an experience loss(known as "debt") on the players that die by their hand, and this loss takes a considerable amount of time to mitigate. There are players in this zone who are there to defeat the enemies because they give increased experience, they aren't there to fight or interact with enemy players in any way and are left alone instead.
There's no benefit to winning by dropping the enemy into the computer controlled enemies, since the computer takes the credit for killing him. So essentially, he is disrupting the gameplay of the other players, inflicting a loss of time, and for no personal gain aside from schadenfreude. A classic troll.
He's not bucking social norms, he's being a sociopath as far the game world allows. The results are not suprising, interesting, or even insightful. If he wanted to buck social norms, he should play a healer character who focuses only on his weak offensive abilities. That's the game-equivalent of being a social outcast. He's going for the game-equivalent of Charles Manson.
Yes. It does. Reverse tautology aside. The coded rules of the game are analogous to the rules of physics in real life. The social conventions are a layer on top of those rules created by the players. While I can't break the laws of physics I can certainly break the laws of man, and I'll pay the consequences if I do. If I determine that I can accept the consequences, (in this case being threatened by strangers on the internet)or I have enough money to hire good lawyers, then I am free to do so unless someone stops me.
Get used to living in the real world.
Now they know his name....
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I have similar experiences with on-line poker. If I'm in a heads up and have a lot more chips than my opponent, ill go all-in with any cards. I figure I can take the risk of doubling him up a few times to finish the game quick. If I go all in three times in a row I usually suck out at least once, but people go crazy when you do and turn rather nasty. They get especially offended when they lose because the other person played 'stupidly' and still won. I think its ridiculous that people start lobbing insults.
If people pay good money to play a game and they don't break the rules- they they can play that game however they want in my opinion. Its childish to ostracise someone over it.
So what you're saying is that even though they -didn't- make it impossible for him to attack the opposing faction, he was wrong for doing so. Despite the fact that doing so was the intent of the game's setup?
So why haven't the people who play City of Heroes/Villains all left? Because there's nothing to prevent anyone from starting a character and attacking the opposing faction. In fact, it's encouraged.
Wait, so playing the game as it was INTENDED to be played is being an asshole?
This is the biggest pile of deluded nonsense ever. They intended for PvP to happen. PvP happens. Idiots cry.
It's not society, it's a game. I imagine that people such as yourself who confuse the two might have a problem with what he did.
Go ahead and burn a flag. It's within the rules, but people will hate you for it. Wow. I should write a paper.
Hum in City of Heroes members of the two player created faction hang out in the battle zone chatting. In EVE members of the player created factions lie, steal, infiltrate each others message boards, ect. I think this researcher needs to play some other games.
Must we all conform to social convention?
Only if you want to actually live and interact within a society.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
So you don't appreciate the social aspects of an MMO. Why exactly are games not an appropriate place for socializing? Clearly you appreciate the social aspects of slashdot.
Jeremy
Trolls and cheaters in online games are kinda what made me quit. And yes, from people threatening to find and kill me FOR NO REASON, flying immortal enemies with all the best weapons...
Since I stopped, I've made something out of my life - finished college, got a decent job, great girlfriend, and lost those extra ponds. I thank those jerks every day!
But then, what works for me, might not work for you. You might not NEED a life!
And just as with real-world laws, there's a limit to how much you can specify clearly enough, or how many restrictions you actually want to set.
In fact, I think we'd both agree that it would be a Bad Idea to have all laws be set to match social customs. There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt, and I would not want to live in a place that had such a law -- yet you probably still wouldn't want me to do that, and society in general would probably disapprove.
"Don't be a dick" can't be coded into law, but it's still good advice.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
it all sound pretty lame to me. Get a life
This behavior as described by the researcher does not get XP for the player. It does not get drops for the player, either. It simply wastes the opponent's time.
Note also that there are two different behaviors described. One, a pattern of teleporting foes into the 'safe zone guards' was later defined as griefing by the developers, and punishable by pretty much the same punishment as threatening people. The other is a matter of waiting till someone is badly hurt, fighting someone else, and picking them off by teleporting them directly into a boss. This is completely legal, it simply imposes an XP penalty on the person killed. It is also, of course, viewed as 'cheap.'
I suspect strongly that our friend did the 'teleport into guard' trick until the day it was declared griefing, then switched to a new tactic, just to cause the maximum social annoyance.
I have seen this behavior in real life, as well. It is the person who drives in the left lane at ten under the limit, on a road where the convention is twenty over. Much like the behavior described in the game, it is technically legal, unless, of course, the cops decide the driver is intentionally blocking the road.
In this case, I suspect he is both intentionally blocking the road _and_ driving with a hat on, barely able to see over the windshield, if he truly does not understand why his behavior was deemed frustrating.
To put it another way, most of us grew out of this behavior when we were six. It's passive-aggressive, and spiritually the same as "I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you."
His survival _after_ this behavior might be an indication of skill... but I doubt he survived for long, simply taking advantage of the lack of death penalty, and various stealth powers to return to play after being killed.
As far as playing by the 'rules', I should note that it has become harder and harder to perform his tactics, due to behavior like this. Why? Because, while the game world may allow it, it was only allowed because the developers didn't actually believe someone would behave like this, to no personal gain and great social cost. As such, they have added equipment, power sets, potions, and direct power changes to make it harder to perform.
Basically, he played the game (actually fighting villains) and was hated for it. Not because he was being vile or crude (indeed, completely contrary to what you suggest) but by violating game defeating "customs." Why the hell have a city full of heroes and villains, if the villains and heroes just idly chat and don't actually fight each other?
Because people actually like it that way? I mean, who is this self-proclaimed researcher to go around enforcing his vision of how people should play the game with the equivalent of violent force?
Why do you say that going around beating up villains is actually "playing the game" and the people standing around and chatting aren't? Who gets to say what the game actually is? The developers or the people who play it?
In the real world, the people who make the laws of our society are our society's "developers," but the people who actually live in the world, or the "players," often set up unwritten rules. Just because the law says that something is okay, doesn't mean that it really is.
It's like people who go 45 MPH in the left lane on a 55 MPH road. Yeah, that's definitely what the laws say you can do, but most people don't, and the presence of a vehicle going a different speed from the flow of traffic creates danger and stress that shouldn't be there. Ignoring custom in favor of only the rules in print is antisocial behavior.
In terms of the game, the people who play City of Heroes have decided as a community what kind of behavior is acceptable. You only get to go PVP with people who have consented, and the arena is a place for people on other sides of the Heroes / Villains game split to be able to chat otherwise. It's a like a dance club where someone has decided that just because he's a man and you're a woman that he gets to bump and grind against you even if you're not interested. ("That's what dance clubs are for! Why is everyone ganging up on poor little me?")
I won't say that the abusive behavior of some of the angered players was acceptable, but this researcher is a space cadet if he thinks that what he was doing was perfectly kosher and/or commendable or that the reactions to his griefing were surprising. He was using the game's equivalent of violent force to tell people how to play the game and not respecting people when they said that they didn't like playing the way he did. Nobody likes someone who goes around ganking people for "playing wrong."
If he really thinks that the community's reaction to him "marching to the beat of a different drummer" is so horrible, then I wonder what he would think of someone driving by his home at 3:00 AM every night with the bass cranked up. Bold iconoclast? Or someone that he wished the cops would deal with?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
one of the reasons why there will never be a true Democracy. The elite in every society tells the commoner and new initiate what to think, and for the most part they fall in line.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
That's amazing!
He actually found an MMORPG with a faction battlezone where the participants are NOT at each others throats?!?
Maybe he should go into WoW, or Warhammer, or just about all the others.
Try walking into a PvP flagged area and not get killed, especially if you are half the power of your opponents, or even weaker.
He should be more interested in why CoH/CoV has a PvP area that is used peacefully when that's unthinkable in other games.
Seeing the other side of the story is a good thing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Someone get the Sword of a Thousand Truths!
Xaotik Designs
If you read some of the comments from posters who played the game, apparently he was kind of cheating. He was using a cheap trick to teleport opponents in front of NPC guards which did all the work for him, while he evaded attackers and teleported them into the NPC trap one at a time. The bots are there to create a "safe zone" for people who don't want to PVP. He abused it to kill people who didn't want to PVP from the other side.
Basically, he was doing the equivalent of "train to the guards" and claiming credit for the kills. Technically that's "within the rules" but definitely against the spirit of the game even as the developers set it up. What a biter.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
and writes book describing why it's ok to be a Griefer.
More surprising to me was that in CoH/V PvP is not played as described. I play WoW, on both PvP and carebear servers, and boy do I get ganked whenever I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no such "polite agreement" between Ally and Horde in WoW. How did one get established in CoH/V?
And while it does indeed suck to get griefed and ganked by the opposing forces, esp when I am no threat to them, if it starts bothering me much I just go do something else for awhile. The Alliance can't be roaming Tarren Mill all of the time? Can they? But it seems like I did have to log in in the Early AM Server Time in order to complete some of those quests.
--
$tar -xvf
Laws? Kicking over a kid's sand castle isn't illegal, but people will hate you for it. I'm not sure what your point is here.
Seriously, don't go crying if you can't handle someone playing the game the way it was designed to be played.
The individual. How the fuck can you play baseball with only one person?
From the days of mIRC to today's Web 2.0 (see for example this), the web is as brutal of friendly place as real life is. Is this trivial 'insight' really worth lifetime guaranteed employment, i.e. tenure? It sounds more like dear Prof was trying to expense / justify his online MMO addictions.
"Sorry, I cannot teach the lecture this afternoon, I have an important meeting to attend in the City of Heroes."
MMORPG or MMOIRCc?
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Feel free to keep making it up as you go along. You have to be one of those players that takes the game scarily seriously that I see in WoW all the time, threatening other players online as though you could do anything about anything, and going all nerd-rage and moving onto personal threats within a short space of time. Reminds me of the time I accidentally trained a bunch of mobs onto another player on the same faction, and he told me to "do that again and watch what happens". When the game completely removed the ability to affect players on the same side in any meaningful way. Maybe he was going to cast water walking on me as I took a huge dive into water or something.
You can't freely be a 'badass' in the game? Because of what? That it's going to be "added to your reputation"? You seriously think that people are going to be changing servers and character names because of a bunch of tweens or early twenty-somethings call them a faggot or a n00b enough? You do realise that there is a ceiling on the IQ level allowed to access/read MMO forums, and let me tell you, you'll get enough change out of a hundred to fund at least a handful of YouTube commentators.
But I digress.
If the game developer (self righteous? ouch, someone bitching about the latest nerf are they?) didn't prevent something, then it's within the rules. Just in case you weren't aware, that's actually how the rules in a game are defined, because it's a closed system and there are no external influences. The developer is king. If they let you do something, do it. If they don't want it done, they block it. If something is happening that makes you all teary eyed, then go dampen the shoulder of the internal game admins, and I'm sure that if the developers want it stopped, it will be stopped. Otherwise, hey, it's just a game. For some of us. In the mean time feel free to parade around like some sort of king of shit mountain, as though you have the power to really do anything, because your self delusion is pretty damn entertaining to read.
[Side note : I have an 80, 76, 71 and 70 in WoW, this isn't a "You're a loser because you play WoW" comment. It's just that there is a reason I play on a PvP server; it's so your own side can be easily blocked as well as having no way of talking to the other side. Because basically, as a rule, the vast majority of MMO gamers are socially, and likely mentally, retarded, and take the game seriously to a quite frankly pathetic level. Case in point, our man unity100 here]
There is a lot of early morning aggro here, not least because I can't drink coffee at the moment, but I'll post anyway.
Okay, so it seems that everyone has taken the headline's "Suprised When Players Hate Him" as fact, but I don't recall seeing that he was surprised, shocked, unnerved, or anything of the sort by their reaction. Not only that, but he wasn't really trolling, he was playing the game - albeit by disregarding "customs" set up by the buddy buddy heroes and villains - as it was intended, but the article doesn't mention whether or not he harassed players. Though, if I were a hero and saw a villain just chilling, chatting it up, I'd probably not waste much time in kicking his/her ass.
/., upset your readers by running an inciting headline and then let us tear each other apart because some people just don't RTFA. Yay.
So, good job,
so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
It's not a "society", it's a game.
In real society, people do things you won't like all the time, and they are still "within the rules". Get used to it. YOu don't get to threaten their life.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
He's trying to compare this to being a 'geek' that is outcast in highschool. A 'geek' becomes an outcast in highschool because he is 'not like everyone else' and doesn't adhere to social norms. He became an outcast because he was upsetting other people.
A better way to put it would be that a 'geek' becomes an outcast in a highschool without doing anything that affects/infringes on other people's rights and what they are doing.. just because they are different. What this guy was doing was akin standing on the edge of his property line and singing really loudly annoying all his neighbors... but not loudly enough to qualify as illegal under any laws. In that case, he is disrupting the lives of others with his 'technically legal' behavior, which is A LOT different than doing something like just 'not trimming his hedges correctly.'
In game, he was trying to force other players to battle him that did not want to battle him. While the game allowed him to do it, *HE* was the one trying to force people to do something that *HE* wanted to do that the other player *DID NOT* want to do. It's also pretty disingenuous to say compare this to someone that is trying to 'work towards change' in a society. It's not like he painted himself as some crusader for changing the social norms. People may have understood him better if he had stated that he was playing be the rules and thought that all players should play accordingly. In such a case, trying to change social norms through leading by action is a poor way to do things. *Especially* since there are many people online that do such things *on purpose* to annoy people (and not for any type of lofty goals). If he didn't not want to be grouped in with such people he would have to make an effort to distinguish himself and his actions from those of malicious users.
He really came across as a douche to me though. It could just be the writing (in which case it's a reflection of the writer) but things like taking the death threats serious paint make him sound like one of those people that are semi-luddites that are afraid that their technology will blow up on them. People make threats like that on- and off-line all the time, but only a fraction of them are anything but anger and frustration. Parts of that article really make that guy sound like a poster-child for the phrase "[the] internet [is] serious business." (Though to be fair, most of the players revolting against him probably qualify too)
There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt
That's what "Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress" is for.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
He had been playing since the game came out in 2004. He knew the customs, he knew the rules. He played the game as designed. He was a hero who defeated villains in a PvP server. He played the game correctly, while everyone else wasn't.
How is teleporting people in front of NPC bots designed to enforce a safe zone instead of beating someone up yourself "playing correctly?" Especially when he was attacking people who didn't want to PVP by abusing a mechanism intended to protect people who didn't want to PVP?
The only reason he was "unbeatable" was because he built a character optimized to exploit a cheap trick that didn't rely on his own strength. I mean, he talks himself up as being skilled, but the truth is a little less flattering. Plus, he wasn't as nice and innocently curious of a guy as he pretends to be. An AC below notes that he would taunt people, post bragging kill logs, etc.
He was a griefer who basically bemoans how "haters gotta be hatin'." What a chump.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
See, that's why I love Eve Online. We (an alliance of over 1000 players on a server with hundreds of thousands) *make* the rules, at least in our own section of space. Jumping a transport through our space as a neutral pilot (we don't know you and have no standings set) will get you killed where we hang out. Want your loot back? Sure, we'll offer it - but we'll put a steep markup on it compared to what we'd ask from the alliance. If you don't like it, stick to NRDS (Not Red, Don't Shoot, i.e. only kill hostile ships) space. On the other hand, if you want to join us, go ahead and ask - we're usually recriuting to some extent or another. We'll even take in new players and help them bet set up, which a lot of alliances have no interest in doing. Why operate this way? It's how we like to play. Don't like it? Stay out of our way (we occupy about a dozen systems, with presence in perhaps a dozen more, out of many hundreds) or get your own alliance together (or join one) and fight us. Seriosuly, bring it - the game is no fun when you have to fly 40 systems away to get an PvP.
I can totally sympathise with this guy. He was just in the wrong game - apparently City of Heroes/Villians is simply overrun with carebears.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
the guy's blog
Geesh. After reading his responses to Lisa on his blog, he's apparently an ass in real life, too.
Caveat: I haven't played online games in years.
His behavior makes me wonder what he's like in real life. I'm reminded of the lawyer who decided that a cleaner's "customer satisfaction guaranteed" sign meant he could demand $54 Million for a pair of lost pants, on the theory that he wasn't satisfied until he got that amount, and the shop had guaranteed his satisfaction.
There is the letter of the law, and there is what is collectively considered proper. I'm sure the "researcher" knows that. I wonder how he behaves in real life; if he is rude and inconsiderate and takes advantage of people where the rules don't specifically forbid his behavior. For instance, if you're not fussy, you can live on water, condiments and free pretzels whilst surfing the web on the restaurant's free wifi, at least until the owner points out that these things are intended as perks for paying customers. Of course, this lets you be stunned and saddened that the owner would get mad at you, since this policy isn't on a sign anywhere. Maybe even write an academic paper about it.
Parenthetically, I wonder is if he wasn't exploiting a weakness in the game. He must have been good at the game to make it to the arena, but his "power" seems to give him an unbeatable advantage. Reminds me of a similar weakness in a game I played years ago -- you could mount the longest range weapon on a fast chassis and be essentially unbeatable, because you could stay out of everyone's range and still tag them. In order to make the game enjoyable, we had to all adopt this tactic, which would defeat 90% of the point of the game, or agree that nobody does it.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the "researcher" has merely found a different way to deliberately piss people off and then whine that nobody likes him. It's no different from being a dick on Usenet from an anonymous account. (Esh, I'm showing my age.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm wondering if Myers went through his university's human subjects protection office on this, as he should have. I'd be really surprised to find that his research could get approval.
If you look at his behavior as that of a player, I don't care. But standards are different for a researcher. It looks like he was deliberately pissing people off by violating social norms, and repeating the process on multiple servers. That's out-of-bounds for a researcher.
Read TFA. He didn't just attack people from the other faction, he abused the bots meant to protect players uninterested in PvP to grief players of the opposing faction, engaged in verbal abuse (which is prohibited by pretty much all MMO EULAs) and various other issues above and beyond simply "engaging in PvP". And that's just from his own and extremely biased version of the story, reality is likely even worse.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Unfortunately, it's been taken over by people who are doing something else in it. The majority doesn't want to leave. The individual just wants to use the field for what it was built for.
So who's in the wrong there?
Whoever causes the most trouble for the people permitted by the owner of the field to use it. If the company isn't clearing off the sunbathers, then the one-man baseball team is in the wrong. If the company wanted the baseball field to be only used for baseball, then it's up to them to enforce that and not for one man to cause grief to a bunch of other people who are using the field in a permitted manner.
And it certainly wouldn't be the player's right to just start hitting balls into the middle of the field where people are lying, which is the closest equivalent to what Twixt was doing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
He conducted research on humans, without their consent, and it may have involved children and deception. I sure hope this was institutional review board approved, as he has basically checked off all the high risk criteria that require a full board review and probably requires oversight to be considered ethical. If it was not, his paper should be withdrawn by the publisher, his university should sanction him and he should be ineligible for future government grants.
Myers was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game's rules.
So he technically follows the rules, yet ignores all the social customs the human beings who play the game created about not being an asshole. People hate him for it, and his conclusion is that "even in a 21st century digital fantasyland, an ugly side of real-world human nature pervades". What?
The professor was disturbed that game rules encouraging competition and varied tactics hardly mattered to gaming community members who wanted to preserve a deeply-rooted culture.
He said his experience demonstrated that modern-day social groups making use of modern-day technology can revert to "medieval and crude" methods in trying to manipulate and control others.
"If you aren't a member of the tribe, you get whacked with a stick," he said. "I look at social groups with dismay."
In other words, his idea of freedom, or whatever, is a world of antisocial personalities engaging in pure competition. He is, in other words, an Ayn Rand fan.
Property is theft.
depends - does the guy who wants to play baseball starting pitching the ball at the sunbathers?
FGD 135
Well, maybe we can bring it a bit more in line. You go to the court with your basketball and see people standing around talking. You force them into playing a game with you using a rule exploit such that they instantly lose and are penalized for losing. You then mock them and publicly insult them to incite their ire (read the articles and associated posts of people who had direct experience, also how the game mechanics work). Repeat... repeat... repeat... Now you can stand amazed that for some reason everyone seems to think you are a jerk!
fucking cares?
I guess the point is that just as in society, there are rules and there is etiquette. I'm a big Battlefield 2142 player and it drives me nuts when people do dickwad things that are perfectly legal within the confines of gameplay like RDX whoring, ditching choppers with passengers, or camping. The interesting thing to me has how these standards aren't uniform across all servers. Some call bitching about play that violates the spirit of the game as "whining." Others publish their own lists of custom rules on penalty of being kicked or banned. In the real world, my ex-girlfriend thought Bill Gates was a god because of his ruthless political acumen. Wall Street traders gloat about how they profit on loopholes in laws to their own profit (naked shorts anyone?). So, there will always be a gray area of frowned-upon behavior that will never be banned because a critical mass of "NO" votes will never be reached that would make breaches of etiquette unlawful.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Of interest in the "players set the rules" topic is LambdaMOO, where players actually sent in petitions which became ballots which were voted on and implemented. Frequently, a ballot to permanently shut down the game was submitted; luckily, they never passed. Other ballots would include changes in quota policy, new user policy, etc.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
I'd appreciate the social aspects within the context of the game. The other villains and I would chat it up in our lairs of dark power. Drinking mead, toasting our inevitable triumphs, plotting our strategies.
That's meaningless, the programmed rules of the game are analagous to the laws of physics. Just because you can punch someone on the nose doesn't mean that you should, or that they should just shrug their shoulders and go "well, physics allows it, so I'm ok with it"
FGD 135
I love how online game etiquette gets discussed as if its actually relevant. Makes me smile.
At least that is what Wil Wheaton says. And I agree.
So he does a formal semiotic analysis of an undefined category of acts. Hmmm. Maybe getting an endowed professorship is easier than I thought.
-John Van Voorhis
Because you see, now I'm tempted to buy the game and start PVPing like mad in the PVP zones. Down with carebears... Glory to the empire!! etc etc. :)
David Sirlin wrote about this a few years back, and estimated that over 99% of all people were scrubs. It seems he was right.
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html
The developers are the ones who set the speed limits/laws, and not surprisingly, entering a Player vs. Player arena is explicitly saying "I want to PvP."
Well, does it really mean that? If not everyone who goes there does so, then quite obviously there are plenty of people who have in fact not consented to PvP any more than everyone one on the road has consented to going 10 under 55 MPH just because someone else can.
Also, just because it's possible to PvP with anyone there doesn't mean that people have consented to PvP with you. This is why I brought up the dance club analogy. Just because you're on the floor doesn't mean that just anyone can come up and dance with you without need for any further approval, and it doesn't mean that they can't refuse you if you try without having to run out of the room.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Were I faculty at Loyola, I would find the IRB members who approved this and give them a very hard time, as this is not the kind of research I would want to be associated with. If he has done this without IRB support, I would ask that he be removed from the faculty.
I would point to his academic themed blog (linked to in the article), where he seems to go out of his way to belittle and further antagonize the non-academics who are complaining (he had a separate blog "in character" for his research, this is his "serious academic" blog). His response to an inquiry about the ethics of what he has done is to link to a discussion of similar researchers who seem to reach a conclusion that the ethics in MMO social research are complicated and suggests that transparency and respect of the other players is the best policy (in other words, he links to a blog that suggests he has acted unethically). That he is acting "in character" in his academic blog after the conclusion of the research and is not adhering to the "normal" research conduct of his field is, to me, totally unacceptable.
Gah, I lost my mod points two minutes before reading your post. Yes! A game where "fouls" are committed intentionally, regularly, and repeatedly is seriously broken. I understand that it's commonly accepted and expected now, but anyone who steps away from that game for a year and comes back should say: "You know, that's really dumb."
A player was being irritating, which is within the rules.
The rest of the players turned him into an outcast, which is also within the rules.
I don't see the problem here.
You (and the authors of half the comments I've read so far...) must not have read the article. They went beyond attacking or taunting him in the game. Trying to expose someone's identity and falsely accusing them of being a sex offender is WAY outside the rules.
Also, "being irritating" in this case involved playing the game the way it was meant to be played. He wasn't doing things that were merely "technically" allowed. He wanted to roleplay as a hero, so he attacked villains.
The summary headline is inaccurate and inflammatory; its author needs to go back to Fark.
isn't this why people hate emos?
If the main issue is the death by teleporting enemies into the insta kill zone, then it seems a simple patch that would make a no teleport in zone within range of that would solve that problem.
No doubt he would find some other way to be an ass. I hope tax dollars didn't go into funding this nonsense research.
I have never played any MMOs, but this looks exactly like that southpark episode about warcraft with the lame griefer ruing the game for everyone.
I'm kinda curious as to how he got this past his IRB... I mean, it's human subject's research without informed consent and he basically makes a point of continually irritating people without significant benefit to them. That doesn't seem like something any respectable ethics committee would allow. Perhaps that's who the upset players should have complained to... That is if the researcher identified himself and his purpose to them after collecting his data.
I'm actually a CoH player who PvPed both with and against Twixt (I am not any of the players named, and my verbal interactions with Twixt were quite limited). I'd like to clear up a few things that seem to be missing. Note that I am, in no way, discounting the seriousness of death threats, but maybe a little more understanding of what really took place will allow people to relate better to the frustration.
1) Twixt's actions in PvP translated to an investment of time. By teleporting (the action described) villains into a row of firing squad computer-generated enemies, he would give the other character debt. This debt would impede the character's ability to gain experience by cutting it in half for a certain period of time. Thus, anyone who suffered from what Twixt did would pay for it by having their progress cut in half the next time they got the opportunity to play. A full portion of debt could take upwards of 3 hours of nonstop play to be worked off.
Imagine you go play miniature golf. Directly in front of you is a group of 10 children who have no idea what they're doing. You are unable to skip past them, and as is allowed, they refuse to let you pass. Due to this inconvenience, you only get to play 9 holes (or 4, if you're only on a 9-hole course). Would you be frustrated? I sure would be. They didn't break the rules, but they hurt the fun of my outing by specifically robbing me of the time that I had dedicated to accomplishing my goal. It's not much different than traffic, bowling balls getting stuck in the lanes, people talking during a movie, or any other issue that would rob an individual of their free time. The individuals causing your frustration may not be breaking the rules, but they are affecting your enjoyment.
2) Twixt's account of what took place in the PvP zones he visited just plain isn't accurate.
People did chat because many of the players had played together prior to the release of City of Villains (CoH was released in May of 2004 while CoV in October of 2006). Most of us already knew each other. However, that didn't result in a lack of fighting. Many times, Twixt would simply teleport people from battles already in place to his computer-generated death squads. He's presenting the situation as if he was the only one using the zones correctly when, in actuality, he was just the only one manipulating loopholes to allow him to generally be mean to other players. That's the biggest reason why he was despised.
3) Twixt commonly made fun of players he killed.
He did not simply say random hero-supporting things, he oftentimes bragged openly after using his computer-generated helpers to kill someone. Like any other competitive situation, bragging and talking trash will earn people talking back and becoming more upset. He worked to goad individuals into becoming angrier at what he did.
He mentions the forums as a place where people speculated about parts of his life, but he seems to have left out where he posted kill-logs from his time spent in PvP zones. He posted quite frequently on those boards, and he went out of his way to fuel the hate that developed for him. Professional athletes who do such a thing are widely derided by the media and fans. Twixt worked hard to generate hate, he was not simply an innocent victim.
4) Twixt died. A lot.
Twixt perfected his method of generating debt for other players by dying a whole lot along the way. Statements like, "But no one could stay alive long enough to defeat Twixt..." completely misrepresent what happened.
5) Twixt's research plays a role by examining another realm of society, but his results are predictable.
It's not surprising that people get upset when you're mean to them without reason. On an unmarked curb, it's legal for me to park 5 fee
Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The COH developers have addressed previous griefing techniques, such as teleporting other players into locations they could not exit, heroes camping the inside of the villain hospital, etc. However, griefers are inventive, and sometimes find new tactics faster than the developers can program ways to prevent them.
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/727.html
To be fair, however, that title can apply to a great many things in gaming.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Interesting, I performed similar research for my sociology thesis titled "Bunny Hopping : The Forbidden Hop".
You just got troll'd!
I've never played it, but it seems to me that a game where players get upset at some one for playing according to the rules is a bad game. Second if he was truly using an exploit then why didn't the developers patch it?
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
This whole thing interests me greatly. What is it about humanity, that we create societies in which the underlying rules are so often radically different from what is written down?
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
The real issue here isn't that he violating the world's customs, the real problem here is the fact that he able to exploit in that way. The incompotence of game developers these days is astounding. CoH/V and its like deserve their ignomity and failure due to the reluctance of their developers to fix bugs like these.
Also, just because it's possible to PvP with anyone there doesn't mean that people have consented to PvP with you.
Try telling that to some player pirates in EVE.
This isn't "socializing". What we do here on Slashdot is engage in little intellectual arguments about a variety of topics. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes they're inane, often they're impolite, but what they never are is "social".
If you want to live in a society, then you actually then it's probably a good idea to involve living and society. If you want to stop dealing with society for a little while and go kick the asses of super villains with your super powers, that sounds like a good video game.
I help host and run a Soldat server... if you're not familiar with Soldat, it's basically a real-time 2D counterstrike of sorts. Players connect to a server and play with/against other people depending on the exact game mode, etc.
In the soldat server we run, all of the guns are allowed, and there's very little in the way of 'rules' other than not allowing teamkilling/etc.
( For those who suggest that if something isn't allowed, it should just be prevented via game mechanics... Users -can- teamkill (it's part of the game -dynamic- to prevent just spraying like a madman), but there's a built-in penalty system and eventually we'll ban people if they do it systematically. )
Every once in a while, however, something similar to the following happens...
That's all good and well, until...
However, I say 'screw that'. That's not how -we- set up those servers. We set them up to have all the guns available, so people should be allowed to play with all those guns.. their (temporary) agreement to play only with knives is subject to -those- rules. They want to play with knives, that's great, but I have no qualms banning users who then get their panties in a twist when another user does use a gun.
This applies to various other situations as well. I don't count this as 'griefing'.. the player's playing exactly by the server's definition, and those who want to play the game in a different fashion are welcome to do so on a server that caters to that need.
Now I understand that in City of Heroes, you don't really get a choice of servers with different mechanics and such.
However, that leaves me with the descriptions of City of Heroes:
http://www.cityofheroes.com/about_the_game/introduction/game_synopsis_overiew.html
http://www.cityofheroes.com/about_the_game/introduction/game_synopsis.html (hero)
http://www.cityofheroes.com/about_the_game/introduction/you_are_a_villain.html (villain)
All three describe battles between Heroes and Villains and whatnot. Not "Mingle socially and share recipes in our expansive game world".
Seems to me that those who do that are finding themselves on the wrong server.. and given that there's only one server as it were... in the wrong game.
Obviously this Twixt character was a jackass, but the other players should consider the (vulnerable) situation they put themselves in when they interact in the game in a manner different from what the creators, hosters, etc. seem to have envisioned.
Either that, or get ncsoft to change the game description.
This researcher is the ultimate in "gaming" the system and in being a jerk. He gets paid to play a video game all day, where he chooses to exploit in ways that are meant to annoy everyone else. He then publishes on how he's supposedly shocked that people don't love him for this. His own example is much more remarkable than that of the other players--he's very good at showing how stupid this culture is--by actually paying him to be an ejerk.
I can't help it, you insensitive clod!
--
"Dick" Feynman
No, but if you ignore social convention, you shouldn't be surprised when there are negative reactions from society for doing so; especially when your 'rejection of social conventions' has a directly negative effect on other people...
I'm an advocate of 'letter of the law' in games. (And in real life, if you don't mind being an outcast)
I play EVE Online, and I love that aspect of it. As long as you don't break any laws, you're fine. And even if you do, you only take in game penalties, and perhaps the hatred of your peers.
What annoys me is that he seems surprised about being hated. No shit, sherlock. Try going to work in say, a Network Operations Center, and eating a ton of bean burritos every day before work and intentionally fart as much as you can, especially when standing right next to or in front of people. Sure, you're not breaking any laws, but you can gaurentee you'll be hated and an outcast for it.
How do you measure the punishment for something you can't measure the crime in?
the comments to this article are hilarious, most people here have no clue whatsoever what he actually did in game, there are only very few comments who correctly point out that he did not just pvp (instead of standing around and chat) but that he used insta-kill npcs to kill, which actually makes them not his kills anymore. he was using a problematic game design against people without any reason other than to make them angry, it's as if he plays monopoly with friends and at some random point he takes the whole game and throws it at the wall. yea that analogy stinks.
what i would also like to point out is a huge flaw in the whole thing. the rules made up by ncsoft are coded, you don't have the possibility to not obey them, the game doesn't allow it (trying to hack the server doesn't count, it's not done by your character, it's done by you in the real world). these rules do - in the real world - not translate to laws which you have to follow or else..., they translate to laws of nature, physics. there is nothing to stop you killing people in the real world, if you like you can do it, it's just, people might hate you for it. mmorpg don't have law enforcement, there is no way for players to put others in prison because they committed a crime etc (not even in eve, darkfall or any other sandbox), mmorpgs simply do not have laws. the only thing they do have are social contracts, rules to follow if you want to fit into the society. what the author did is like when you walk around in life and call everyone you see an asshat, they won't like you, be an asshole throughout your life and everyone will try to get you out of their life as quickly as possible, they will mark you as an idiot and avoid you even though you only violated social code.
in conclusion this whole study is a huge joke, the author did not even understand how to translate rules from a mmorpg to real life. very sad.
Next week, Myers will head out onto the highway where he will scrupulously drive at exactly 35 mph in the left lane for the entire trip.
"I don't understand why these other drivers don't like that. I'm going under the speed limit, so it's all legal.", he was quoted as saying shortly before being swallowed up by the angry mob.
one of the reasons why there will never be a true Democracy. The elite in every society tells the commoner and new initiate what to think, and for the most part they fall in line.
Except this prof proved he was elite by making the mobiles kill his victims. He tried to dictate like in your example above. The commoners would have none of it. He wasn't an initiate either.
Actually, if you ask the the CS staff, if you play the game and read the beginner's info - yeah, they have. Entering a PvP Zone means you consent to be engaged by anyone anywhere at any when inside the zone. If you want to only PvP against specific people, that's what "City of" has arenas for.
His email is easy enough to find, along with a phone number.
---
I suffered from griefers like you in Everquest who trained me more than once.
You rationalize "If you aren't a member of the tribe, you get whacked with a stick," he said. "I look at social groups with dismay" but I'll give it to you straight.
People didn't like you because you were a Jerk.
You made your point- you cleverly created a hero who couldn't be beat.
Then you proceeded to spend months ruining the game for a lot of people who just wanted to sign on and have fun. In short, you made a lot of people angry and unhappy. You added a lot of hostility to the world that I'm sure got vented on others.
It has nothing to do with "tribes" or "eye color" or anything like that. You were just a major jerk and despised for it. You put your feelings ahead of hundreds of other people. You didn't care at all how many people you made angry- and like most griefers, you probably enjoyed it and got a sick ego thrill out of your "power".
You might not be that way in real life where you are not anonymous.
If it had been my game and you were upsetting that many of my customers- I'd have suspended you or disabled your character's power and then, I'm sure you would have forced me to ban you.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I played the original NWN on AOL in the early '90s, and I encountered a very similar situation. A very cozy social network had arisen of "nice" people who chit-chat roleplayed but did little else. The game itself was limited - a new character could easily max in a day and push through most of the stock content during that time. So, most of us kind folx (I was definitely one) spent their HOURLY fee (yeah, they charged by the hour back then) typing at each other and acting as chaperones for newer players. It was a safe, comfortable, static, and ultimately dull world. The user community was hardly growing. There was no PvP - hard to believe an MMO without any PvP - but it was exclusively enforced by social convention.
That is, until a player named Beelzebub (I can't recall his actual spelling) showed up and turned the universe upside down. Although PvP was mostly unexplored, the game mechanics allowed for PvP, and Beelz was merciless. He didn't talk to you. He was utterly silent and deadly. He'd ambush you, wipe you out in just a few rounds with a selection of spells (cleric/mage was the nerf in that game) specifically geared towards PvP, and then vanish. He wasn't "mean" in the sense that he embarrassed you or targeted you in any way - he was faithfully running a lawful evil character.
The furor that arose from his actions was overwhelming. I was one of the most heated, calling for his banning, rewriting the game mechanics, blah, blah, blah. I was overruled by the "NWN*" players (near-employees who provided technical support and performed in-game magic to fix problems) and Beelz continued on his merry way. Eventually, guilds arose to both oppose and support PvP, more players joined, and a thriving community developed. From stagnation came creativity and a new lease on life for NWN.
I literally hated Beelz at the time, but I look back now and I realize that he was like the Mac's hammer thrown into the huge screen in that famous 1984 commercial. He provided a spark, a new way of thinking about your character and your interaction with the game world. The old way didn't crumble; in fact, the "pacifist" guilds took on new vigor because they could exist as a foil to the PvP-centered guilds. NWN had had a strong community before Beelz, but it favored conformity and predictability. Those are fine and good, but they're not the pillars of an exciting, adventurous, growing world.
When a single player is despised by a large portion of an MMO, it probably means that player is doing something right.
---Jason
As far as I understand it, he involved unwilling participants into his research and never informed them of what he was doing so I suspect they never gave him consent.
If people really wanted to punish this guy for being an ass, it's as easy as reporting him to his chair and asking him why he felt he inflict such grief on unwilling participants. I know most research requires that you consent and that's what bothers me most about his ass-hole antics
Sigs are dangerous coy things
1. Get a phd.
2. Play MMOs
3. If your character becomes hated due to your lossy gaming, CALL IT PART OF YOUR REASEARCH!
4 ????
5. Profit!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
one of the reasons why there will never be a true Democracy.
The true democracy defines its own rules. The initiate is there by invitation. The initiate is there to learn. He can be voted off the island.
Also, "being irritating" in this case involved playing the game the way it was meant to be played. He wasn't doing things that were merely "technically" allowed. He wanted to roleplay as a hero, so he attacked villains.
The summary headline is inaccurate and inflammatory; its author needs to go back to Fark.
what he did is exactly "things that were merely technically allowed" he used insta-kill npcs to grieve. the article suggests he was skilled to no end and able to somehow beat everyone because of his uberness, he wasn't, you actually can't be in any mmorpg to my knowledge. if people want to kill you, they will and he was killed many many times, he just continued to use borderline mechanics to annoy other people, he didn't even profit from doing so. how the fuck did that comment get modded up, seriously...
Wrong. He went to the arena (specifically for fighting), and fought. Anyone who didn't want to fight him could simply not have gone to the arena, an area specifically designated as for PvP fights.
Why he does that research in on-line world, instead of the real world? Really, he would be suprised that people will be angry,insultive, abusive to him if he would pull out shit like:
1: Driving exactly the speed limit on carpool/fast line.
2: Calling police if anyone else went faster than the speed limit.
3: Calling police because he think the woman holding a child's arms is doing it too hard, and needs to have social services called on her.
4: etc, etc,etc...
I wonder how he would feel, if I kept on raising my hand in his class, constantly asking a question about what he just said.
AFTER ALL I HAVE A RIGHT AS A STUDENT TO HAVE PROFESSOR EXPLAIN TO ME ALL THAT IS NEEDED! AND THEN GO TO THE DEAN WHEN HE TELLS ME TO HOLD OFF, or WAIT TILL END OF THE CLASS, to complain that, "IM JUST FOLLOWING THE CLASS RULES!"
on top of it, go to his office hours and spend every minute going over the books reading.
REALLY, I WONDER HOW HE WOULD FEEL ABOUT IT??
So please, stop this naivety. He is acting like an asshole, and faints ignorance on why people dislike him. AND HE GETS PAID FOR IT?? WOW, NEWS AT 8! PEOPLE ACTING LIKE SELF RIGHTEOUS ASSHOLES ARE NOT WELCOME IN COMMUNITIES!!!
He is an asshole, simple and clear.
He claims to have done an experiment, yet from what I can see, he's tried a grand total of ONE behaviour.
Maybe all players treat everyone like they're an asshole, maybe it wasn't the killing itself, but the obnoxious bragging about it that got people riled.
Maybe it was the color of his pants, or the time of year, or maybe he did something outside of the game itself to bring it on.
And no statement from the developers of the game that what he was doing was how they "intended" the game to be played.
How can he possibly draw valid conclusions from this?
Breaking Social conventions is insulting, it is the very root of the issue.
It is an interesting social experiment. A Guy comes in, plays by the laws, but not by the social conventions. Of course he gets people pissed off.
Take it from me, if you visit a new culture, people may be forgiving if you break a few laws...but if you break a taboo they'll try and kill you.
First, let me say that there's much to be said for conducting research in a novel setting like in a MMO. As a researcher I have conducted some work in First Person Shooters and on online forums for a specific game (which will remain nameless) which dealt with similar issues of social norm creation and violation (albeit my research was conducted passively and through observation). There are a variety of things that can be learned about social interactions and processes by which individuals create new norms and how individuals construct proper conduct in an environment where essentially the only hard rules are in the code. It's really quite fascinating.
Second, let me say that I don't know everything about the situation in terms of the exact means he conducted his research, and what permissions he had, and how, if at all, he obtained consent (although I'll assume he didn't given the reactions he received).
That all said, I find this research to be an ethical breach. While there is nothing inherently wrong with testing social structures to see reactions, one of the things we agree to in conducting human subjects research is not to engage in harming our research subjects. For example, from the NiH website:
"Two general rules have been formulated as complementary expressions of beneficent actions in this sense: (1) do not harm and (2) maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms. "
This researcher may have started out with the the best of intentions, but as is clear to anyone with experience in CoH/V, his behavior was harmful to his research subjects in several ways:
1. He was taking time from his subjects without consent (Implicit as that consent may be in the PvP area, he knew it was not the explicit social norm NOT to fight) and did so in a way that was most onerous to the subjects. Often probably quite a bit of time from exp debt.
2. He was disrupting the lives and entertainment of others and purposely meddling in others interpersonal affairs.
3. He obviously purposely distressed his research subjects, going to far as to purposely taunt and anger individuals.
In any scenario when you are performing research that may injure your subjects that has to be weighed against the potential benefits. What exactly were the benefits here? His research subjects lost time, some probably felt emotional distress, were subjected without consent, and in the end get nothing. To that point, his transgressions weren't merely transitory, he obvious engaged in enough harmful behavior over a long enough period of time to provoke a serious response from a huge number of players.
Moreover, risks to subjects must be weighed against alternative means of finding out the answer to the research question. If there is a less onerous means of answering the question that will provide the same data, that should be the course of action. As a self-admitted experienced player, he knew the social convention of the area. He knew that violating the social convention was bound to provoke a reaction. There were alternative means (observation, survey, reading forums, etc), all of which could have provided the same data. Plus, it's not as if this research setting is altogether novel or completely unexplored to the point where that would justify his means.
On the other hand, for all of the grief he's caused he's getting a publication out of it and something to add to his vitae.
Thus he harmed a bunch of individuals for his own person gain. That is the essence of the kind of ethical breach that human subjects rules are designed to prevent.
No, you're wrong.
He used the abilities his character had to inflict maximum damage on his characters enemies. Good play, nothing else.
The other freaking morons that would sit around in a full on pkill zone chatting up buddies on the other side and letting them farm in peace were the ones exploiting flaws in game mechanics to ruin the game.
I havent played this particular game, but I have certainly seen that type ruin more than one game before.
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I have no idea what this story is about.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
i actually played cox and people don't just stand around and chat in pvp, it's a ridiculous statement that is simply there to justify what he did, there are even cooperation zones where you can go to meet villains and chat with them, so if you wanna chat, you will go there. yes he used abilities to damage his enemies in the most devastating manner, but he did so with no reason, he did not get any points for it, as he did not actually kill them (the npcs did), in terms of pvp he didn't do shit, he just forced players to loose in pve. and again, chatting is not ruining cox pvp since there are fights all the time, chatting over anything other than broadcast and tell is not the norm at any rate.
He sure doesn't seem to know an awful lot. Anonymity alone is enough to bring out more aggression than usual on the internet. These people that hated him aren't evil, or wrong. He was basically spitting in everyone's face and disregarding common social standards and he expected people to take it lightly?
what did you really expect?
It's a crappy MMO full of people who make up the rules as they go, ass-tards who run "supergroups" that are not just for having fun playing but for conducting gestapo-like inquisitions, and people who will run around trying to keep you from ever finding a group if they find out that your political persuasion is not the exact same as theirs.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. The only thing that surprises me is that someone published this "research" and thinks it means something.
So basically, the guy was Borat?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Huh? Because the game mechanics didnt give him XP that delegitimises his acts? Hardly. He played a hero, removing villains was his goal, not racking up points in a database somewhere!
According to TFA, there are arenas for duels, and a full pvp area as well. Despite this, the custom has evolved that both sides use the full PVP area for farming and duelling, and no true pvp takes place (set duels are not the same thing.) No? Because if that's not accurate then one must wonder why Twixt became so hated, if everyone else was doing the same thing he was...
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I'd say that you had better tread carefully when comparing democracy to an online RPG. The researcher did no hacking, and only broke the "cultural" rules. A group of Quake players may have house rules against camping or spawn-killing, but the real "rules" are the only the ones put into place by the designers/developers, not the players, and so-called "spoken" rules don't really matter without modifications or admins to enforce them within the game.
I'm not saying I think your conclusion is incorrect, I just think it's a funny context to draw it from. So in this case, if the high level players are the cultural elite then what does that make the devs?
What's the value of information that you don't know?
It sounds to me like they made every attempt possible to invite him into the tribe, and yet he responded by consistently pissing on the campfire.
I dunno, ask someone who has sat on a jury for a personal lawsuit.
He played a hero, removing villains was his goal, not racking up points in a database somewhere!
I'm so glad you don't write comic books. Your heroes would suck.
Huh? Because the game mechanics didnt give him XP that delegitimises his acts? Hardly. He played a hero, removing villains was his goal, not racking up points in a database somewhere!
so he did something in a game that didn't reward him in any way, the only thing it did was annoy other players. yes it's possible to do, but it makes no sense from his point of view other than to piss everyone off, so how did he actually play the game now? it's like playing ping-pong and hitting every ball in your opponents eye, doesn't get you any points, while the enemy can still gain points while starting to hate you to death, because you're simply being an asshole.
According to TFA, there are arenas for duels, and a full pvp area as well. Despite this, the custom has evolved that both sides use the full PVP area for farming and duelling, and no true pvp takes place (set duels are not the same thing.) No? Because if that's not accurate then one must wonder why Twixt became so hated, if everyone else was doing the same thing he was...
TFA is simply wrong, the arenas are used for fighting, but the pvp zones are too. is i just told you, there are cooperation zones where you can team up with the other fraction, there is no reason to sit around a fire and tell stories in a pvp area, and people don't. duelling is only rarely happening, there are possibilities that people broadcast about dueling someone who just killed them in normal pvp, but if those happen, there is a good chance that someone else will just attack anyway.
twixt became hated because he did not participate in the pvp setting that was set up, he did not go for pvp reputation by actually killing other players himself, but killed people off in pve battles with insta-kill bots, leading to pve debt. other people did actually fight each other without trying to grieve, so no, they did not do the same thing.
btw. cox is mainly a pve game, my guess would be that around 95% of cox players never step into a pvp area.
In most states, that's terroristic threat. In Texas, that can you 2 to 20. Imagine the typical geek in his prison cell, talking to his new cellmate with all his tattoos.
"So what you do?"
"I threatened to kill a guy."
"Oh yeah? Where at?"
"In an MMO."
"Huh?"
"It's an online world where we play comic book characters...."
(Standing up, taking shirt off, smiling.) "Oh yeah? You like to pretend you're wearing tight little spandex costumes? Well I like to play make believe too....."
Guard walks by, observes the spectacle, and notes, "Ya'll don't make too big of a mess in there...."
MMO players are all potential mass murderers and terrorists!
All computer games must be prohibited so people can go back and watch something as peaceful as CNN and live happily ever after.
no sig
You can't put everything in the rules. It's very easy to be an annoying retard and bother other people while following all the rules of whatever game you are playing, unless the rules are so subjective as to allow for punishment of any behavior.
He was not "playing the game the way it was meant to be played", or he would've been getting credit for his kills. He was abusing game mechanics for no actual purpose but to annoy the crap out of people. Think of him as a guy who walks into a bar and dumps a bottle of beer on someone's head, then runs away. Repeatedly. Then goes back into the bar and mocks the dude he just dumped beer on. In real life, he's not going to get death threats, he's going to get beaten up. If he does it hundreds of times, he's eventually going to run into a beating he can't survive.
"Must we all conform to social convention?"
only if you want to be one of the cool kids who everybody gets along with. independant thinkers should be ridiculed for their non-conformity if the social convention where you are is to fart during a meal as a sign of approval of the meal you'd better stress that rectum into belching out some noxious gasses...
in all seriousness though... fuck socialism. A democratic society is one where you have freedom... this guy went into an online game and did what the game was designed for... heroes fighting villains, he broke no rules, he just pissed off a bunch of idiots that thought "heroes vs villians, that sounds like an interesting place to hang out and chat about shit"...
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
Congrats! Now if you ever actually played basketball competitively you'd know that almost any good team employs the full court press, but does so selectively. That's because it is not hard to beat with a bit of good coaching, particularly if the pressing team is relying more on effort than skill.
Gladwell did what he always does, which is blow an interesting story way out of proportion.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Reminds me of a scene from the television series "Shaka Zulu" where a young Shaka eagerly looks forward to proving himself in battle but instead observes a "battle" where the opponents simply dress up, dance, and hurl insults at each other to determine the winner. This method of warfare and Shaka's subsequent shakeup seems to be backed up by WikiPedia:
Not that this has any bearing on the subject at hand but interesting none the less. Or does it?
Reading this article, it seemed utterly bizarre to me that players on one faction would expect players to pull their punches when fighting players from the opposing faction. Then occured to me: that's because I'm a World of Warcraft Player: there's more emnity between our factions because players on each side have no way of communicating with each other! Makes me wonder to what extent the unspoken customs are an unexpected result of game design choices.
So this professor spent a long time being a jerk, and was surprised to find out that people didn't like it?
Me thinks, and this is without ever playing the MMO in question, that in killing villains, the doctor was affecting other players. Presumably, their only recourse was to go after him, with what sounds like varied success. In my eyes, he was being ostracized and criticized not because he was being different, as the article states, but very much because he was affecting game play and online activities of other people. Just because he was following the rules as set by the MMO does not somehow, in my eyes, give him a right to disregard the customs and traditions as set by players. An MMO, at least, means little without the community behind it and thus, to some extent, the community becomes the voice and law where none is set forth by the developers.
In that sense, I can't imagine what kind of a reaction he might have otherwise expected. Surely, as a professor who studies video games, he must also know a little about human nature. it boggles the mind that he might've genuinely believed that so long as game rules were followed, no one would fault him for being a troll.
Just a thought.
"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself." ~ Jack Gurney
Umm no. It's a game of heros vs villains. He was playing heros vs villains. It makes total sense, and the OOC factors you keep bringing up like they mean something are just that - OOC. Utterly meaningless here.
And I get the feeling trying to explain this to you will be something like trying to explain the colour blue to someone who was blind from birth. :(
You are playing a database. Hence your fixation on points, and repeatedly raising the fact that the game 'didnt reward' what he was doing. In an RPG you dont take actions to curry rewards, at least not primarily. You take actions because of IC motivations. Your character knows nothing about points or score!
And bottom line, if you are playing the game you should be playing it because you enjoy it.
If you dont like the game, ffs find another game instead of ruining it for the people that are actually playing it and enjoying it. Which is clearly what the majority of COH players have done - taken over a game they didnt like and ruined it for anyone that actually want to play.
Oh well, after reading TFA I am greatful to the author for the warning - it's a game I might have otherwise wasted time on.
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You said "Those nasty natives! How dare they try to keep you down!" but it sounds to me as if he had a lot of them "down", knocked out flat down, and their reactions were those of the impotent and frustrated. They should have brought on a better, stronger, more skilled player to get the better of him mano-a-mano, and not with gangin g up on he or threatening to kill him. That's dumb. That might have gotten the one who blew him away a lot of respect, from the researcher himself even, and even chilled the offending researcher out by taking him down a peg or two. That usually works. If you cannot kill them with kindness, or facts? Kick their ass, 1 on 1. It works in the street, and all the way into cyberspace out here too.
In an RPG you dont take actions to curry rewards, at least not primarily. You take actions because of IC motivations. Your character knows nothing about points or score!
you want to tell me that the majority of mmorpg players are not playing for rewards? it's obvious that you can't mean that, because it's an absolutely ridiculous claim. the whole reason behind the addiction to mmorpgs are rewards, there is also the social part, but the actual roleplaying is so incredibly miniscule, you need to try very hard to find it, even on most rp servers. and afaik he played on freedom (not sure, didn't read the study itself) which is not an rp server. btw, every mmorpg community would react the exact same way to this kind of grieving, you won't find a single one where people will like you for training npcs on them or port them into them.
anyway, this discussion obviously makes no sense, so this is my last post.
There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt
There was in Michigan, for over a hundred years. Fortunately, the Supreme Court struck it down.
The speed of time is one second per second.
is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt, and I would not want to live in a place that had such a law
Um, actually, in most parts of the planet there are laws such as "use offensive language" that are designed to prevent you from doing just that. Mind you, they're usually only enforced if and when people swear at actual police officers (there's a concept known as the "trifecta" in my jurisdiction - use offensive language, assault police and resist arrest - most people who get charged with one seem to end up being charged with all three).
just because a game developer didnt prevent something doesnt mean that its within the rules. the game developer doesnt play that game. even if s/he/they do, they constitute a near zero percentage of the game's players.
But... seriously. Players sending robots to do fighting and turning it into X-Men and Pokemon have a mind-wrenching love child?
I'd waste every last one of those slackers that I could too.
Oh - and the result of players actually playing the game hard-core over time to get even/survive? Beautiful.
He did something that people hated. They tried to handle it with in-game mechanics, but that failed. They they moved on to using social pressure.
This isn't anything novel. This isn't anything new. This is exactly how human civilization has worked for the last twenty thousand years: 1) Notice something is a problem. 2) Try to handle it within the rules (call the police, hit it with your saber-tooth-killin' club, whatever). 3) If (2) fails, then move on to social ostracism.
If this isn't the lesson that the professor learned, then he's a total imbecile.
Time someone teaches these 'Heroes' what villainy is all about!
Wait'll they get a load of me.
No. I do not have sufficient data to generalise about that expansive a group. I would say that in my experience most "MMORPG Players" arent actually playing an RPG, MMO or otherwise. They should discover IRC and save some money.
Which is in no wise analogous behaviour to what he was doing, in the first place (the anti-twixt folks were the griefers, you should RTFA,) and in the second, no, not every one of these "communities" react the same way. When I played EQ (race war server) the equivelant behaviour was called "cross-teaming."
It's not a perfect parallel but it's pretty close. Like the vocal griefers this guy ran across, cross-teamers ruined the game by approaching it as a database game instead of an MMORPG, and explicitly working with the players that were supposed to be their mortal enemies. In that game, the whole world (on the proper server) was pretty much pvp, with racial teams which were pretty balanced and fair. The teams were human, short, elf, and dark IIRC, and it was supposed to be constant war against all. First the humans, shorts, and elves all basically left each other alone, so instead of 4 vs 4 it became effectively 3 vs 1. Fine, team dark rocked, we could take that. Then our enemies started creating dark characters too. So we would be running a zone and suddenly a party of mixed lighties attacks, fine, we can counter. We almost get one of them dead, and suddenly their dark-team cleric pops up and starts healing them. And we cant hit her, she's on our team.
Now for some time, in contrast to the COH story here, it was the use of OOC tactics that the majority of the players decried, and the folks actually trying to play the game didnt get ostracised. At first, at least, it worked the other way around.
So bug reports were filed and Sony promised to fix it in code. Months went by. No code fix appeared. As time went on more and more people decided 'if you cant beat em join em' and slowly, the cultural code that said we were here to play rather than exploit bugs was eroded, and the people actually playing the game properly DID become marginalised. By the time Sony finally admitted they werent going to fix the bug, the majority of the server was cross-teaming (or had already quit in disgust because of it.)
The end result may be similar but the path to get there was very different.
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FFS he wasnt griefing, and he wasnt beating the programmers. He was petitioned against repeatedly and it was ruled repeatedly that he wasnt doing anything wrong.
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Most if not all player which are REALLY roleplayer (as in pen and paper) rarely gank on each other. This is a breaking experience. What they do is they form groups which are friendly to each member. If they did not the group would implode and people go separate ways. The same happens in computer RPG where roleplayer come and "roleplay". The roleplay IS the goal, the immersing in a foreign world in a group and have fun together. On the other hand those which do PVP and say they roleplay are in reality covering their competition streak with a mantel of roleplaying. The roleplay IS NOT the goal. The PVP is. At least that has been my experience of all "roleplayer" doing pvp. The roleplay was only ever a tool to enhance their enjoyment of the pvp. There might be a few to which the pvp is enhancing the thrill of the roleplay by adding external danger, but in my (anecdotial) experience those must be a rarety as I never met one.
In conclusion people lament you can't roleplay in modern rpg because they are limited in how you can SHOW your role to player and how they are limited in the action you can do. The lament have mostly nothing to do with PVP ever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Dr. Myers' interpretations, as reported here, seem to me quite a bit naive.
I am reminded of tales of soldiers in the trenches, during WWI, from both sides, pausing hostilities during Christmas, to work together briefly, share food and drink.
Certainly, the "rules" were that they should be shooting each other. Thank G-d-- no social situation works that way.
Mr. Myers seems to think that the "rules" written by the creators of the system are the "work of God" which everyone should and must follow, and there is something wrong when they don't.
So much for fascism. There is nothing medieval or wrong when actual humans, acting together in a social situation, choose to create their own understandings and rules-- and shun someone who ignores this.
Rather, there is much to be celebrated.
Myers-- isn't that an Irish surname? I would hope for a better analysis of how any why participants rejected his behavior.
That and that "tyranny of the majority" thing.
If the PvP were balanced, fun, interesting, required skill or coordination, had meaningful rewards, and had been introduced when the game wasn't already over 2 years old with an extremely strongly established PVE-only community, and perhaps if there was an area of friendly cooperation between heroes and villains to compete with this area, and if there were not PvE incentives within the PvP zone, then the game probably would not have this problem of a PvP zone not being used for PvP.
When the most effective way of killing players is teleporting them in front of NPC's, you know there is something severely flawed with the game's combat mechanics. It's not the researcher's fault, and to a lesser extent it's only partially the community's fault. The community has simply found that PvP is not fun, or balanced, or rewarding, and therefore refused to participate. Which is primarily the fault of the designers. But instead of harassing the players who actually try to play the game as intended, they should petition the designers to modify the game to either make the PvP rewarding, balanced, and fun, or to change the rules of the zone to avoid the so-called "griefing" this research was able to perform. Instead of a PvP zone, it could be a "hero and villain cooperation zone". It sounds facetious, but it's not that uncommon in comic books for heroes and villains to cooperate against "the greater threat".
In the end, it comes down to the gameplay being simply broken, either in one direction (no incentive to pvp) or the other (too easy to subject players to nonconsensual pvp).
Missed the point. The problem is not laws matching social customs, rather it is the mindless following of laws, and the assumed inherent morality of doing so, even when they violate social customs of interaction. To be clear, we're not talking about just not following social customs, but directly interfering in others actions.
People don't like assholes, film at 11...
...so I guess now there's going to be “PTFG”.
The ‘P’ stands for “play”, and if you can't figure out the rest, what are you doing here?
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
Except that WoW developers force the player base to do things all the time, and it's the most popular MMO on earth. The problem is when developers force players to do things that are *not fun*, not when developers force players to do things in general. The obvious deduction taken from this article is that CoH/CoV PvP is *not fun*. But rather than attempt to overhaul it and make it fun, the developers have left the playerbase to make their own game of it, to the detriment of those who would at least like to try the game that it was originally meant to be.
I bet if they overhauled the PvP system to be fun, then forced the people to PvP in PvP zones instead of standing around fighting NPC's or chatting, then they'd actually see a net increase in the game's population, rather than a decrease, because they would be adding an element to the game that did not already exist (fun PvP), without really removing anything (the ability to chat and stand around doing nothing).
if it came up and bit you on the ass.
So he's discovered the Phelps effect works in video games? That if you don't technically break a rule, but are a total jackass people don't like you. Gee. Who ever could have guess... um... everybody.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Yes, actually, he was doing things that were "technically" allowed.
HOWEVER, if you read his blog about why he left CoH/CoV in November of last year, he cited "upcoming changes" made by the developers.
Also, when this person came up against someone built to withstand or outright negate his strategy, he'd leave the zone.
Moreover, he trash-talked the whole while, saying a lot more than merely "heroes win".
This was Issue 13, which included a MASSIVE PVP revamp. After the revamp, strategies like his became MUCH less workable.
Also, he was focusing on one mechanic "killing other players", and ignoring others. Such as advancement of character level, the reward system, or the fact that incurring debt on a non-maxed character who dies is essentially robbing them of time played.
It was players like this that made PVP in CoH/CoV so unpopular in the first place.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The Professor also has some awesome poetry sk1llz
from http://www.masscomm.loyno.edu/~dmyers/F99%20classes/City%20of%20Heroes%20Official%20Forums_TwixtThread.htm
Who dis Neeto wats his name?
Does he even play the game?
Does he have a dom or not?
Does he scratch yur palm a lot?
Does he cry and baitch and moan
When Twixt and heroes win the zone?
Romper bomper stomper boo
Neeto keeno icky poo.
There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt
That's what "Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress" is for.
You would say that, you cunt!
Trying to expose someone's identity and falsely accusing them of being a sex offender is WAY outside the rules.
Those are socially founded rules not in game rules, does not apply if following his example.
Is there really a difference between virtual world and real cultures. Should not the same ethics apply when studying either?
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
The coded rules of the game are analogous to the rules of physics in real life. The social conventions are a layer on top of those rules created by the players. While I can't break the laws of physics I can certainly break the laws of man, and I'll pay the consequences if I do.
So, if he doesn't break the laws of the game by violating the TOS (or game physics or whatever), then he played by the rules. But if he breaks the laws of man, he was still playing by the rules? He was playing within the laws of the universe created by the developers. He was playing outside the "rules" imposed on the players by themselves. He broke the laws (man-rules). That's what you said, and I agree. Though your tone indicated that you think that breaking the laws of man is still not breaking the rules, and I'll leave that to a different discussion.
Learn to love Alaska
I think the issue is in some people seeing it as a separate world/community and some seeing it as a game within our own real world/community.
This researcher was being a complete asshole, harassing people and ruining the game for easily dozens of people, in front of hundreds of others. How is that different than a guy who goes down to a park and starts knocking over people's chess boards? Revealing the end of movies outside of a theater, maybe going inside and shouting and being an ass during the movie? All the while, he's trash talking the people he's harrassing.
In the real world, people like that get the shit beat out of them (that is, something illegal being done to them for their [questionably] legal acts) and nobody would be at all surprised. Well, he's in THE REAL WORLD. Just because he's sitting in front of a computer doesn't mean he's in some magical place that is no longer reality. He's surprised at -threats-?
This research is absolutely useless, reveals nothing at all, and was an excuse for him to be an asshole while playing his favorite video game. This guy shouldn't even have a job, much less a degree.
Yes you can. There were bunches of CS mods which, if you 'camped' an area, would do anything from shining a bright light on you / make you emit a beeping noise, to physically launching you through the air.
Team Fortress 2 is an excellent example of coding the douchyness out of a game. Makes it less fun to be douchebag though :(
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Well, as someone who's been on MUDs long before MMOs, and briefly even tried his hand at creating content on one, I can at least say this: I had thought I've heard every excuse before. There was always a segment (the ones Bartle called "killers") who'd whine at length that if you don't let them repeatedly gank newbies:
A. you're infringing upon their freedom of speech. (Never mind that that ammendment is about congress, not about their behaviour on someone else's private property.)
B. ... and their dad is a lawyer and will sue you for it. (Never did somehow.)
C. ... and that's the road to fascism and slavery. (Yeah, right.)
D. You're making roleplaying impossible. (Apparently being an out-of-character griefer is the only possible role to play.)
E. You're depriving those newbies of _fun_. They may not know it, but they secretly _want_ to be ganked repeatedly and otherwise harrassed. If you let them opt out of that instead of being thrown to the wolves from the first minute, they'll all get bored and leave! (I think Everquest 1 disproved that one quite nicely.)
F. Somehow a failure of a human being, along with everyone else who even thinks of being, you know, social in a massively multiplayer game.
And, umm, that's about it off the top of my head.
The research one is actually kind of new. Of course, this "researcher" didn't invent it, but still, it's kinda refreshing to see the douchebags have broadened their repertoire a little. They were starting to sound like a broken record.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Who would have believed him if he had claimed, before submitting documented evidence, that on-line players would actually (a) get so upset in-game and (b) let it get to their collective heads and (c) blissfully ignore the way the game is set up?
Someone who plays roleplaying games on a regular basis probably would, but not the world at large and probably not social scientists either. It's the merit of his research that he exposed this strong impact of games on players' emotions.
It's also much more informative than anecdotal stories about this-or-that Chinese player killing another player for flogging his borrowed magical sword because it's systematic, controlled, and documented.
I'm afraid it also provides solid evidence that there may be valid grounds for *legislating* certain aspects of on-line gaming simply because these games have such an emotional impact. I'm not saying that legislation *must* be enacted, merely that online games aren't just ... well ... kidd's stuff. It also proves that grown-ups are a *lot* more childish than one might assume at first glance.
I agree with the parent: this is what RPGs are for.
On the other hand, the fact is that almost no one actually role plays in an RPG. Instead, the games become social platforms with a little entertainment on the side.
Most people who genuinely want to role play have given up on public online games. There are private online games, and there is always the really old-fashioned idea of sitting around a table together.
"Professor shocked that people act like people!"
:(
I'm amazed that this passed peer review, amazed it got attention online and even more amazed I'm commenting on it myself
I guess it's just troll-bait from an professional flamer...
-- Gaxx
Umm no. It's a game of heros vs villains. He was playing heros vs villains. It makes total sense, and the OOC factors you keep bringing up like they mean something are just that - OOC. Utterly meaningless here.
Ok, lets say that he was roleplaying, it's hardly heroic to teleport someone in front of npc:s, to let them do the work for you. Besides, the robots in question were not intended to be used in that manner. They are there to protect people from spawn campers. A practise I would prefer calling exploiting.
It's not that the robots where hard to beat. They were impossible to beat, but they were not there for an offensive purpose but a defensive.
If you dont like the game, ffs find another game instead of ruining it for the people that are actually playing it and enjoying it. Which is clearly what the majority of COH players have done - taken over a game they didnt like and ruined it for anyone that actually want to play.
Oh well, after reading TFA I am greatful to the author for the warning - it's a game I might have otherwise wasted time on.
I don't doubt that you have lot of experience from other mmo:s but it's easy to tell that you don't know about the history of CoH.
When it first came out there wasn't any arena, there wasn't any pvp at all.
People who played it did so because they liked the setting and because they liked PvE.
When Cryptic introduced PvP in the form of the Arena it was met generally with a yawn. They had some traffic in the beginning but has since then been mostly deserted.
The same thing happened when they introduced the PvP-zones.
You are probably right in that CoH would only be a waste of time for you, but the people who are playing it and who do like it have not simply "taken over a game". They where already playing it when things got added they weren't interested of. It's a bit like adding a meat sandwich to the menu of a vegan restaurant. Sure, some who aren't hardcore vegans or just passing by might like it and it but most of the clientele won't be interrested.
"This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (or STFU, for you un-hip people)."
I play exactly like that guy. Didn't realize there was some sort of touchy feely high school club going on in the game. I just wanted to compete with other gamers in an area that appeared designed for just that. Now it explains why half the people start foaming at the mouth when I try and play a simple game.
There millions of chat rooms online, go there if you just want to talk.
"Using obscene language in the gameâ(TM)s broadcast channels, for instance, was clearly against the gameâ(TM)s EULA and was both a petition-able and actionable offense, regardless of any individual playerâ(TM)s desires or preferences. Droning, on the other hand, was equally clearly an acceptable tactic as determined both by the game design and as confirmed by lack of moderator intervention on any petitionerâ(TM)s behalf." Would suggest that the product vendor was fine with the tactics employed.
"In fact, fairly often, players with multiple accounts (controlling both heroes and villains) would invite Twixt into hero teams that were then used to aid surreptitious villain activities against him. This kind of collusion and increasingly hostile environment forced Twixt to operate largely independently and, over time, habitually refuse team invitations." would suggest that numerous players were behaving like wankers and not playing in the so called 'spirit' of the game (which would vary between player to player).
"There were some other players â" not many â" who, after observing Twixtâ(TM)s success in the zone, copied his tactics and attitude. But, in all cases, this copycat play had the support of some larger social group that also opposed, for various reasons, conventional and socially sanctioned behavior." would suggest that just like any culture people have different ideas on what is and is not allowed. The professor was not alone in his actions and some players support his method of play.
So in short the professor played within the rules defined by the owner of the product, inline with how the owner intended the product to be played (Player VERSUS Player) and had various other players support his actions.... while other people cried great big tears of furstration at their pathetic real lives... oops... i mean having their arses handed to them in a make believe far away land.
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
I see a ton of analogies here, but none about cars! WTF?
"Don't be a dick" can't be coded into law, but it's still good advice."
Shame "illegal copyright infringement" isn't codified the same way.
" It wasn't so I could live in a society, but so I could have super powers, choose a side, and then run around kicking the asses of people on the opposing side with said super powers. "
The problem is when the other side are human players what happens to their avatar directly effects tehir psychology. Rage quitting and people getting mad at losing or dying is very common in video games. Mature sportsen make up a minority of any game playing population, but most people get enraged when they lose.
Even top playeers who are working on subdueing their anger when they lose because they recognize it is a flaw in themselves.
This is why PvE is so popular, killing ememies who don't have humans behind them to get angry and offended makes the fantasy of killing the villains much more palatable.
You have to remember psychologically people are emotionally / mentally invested in their avatars. Most people are not nerdy enough or intelligent enough to seperate their psyche from what happens to them in game.
Bad summary, misses important facts and even manipulates some resulted in your +5 insightful AC message.
Ever considered Slashdot being the number 1 troll of all times? ;)
Every gaming community evolves its modes of accepted behaviour beyond a mere "this is what the game allows". Forget that what he did was "legal" in game terms; his offence was to fail to recognise that he was joining a community and therefore to repeatedly behave in a way that spoiled the enjoyment of the game for other players. If he can't see that and doesn't understand why he should therefore have found himself held in contempt, then (professor or not) he isn't sufficiently dispassionate for his research to be of value.
fuck it, i have to post again, your post is just ridiculous.
first off, a griever is someone who causes grieve by interrupting gameplay in an unintended way, griever != whiner, please at least get your mmorpg slang right.
i have played eq, and cross teaming has absolutely nothing to do with this, you're not able to team up with anyone of the opposite faction in cox (only in cooperation zones, but we're talking pvp areas here), you can't heal them etc. i am repeating myself, people in those zones are playing as intended, they are pvping, they are fighting each other with some ooc text in between. twixt is essentially doing what fansy did in eq1, are you getting it now?
The drones in the hero safe zone are effectively invincible, and instantly kill any villain that comes close or is teleported close. Twixt's entire strategy was to exploit their presence.
While teleporting villains to the drones might have been within the rules, it was not sanctioned by the developers.
You can tell because it did not give him any kind of rewards. Developers tend to put rewards on things they want players to do, and it's a good way to determine how a game is intended to be played - the spirit, rather than the letter of the law.
TPing to the drones gives no XP. No cash. No rep. No items. No badges, bounty... NOTHING. He may have teleported them, but the drone carried out the kill. For all the hours he did this, he gained literally nothing. All he did was piss off people, and he knew this.
Griefer.
GOD?
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
Actually, the reason that pure democracies don't work is kind of the opposite: Groups of people (the majority, not the "elite") end up voting themselves money at the expense of the minority. Happens every time. The "elite" don't stand a chance in a pure democracy. But it doesn't work any better than an oligarchy, anyway. They both suck.
so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
So, why bother logging on then?
Since your stuck on the RP aspect of the game. WTF kind of *hero* was he? Last I checked a hero doesn't go around murdering everyone he can get ahold of. Sounds more like a sociopathic villian than a hero. Your point would at least have some merit if that's what he played. But he didn't, he played a "good guy" and acted like a douchebag both in character and out of character.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
the anti-twixt folks were the griefers, you should RTFA
I did read the article. Some people used out of game methods to get back at him since his character was too powerful in game. Since your stuck in "RP is All" mode isn't it common practice that the villians would resort to defaming a 'hero' if they can't beat them? In any case, he reaped what he sowed, nothing more, nothing less. Role playing as a blood thirsty 'hero' doesn't absolve him of being an ass.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
"You (and the authors of half the comments I've read so far...) must not have read the article. They went beyond attacking or taunting him in the game. Trying to expose someone's identity and falsely accusing them of being a sex offender is WAY outside the rules."
Huh?
Please show me where the rules state explicitly that these cannot be done?
Heck, how many times has Peter Parker been accused of wrongdoing and been thrown to the wolves for it?
Since this is a Heroes/Villains MMORPG and he's playing the Hero, he should EXPECT it. The others are merely doing what happens in all hero comics.
And the rules don't say "you cannot expose someone's identity" or "you cannot accuse someone of being a sex offender".
So it was within the rules AND within the canon.
You say that like you think it is a terrible thing. Democracy isn't an ideal, it is a compromise (it compromises things like freedom, which is an ideal (too bad it isn't workable as a principle)).
If some system other than a pure direct democracy results in people having more freedom, it's better than a direct democracy. (Quibble away, but measuring 'freedom' probably includes things like not getting murdered, so try to make it interesting)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
On the net, laws and rules of societies can again work like they were intended to work!
See, I thought about the reasons behind laws and all, and in fact, everything can be disputed. There is no absolute right and wrong. (You can fight that truth, but you can't hide from it.)
Which means that nobody in per se "wrong", and right and wrong is a relative thing. (Like pretty much anything in this universe.)
This means that the only legitimate and morally acceptable "punishment", is separation. E.g. trough the bigger group expel the smaller one. Which makes the smaller group outcasts, if you want.
Of course this requires a space to expel them to. (Or two spaces to put them both in, in more fair words.)
Unfortunately, in reality, space is limited. So we put them in jail (Which is pretty much like expelling with pardoning after a time.), or punish them (which is only right from the punisher's perspective, and therefore does not make the punished "better" but usually "worse". [Again, from the punisher's p.o.v.])
But in virtuality, there is infinite space. So we can alway just separate them. Moderation on Slashdot is also a form of this. Just that there is one main "stream" that defines Slashdot, and everything else falls off the sides.
And that is why and how the net works. Sure we have to put up with trolls. But we get total freedom of being ourselves in exchange. I think this is very very worth it.
We should find a way, to make this work in reality, with its limited space, too.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's right. Now, please walk this way.
Google "Everquest Fansy Go Go Good Team" ... this guy is at best unoriginal, at worst really needs to get a life!
Back when I was into PC games (and especially Quake and Quake II) I ran "Quake Christmas Carols" on my web site every December, and one concerned the campers everyone loathes:
Free Martian Whores!
If you've got an entire map to play in and can't defeat a guy who's stuck in one spot you suck at the game.
This is the lowest form of 'cheating'. If you'll notice, it's also shared by players who have barely learned to move.
Actually, "Don't be a dick" is a fairly accurate way of paraphrasing every law ever written.
I notice a lot of people talking about consenting to PvP but look at this guy's tactics.
I don't think the issue is that he's fighting people but that he's not fighting them fairly.
He's teleporting enemies in front of the game's automated defense npcs so they kill the enemy, not him.
That's like when a kid will start a fight then run behind an adult, claiming the other kid started it.
As a person who PvP's on some MMO's (to the point of having played on PvP servers for the majority of my MMO experiences), it's infuriating when someone will exploit a game mechanic to kill you rather than their character's own skills.
In some games, this kind of behavior can get your account suspended.
"A university professor was killed today in Texas after a three month experiment ended abruptly. He was visiting every state capitol and burning American flags in front of them."
"A university professor was killed today in Boston after a three month experiment ended abruptly. He was visiting every major U.S. city and driving the speed limit in the left lane."
"A university professor was killed today in Harlem after a three month experiment ended abruptly. He was visiting urban slums wearing nothing but a speedo and a sandwich board that read, 'I HATE N*****S'."
"A deranged homeless man was killed today in Coppenhagen. He was posing as a university professor performing three-month experiments, acting like a total douchebag. A group of actual university professors screamed at him that he was giving them all a bad name, and then they killed him."
Education is the silver bullet.
City of heroes originally was just city of heroes. A few years later they added a city of villians and allowed for PVP. The game wasn't totally redesigned.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
"Corporal would you open this book up to the part that says that where the mess hall is?"
"Well, Lt Kaffee, that's not in the book either, sir."
"You mean to say the entire time you've been at Gitmo you've never had a meal?"
"No sir, three squares a day, sir."
"I don't understand. How could you know where the mess hall is if it's not in this book?"
"I guess I just followed the crowd at chow time, sir."
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Please read the clarifying comments several people have made.
This guy was teleporting players into range of a safe zone where the NPCs would kill the enemy player, causing EXP debt (where if the player had killed them it would not).
He was getting the in game characters to do his killing for him, which is highly infuriating to begin with, causing lasting detriments to the players beyond the time involved for him to 'kill' them.
No, you fucking child. That's for bullying intended to inflict emotional scars. Simply randomly insulting someone merely shows them not everyone in the world is a Disney character. There's nothing in that which, if it caused lasting harm, is the fault of the unsavory person.
Now to call your mom a worthless person, incapable of doing anything right, and continue doing so day after day while also keeping her from leaving. That's where that law you mentioned comes in.
Honestly, I can't believe you fucking imbeciles who want to water our world down so that you'll never have to face the ugly truth of your own failure. Laws are for real harm, asshole, over-prescribing them is as harmful as with antibiotics.
Having occasionally played with, against, and as a RPing hero in CoH, the interesting view would have been if he had created a character with a personality within the game and played that character the same way.
If he had played as a British gentleman named "The Dapper Fellow" and developed a personality driven behavior that resulted in the same method of teleporting enemies into the line of fire, with in-character taunts and compliments, I doubt the behavior would have provoked such an intense response from the other PvP members. However, then other characters would be free to find creative ways of dissuading The Dapper Fellow from his behavior ("Let's bring the fight to them!) while still protesting his behavior, but in a more controlled method.
As it was executed, he was simply a troll.
It probably is illegal. Vandalism, destruction of property? Just because it's temporary or made of sand you don't usually keep doesn't mean it's not property. If you break somebody's ice sculpture, couldn't that be that illegal too?
Now, it would be really difficult to get the police to arrest or the DA to prosecute for such a crime (though it might be easier if it was your entry for a sand castle competition) ... but that doesn't mean it couldn't be considered illegal.
In the later years in Counter-Strike, (when they went retail) some wiseguys made their own rules regarding what was allowed settings for the client network configuration, which they simply coined as "rates", claiming that lower settings made players more difficult to hit thus gaining an advantage. This had of course no merit what so ever, but it didn't stop this totally laughable rule to become a dogma in the community. "Fix your rates!", or "Your rates are wrong, you cheat!" became clichès in the ingame chat. Another similar claim without any merit was that using a 16-bit color depth did alpha blending differently compared to 32-bit true color, thus letting players see better through smoke from smoke grenades. This also gained a following. And let us not forget the made up rules regarding overpowered weapons like the AWP rifle. A lot of servers banned it alltogether, or capped it with metamod plugins, so only one player on each team could have one. And while they were at it, the majority of servers started kicking clients with more than 90 ms latency, even if the game played fine with up to 250 ms. This happened even before the "rate" rule gained popularity.
What I mean to demonstrate with these examples is that if a game purposely let me set configurate settings to my liking or use a certain tactic or strategy as a part of the game, I don't care jack shit what made up rules a community has. I play my games as intended by the gameplay. The fact that CS gamers don't know what they talked about, only helps fuel my hopelessness I feel for the community.
If you are fed up with actual exploits, file a bug report. If you think a game mechanic is cheap, work around it, or don't play the game at all. Don't impose restrictions on others. It confuses newcomers and makes the game rules overly complex.
P.S The online community I played on was Norway/Europe. I don't know if this spread to other server regions.
He should try all that in EVE. That stuff is not only welcomed, but you read about it on gaming sites if the reprocussions of what you do are big enough.
It would be interesting to see if there are societal difference based on the game that you play.
Killing an opponent in this way gives zero benefit to the "winner". They don't get a kill credit. They don't get any "loot", and it doesn't help his "side" advance the zone's objective.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The entrance to every zone in COH/COV is an area protected by police robots. The robots have rays that instantly kill anything in the game. The purpose of this is to prevent anyone from greifing people who are in the process of entering the area and don't have control of their characters yet.
If it weren't for these robots, then greifers could drag powerful mobs into the entrance area, or in the PvP area just stand in the enemy entrance area with a buddy or two, and prevent anyone from being able to enter without getting killed before having a chance to fight back at all.
There's also a "teleport foe" skill you can take, which is very handy for pulling, or for when an enemy gets stuck in a wall.
What this guy appeared to be doing was going into the PvP area and using teleport foe to teleport players on the other side into his own insta-death protected entrance area.
It is a very clever way to use the dev's griefer protection tools to grief people. What is most certianly is not is "playing the game by the designer's rules".
If you've ever had a conversation with a game griefer where they dumped their rationalizations for their prickish behavior on you, this article will look very familiar to you.
I see a lot of folks coming to the defense of the community of CoH players that found the researcher's apparently selfish refusal to follow generally accepted rules of in-game behavior reprehensible. What I find interesting is that never are these comments couched in the acceptance that what the players later did (threats of real-life violence!) was equally as socially unacceptable. If someone makes an appearance in my niche and rocks the boat, do I suddenly gain the right to pursue them out of my little niche and exact vengence -- physical violence -- against someone who did little more than frustrate me? Look at the proportion of researcher stimulus to elicited community response. This is clearly a case of abnormal psychology that needs to be studied.
I'm really not sure what the Government Owning the Means of Production has to do with someone griefing other players in an online game. Perhaps you can explain that a bit more?
And being in a democracy doesn't have anything to do with playing a game on servers which you don't own.
____________________
Clouds in the Sky,
Water in a bottle
well actually, a developer, self righteous or not, can do anything at all to change what's legal and what's not - "they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys" - there's just never enough time to play-test these things to cover every single eventuality. I'm sure they intended to remove all the cheap shot tactics, because it would be crazy to intentionally leave one in and say "we're hoping people will sort this out amongst themselves and act reasonably", because, as this article clearly shows, someone is going to screw that up for everyone.
Imagine, for a moment, that you're playing in a PvP zone in CoH. You're fighting against someone else, and they defeat you. As you respawn, you receive one of two tells from the player playing the other character:
"Haha! You suck! I didn't even break a sweat! Why don't you go home and tell your mommy how a big mean man beat you up?"
or
"That was a great fight, you almost had me a few times there!"
Both are allowed under the rules, but one makes you seem like a good sport, and the other makes you seem like a jerk. Would you rather have a society filled with the first type of people, or the second?
____________________
Clouds in the Sky,
Water in a bottle
No, sorry, he didn't go to the Arena. The Arena doesn't have Police Drones in the arena fights. He was using a legal-at-the-time trick to kill characters with little risk to himself. If he had actually been challenging them and fighting them, there wouldn't be a story. He was griefing players instead of fighting them.
____________________
Clouds in the Sky,
Water in a bottle
so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
The society you speak of is exactly the one he set out to investigate.
We call that Disordly Conduct here in Delaware. Its an excellent tool for dealing with unruly neighbors From Del Code, title 11
 1301. Disorderly conduct; unclassified misdemeanor.
A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when:
(1) The person intentionally causes public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm to any other person, or creates a risk thereof by:
a. Engaging in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior; or
b. Making an unreasonable noise or an offensively coarse utterance, gesture or display, or addressing abusive language to any person present; or
c. Disturbing any lawful assembly or meeting of persons without lawful authority; or
d. Obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic; or
e. Congregating with other persons in a public place and refusing to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse; or
f. Creating a hazardous or physically offensive condition which serves no legitimate purpose; or
g. Congregating with other persons in a public place while wearing masks, hoods or other garments rendering their faces unrecognizable, for the purpose of and in a manner likely to imminently subject any person to the deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States of America.
(2) The person engages with at least 1 other person in a course of disorderly conduct as defined in paragraph (1) of this section which is likely to cause substantial harm or serious inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, and refuses or knowingly fails to obey an order to disperse made by a peace officer to the participants.
Disorderly conduct is an unclassified misdemeanor.
Sociopath A.K.A. Antisocial personality disorder:
A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others and inability or unwillingness to conform to what are considered to be the norms of society.
The guy's premise was all wrong. What he was really testing was how people respond to a sociopath when they have absolutely no power to stop it. In real life, a sociopath is forced into therapy, medication, a psychiatric facility, or most commonly, prison. These people were not bullying him. He was the bully and they were responding with the only weapons that had to protect themselves.
I forgot to mention the test is "if it would cause a resonable person to react violently under normal conditions"
Notice also how the "commoner" called him a bad name and just...left. He exercised freedom which the game largely enforces.
This is why freedom is not just a separate thing from democracy, but is more important than it. 99% of humanity's problems are traceable to someone picking up a gun or club to bypass the target's freedom. Putting this under the mild yoke of democracy only partially alleviates it, and rarely expands it, or even maintains it. Certainly few politicians yammer about freedom, instead touting the greatness of democracy. Touting freedom suggests limiting their power, which is not what they're in the game for.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Freedom isn't workable as a principle?
I assume that's because you find it unbelievable that some people don't want to live the way you want them to.
No, seriously. "Follow the money." That's why.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If someone breaks into my house, I have to violate his freedom in order to eject him. People suck. Ergo, not workable as a principle.
I have this hilarious notion that a principle is something that cannot be compromised. Anything you are willing to compromise is just a preference (but there is nothing wrong with preferring the struggle to meet an ideal to wallowing in squalor).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Well congratulations, you read far too much into my one line. I mention that a law exists called "Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress", and apparently now I'm a fucking child, a fucking imbecile, and an asshole who wants to water the world down. Well done, that's one of the better trolls I've seen.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt,
In the UK you would possibly be cautioned under Public Order Act 1986, Section 4:
" (1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he:
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting
thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.".
You'd be charged if my mum was rich or a celebrity, but she isn't. You'd get a good negative cred in the press as she just got awarded by the Queen for long service to the community. I suppose being employed isn't important to you? Employers tend to dislike this sort of threatening behaviour, especially towards elderly females.
In many jurisdictions if you are a different skin colour to my mother then you'd be prosecuted under racial discrimination laws (yes, I think that's wrong).
Also if I then batter the hell out of you with my tyre iron (which I just happened to be holding) I think I'd get let off with a warning due to the extreme nature of your provocation. Worth a chance anyway.
That said, I don't find "cunt" to be an offensive word, just that I know my mother would.
How do you play baseball by yourself?
one of the reasons why there will never be a true Democracy. The elite in every society tells the commoner and new initiate what to think, and for the most part they fall in line.
I think you're confusing "democracy" with "aristocracy". Ultimately, however, "democracy" is "mob rule", where the voting majority gets to dictate to the voting minority (which I think you're actually driving at). In contrast, the US is a "democratic republic", where the "mob's" voted representatives do the dictating (*cough* presumably in line with wishes of their constituency *cough*).
"LinuX - Dropping the c u r t a i n on Windoze." -- Vee Schade, vschade at mindless dot com
The funny this is that being a "villain" means that you don't act "within the acceptable norms."
Though Meyer claimed he was being a "hero," he was actually adopting a "villain" persona, and the other players had to act outside the confines of the game to get back at him.
Being that CoH/CoV has no PvP specific servers/"realms" (e.g. World of Warcraft), and all PvP is engaged in either the arenas or a few special zones only, what this actually "illustrates" (other than the obvious "mob rule" effect in action), is that poor PvP'ers are major whiners. In this case you have "Syphris" choosing to enter a PvP match and being easily bested by "Twixt". An obvious ego-blow as illustrated by Syphris' response to being bested so easily. :-p Go back to PvE and work on your skills with mish teams (or move on to some other way to pass your time) you $*&%^ whiners.
Get a life you moron!
They guy clearly played by the rules. The game was setup to be Villains versus Heroes. Except, it seems, most people did not play that way.
Just because a bunch of dill-holes got together and made their own "rules," does not mean that everyone need to follow them, especially if they are contradictory to the game.
Jackass.
The object of the game is to kill your enemies, not to cause them to be killed by the game itself.
One rewards you. The other does not.
I can't really comment on whether or not they were actually sitting around chatting instead of engaging in PvP (probably some were doing both, and that undoubtedly made a convenient excuse for this asshole to justify his bad behavior). However, he was not engaging in PvP either: he neither inflicted nor received any damage at all. He was simply causing players on the opposing team to be killed by the environment (PvE) – and what's more, by indestructible NPCs. For this alone I consider him just as bad as the people he was condemning, and worse, since he's a hypocrite to boot.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
He was doing something for the express purpose of annoying other players with no benefit to himself, in other words, the definition of griefing. Just because he didn't violate any specific rules doesn't mean he gets a free pass. Even if his actions were within the "rules" of the game, they very clearly were not within the spirit of it. And before you get started on that bullshit "he was a hero, he had to kill the villains", that's not how the game is designed, merely the premise of the world, it's the lore as opposed to the actual game. Quite simply the area he was exploiting was designed to prevent exactly the behavior he was committing, the idea being to provide a safe haven for the players, but by exploiting an oversight in the design he turned that safe haven into an insta-kill zone. Further more he made it worse in that PvP in the game is designed to have no adverse effect on the players, that is, even if someone were to for instance figure out a way to camp your corpse and repeatedly kill you there would be no in-game side-effect other than the waste of your time. The method he was using to grief players however essentially tricked PvE elements of the game into performing the actual kill which by design has negative repercussions on the player. In essence he found a way to apply PvE effects to a PvP kill. The game is clearly setup so that PvP has no adverse consequences, yet he found a way to do exactly that. How exactly is this not griefing?
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
He played a hero, removing villains was his goal, not racking up points in a database somewhere!
Um, hello?
IT'S. NOT. REAL.
You're not fighting the forces of evil. You don't represent the ideals of everything which is good and righteous. You're playing a stupid game, and yes, THE WHOLE IDEA IS RACKING UP POINTS.
Look, if you want to be some sort of white knight, fighting the forces of evil for no personal gain, do something that's ACTUALLY BENEFICIAL to someone. Go volunteer in a soup kitchen or something.
The whole point of the game is to gain prowess in the game. "Destroy the evil villains" is just the method in which you're supposed to do that.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
And, as far as I can tell, having been on Lambda since 1993, it didn't do a single bit of good: we went back to fascism once it was clear that A: nobody cared about government except for people who were pushing a specific agenda and B: it didn't seem to be possible to build a system that got people to want to care about political participation or involved deterrents sufficient to stop griefing.
It was like real-life politics with even more apathy and special-interest maneuvering. (Which is a huge shame because I love the place.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Bug exploitation is usually against the rules.
This was a bug, plain and simple. In fact, according to what I read here, it was apparently patched somehow in a later version of the game, although I'm not sure how they patched it. (Seems to me that the easy way would just be make it impossible for a teleport to drop you in an insta-kill zone, regardless of who cast the teleport spell on you.)
Anyway, it's pretty simple: was the teleport spell intended to be used to drop people into insta-kill zones? No? Then it's a bug. At this point, it's up to the devs to decide whether exploiting this bug should become part of the game play (leave the bug in) or whether it should be removed from the game by patching it (and in the meantime, until the patch is released, exploiting such a bug can become a bannable offense). If the bug only trivially changes the gameplay, or introduces an interesting facet that's worth keeping, they might allow it, but if it's clearly an unfair bug they'll eventually get around to fixing it (or at least we'd hope so for the sake of the people playing the game).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
No, what it illustrates is a clearly unfair bug being exploited by a griefer in order to harass the people who actually wanted to play the game. The bug was later patched, at which point his "experiment" stopped.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
No shitbird, because you suggested the law as a remedy for someone's hypothetical mother who'd been called a cunt. That would be the watering down, and it's your reflex to deny it that makes you an asshole.
You've got paranoid tendencies if you see people disagreeing with you as trolling.
There are laws of physics and there are laws of man. The laws of physics define what is or is not possible. Man's law defines a society. Just because one is more trivial to transgress than the other doesn't mean both aren't important to making things work.
Here again we are faced with the common PvP griefer's refrain of "I'm not breaking any game rules". That's not the point. In real life, according to the "rules" (i.e. the physical laws of our universe), nothing is stopping me from walking up behind unsuspecting passers-by and bashing their brains out with a tire iron; but I don't, because we as humans have developed a society out of the framework of physical law which details CONSEQUENCES for such an action.
In the same way that God created the world (for the purposes of this metaphor, at least) but humans created society, the CoH/WoW/Eve/etc devs created the world, but players created the society. So if an 80 belf ret pally is griefing my little level 20 nub in Darkshire, it's "within the rules of the game", but it's unequivocally bullying. It's no longer a matter of skill; my little level 20 nub has exactly 0.00% chance of beating an 80. But like in real life, the WoW society has developed consequences; those same rules allow me to bring out my 80 rogue to slaughter and camp his ass til he logs whenever I see him from then on.
Under the faulty logic that anything the laws of the game world permit is socially acceptable, any bug or exploit is fair game. Counterstrike players remember the bug in cs_assault that let an unscrupulous player pop up through the ceiling of the warehouse onto the roof. It's permitted under the laws of the CS universe, but any server admin worth his salt would perma-ban the little s**t.
The point is that the rules that the player society develops are just as important (if not more) than the physical rules of the game world itself. And if you flagrantly, gleefully, maliciously disregard them, like in real life, there are consequences.
Sprocket, 8 small questions (& please, no wall of text w/out documented backing @ least - quit evading answering them, especially the 1st one, & then we can refer to what is @ the bottom of my "p.s." below, vs. your evasive walls of text):
----
1.) DEFINE THE WORD PERFECT or PERFECTLY, won't you? (which is what Mr. Ken Richmond, VP of market data systems @ NASDAQ said MDDS performs like, verbatim quoted below & that it provides "Enterprise Availability")
2.) CAN YOU PROVE THAT NASDAQ IS NOT SEEING 99.999% UPTIME ON MDDS? (NASDAQ's OFFICIAL TRADE DATA DISSEMINATION SYSTEM (which is what I said from the get go, not anything else, though you attempted to IMPLY that I did, & yet you had to admit I did NOT say that here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28583581, lol)
3.) Did I ever once say that MDDS is the quote system @ NASDAQ? If so, SHOW US ALL, where I did... (you already admitted I did not, right here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28574671 so that "argument" of yours (straw man type b.s.) fails on that alone - failure to provide PROOF, which is also what you also fail to provide to prove that MDDS does not give 99.999% uptime for NASDAQ, lmao! Sprocket? Putting words in others' mouths they never said is NOT good debate, it always FAILS, as you have, because you do that)
4.) Does any other program @ NASDAQ do what MDDS does @ NASDAQ? (composed of SQLServer 2005 + Windows Server 2003) inclusive of the TIBCO + custom programmed trading floor quote system?
5.) Did you have to ADMIT that SQLServer 2005 + Windows Server 2003 can provide 99.999% uptime? Sure you did, right here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28582575 especially after the XEROX example, which does many orders of magnitude more transactions PER DAY than NASDAQ's MDDS even (& that alone says NASDAQ is pulling that easily enough, alongside the QUOTED testimonials of Ken Richmond of NASDAQ below (which is what I always provide, quoted verbatim testimonials, & All YOU have? Is what your "trollish delusional brain" interprets (without backing & purely opinion - don't like that? Well, show us PROOF that NASDAQ's MDDS is not doing 99.999% uptime then, simple!)))
6.) What EXACTLY is your role in this field/science (computing), professionally, & how many years of it do you have under your belt, + how many degrees around it or certs @ the very least also?
7.) Have you EVER been published in written publications such as "trade rags" as they are often called, for work you have done?
8.) Has work you done ever been featured as a finalist @ Microsoft "tech ed" or like trade shows, & for 2 yrs. in a ROW, as a finalist in that show's hardest category?
----
You're going to love his evasions - they're classic humor! Get ready for a "wall of text" style evasion, everyone... lol!
(However, of course, our "favorite troll" will evade answering them, short & sweet style, because all he will be able to do, lmao, is put up a 'wall of text', complete with evasions of these simple questions... like usual: Trolls - they're TOO predictable, easy to manipulate with facts, & TOO easy to "push their buttons" (especially when they're proven WRONG, as Sprocket here has been))
Also, there IS the simple fact that you had to resort to name calling as well, directed MY way, here, which you "prided yourself" on NOT doing, quoted verbatim, below next (but that THIN veneer has been cracked, TOO easily (trolls - they ALWAYS "fold under pressure" & use "pot calling the kettle black" tactics + put words into others' mouths they never said also)):
----
"It's
It seems that he wrote it in 2006.
The article is from the perspective of the professor and the reporter who interviewed him. If you listen to what the other players have said there's a very different story.
He was clearly not playing the game the way it was "meant to be played", he just didn't violate any hardcoded rules and followed the letter of the law. This is what griefers do, they follow the rules of the game in a way that allows them to destroy the fun of other players.
It is not role playing to attack villains when they're not doing villainous things. It is certainly not heroic to ruin others people's fun.
Listen Freud, if I walked up to your mom and called her a cunt, regardless of whether or not she probably deserved it for producing someone like you, and the purpose of my doing that was to cause her to feel bad (cause emotional distress), she can press charges for that. That's exactly what the law says. That's not watering anything down, that's the law. The elements of the law are:
Defendant acted intentionally or recklessly; and
Defendant's conduct was extreme and outrageous; and
Defendant's act is the cause of the distress; and
Plaintiff suffers severe emotional distress as a result of defendant's conduct.
You might question whether calling your mother a cunt is "extreme and outrageous", it very well might not be, but that's why we have judges and juries.
I don't see people disagreeing with me as trolling, I'm all for civil discourse. What you're doing is not very civil.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Hmm, This sounds a lot like every day in EVE, except for the other several thousand people doing the same thing.
It's pretty clear that he never attacked anyone, he used a teleport mechanic to cause NPC guards that enforce a safe zone to insta-kill his opponents. It's a shame the game mechanics allow this, but clearly is isn't "the way it was meant to be played," nor does it have anything to do with roleplaying. Basically, he found a loophole in the game mechanics and griefed other players with it.
.....so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
Yeah, no gays in these here parts. We're strictly straight up righteous folk.
For all of you who are defending Myers' actions... keep this in mind (as a player who played against him):
1- He talked trash ALL THE TIME. He was actually one of the biggest instigator of trash talking in RV (the pvp zone he stayed in the most.)
2- The entire point of the zone was NOT intended to kill other players, believe it or not. It was meant to capture 'turrets', which were mini-bases outfitted with high-range, high-damage guns. Once all guns from a NEUTRAL turret-base were destroyed, any hero or villain could take control of it and turn it to their factions. Out of ~7 turret bases in the zone, whichever faction would win the most turrets would 'win' the zone. That's it... that's the whole point of the zone. Killing enemy faction players was actually a secondary effect (if they got in your way of taking turret-bases), not the primary objective.
So having Myers state that the point of the zone was to kill enemy players is actually INCORRECT. Ironically, most players were in the zone to kill other players, and therefore THEY were the ones not adhering to the primary intent of the zone.
Having played the game for 3+ years, and having seen Myers aka Twixt in action on hundreds of occasions, I can definitely tell you that his paper is full of ridiculous assertions and complete fabrications.
There was another player in the game who had 4+ accounts, so he could have that many characters in-game at once. He would bring a 'killer' character (dominator) and 3+ 'support' (buffers like therms/kins/etc) and a 'vengeance bait' to give himself a particularly powerful buff. He would then be basically unkillable for several minutes, and employ 'exploitative' tactics (like tp in the air + TK, which would have a floating effect, with the target being completely unable to fight back.)
Guess what, he was considered an asshole too but we didn't need a paper to justify it.
Oh, and the biggest difference, this guy didn't gloat afterwards, like Myers did.
Like someone astutely stated earlier... Myers was actually the bully, yet he painted himself as the victim.
Wow.
What a disillusioned douche.
That's exactly what the law says. That's not watering anything down, that's the law.
Sigh, yes. That is a law.
But when you suggest it as a remedy for a trivial insult you're watering it down, along with the suffering of those it's meant to protect such as the little girl hounded to suicide.
You might question whether calling your mother a cunt is "extreme and outrageous"
No, I know that it is not, you festering retard, as does everyone with a mental age over seven. It's ridiculous that a few unfriendly words from someone you don't even know could be so extreme as to cause a normal person severe distress.
I don't see people disagreeing with me as trolling, I'm all for civil discourse. What you're doing is not very civil.
Bullshit, Fucknut. If I was uncivil I'd be kicking down your door and punctuating this with violence, or threatening to do so. I am merely sharing my view of someone who could utter such ill-considered drivel.
But that's my point, you'd rather be offended by my words than simply address the content. The law isn't (/shouldn't be) another censorship tool for whiners who are afraid of being shown to be wrong, or upset that they aren't being respected properly.
I didn't suggest it as a remedy for a trivial insult. The original statement I was replying to:
There is no law against me walking up to your mother and calling her a cunt
That is not a correct statement, there is such a law, which I've pointed out, which sometimes gets broadly applied by certain people to do just that - remedy a trivial insult. That's not something I personally would use that law for, my sensibilities are not so easily offended as to cause me emotional distress when a fat, sword-toting walking Unix stereotype calls me a festering retard, but the fact is that people within the United States use that law for relatively minor grievances. They are watering the law down, and I'm not one of them.
To put a fine point on it - I'm not suggesting the law as a remedy for a trivial insult. I'm pointing out that there exists a law which other people do in fact use that way.
It's ridiculous that a few unfriendly words from someone you don't even know could be so extreme as to cause a normal person severe distress.
Yes, it's ridiculous to me, but like I also pointed out, that's what judges and juries are for, and I can imagine plenty of sympathetic juries who would consider "aggressive" use of the word "cunt" as being "extreme".
If I was uncivil I'd be kicking down your door and punctuating this with violence, or threatening to do so.
It doesn't surprise me that I have to point this out to you also, but it is widely considered uncivil to go around addressing people the way you are, or otherwise flinging insults. I understand that you probably don't get a lot of social contact, but it's considered a civil norm to refrain from insults in a casual conversation, especially a conversation with someone whom you don't know.
But that's my point, you'd rather be offended by my words than simply address the content.
No, I'm happy to address the content, which is what all of my posts have done, to the point that you now conceded that the law that I originally pointed out does in fact exist and does in fact get used in the way in which I claimed. You just seem to be under the mistaken assumption that I'm a type of person that I'm actually not, and enjoy insulting me because of that. It's not offensive to me when someone insults me for a perceived reason which isn't actually true (i.e., ignorance).
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
One thing is being missed here that needs to be clarified.
PvP in City of Heroes is an afterthought. The game didn't have PvP for the entire first year it is existed. Although the article is titled "'City of Heroes' character 'Twixt' becomes game's most hated outcast courtesy of Loyola professor" a more accurate one would be "Game Addicted Professor Ticks Off 50 PvPers on Freedom Server." I doubt if more than a third of City of Heroes players have even seen PvP, let alone participated in it.
Hidden sentries, teleporting to enemy spawn, joining unassigned team, cloaktaunting, getting stuck in doors...
TF2 has had plentiful ways to exploit and grief, only thing saving it is Valve being ever vigilant about exploits like that.
Ok, but whats the difference between norms and rules?
If the players make the rules, doesn't that then make the players responsible for their enforcement?
Sounds like thats exactly what happened here. I actually disagree with those who say this isn't something worth study. In many ways it is.... its humans acting in an environment where there is no higher authority that can help them. Essentially, they have rules and most people follow them... but... what happens when a rule breaker shows up in a world with no police?
In fact, how are the "rules" even determined. I mean, are you expected to modify your bahaviour every time one guy says "hey not fair" or "hey thats not cool"? Two guys? when?
In this case he went into a war zone. A place, defined, as where heros and villans do battle with eachother. Then he... went to battle. Then villans start getting pissed because there is a hero going around killing them in a war zone.
I think he should check out shadowbane if it is still around. The whole world after newb island was a "war zone". Banditry was rampant in that game. In fact, the game was almost setup as a social experiment just like he might find interesting... that is... the world was really dog eat dog with no real rules beyond the game... so players had to band together and form their own little societies.... posses would form to go after bandits etc.
If I could devote more than a couple of weeks to an MMO before deciding I don't need a second job, I would have stayed with that one, I liked it alot because of that social aspect that was created by letting everyone run amok and forcing people to band together for protection.
The aproach on WOW and COV/COH always seemed kind of lame to me. In real life I can do whatever I want, even kill people. However, the consequence is, the police may get called and come after me. It always seemed silly that I am this powerful mage, but... oh, I can't target this dude, or I can't attack anyone without going over there.
I like the "players police the game" setup better, because it makes the social interaction more interesting, and more needed as part of the game rather than just letting it be "our big clubhouse"
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This isn't "socializing". What we do here on Slashdot is engage in little intellectual arguments about a variety of topics. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes they're inane, often they're impolite, but what they never are is "social".
You should probably go look up the definition of social and socialize. While you are at it, "intellectual" might need some boning up on, based on the conversation around here....
What about snipers? I always thought camping was acceptable in counterstrike anyway, maybe not (I don't own it, but I have played).
Look, I used camping because it was the easiest example. Proving that there are iffy ways to solve that problem does not prove anything about all the others.
and independent thinkers that heralded the democratic age of today were douchebags, doing anything that was legit within the system at that point in time ....
not.
read some history. in your 'democratic' america people are currently exploited to such an extent by corporations that, from their juvenile years to their death their life is a race to pay debts and make out. a small percentage of lucky people 'make it', because the society currently needs the people with their skillset badly, but all others get the shaft.
you need more socialism in your dog eat dog democracy.
Read radical news here
Pshaw, if I were a true unix stereotype I wouldn't be caught dead walking.
I see your distinction, but it seems weak, and thus retroactive. That law is not for people who got called a cunt any more than a assault is 'for' people who were barely touched. You can cry rape for anything but it's meant to punish people who seriously harm another person not to punish someone for being uglier than you expected when you sober up, even though it gets used that way.
That is not a correct statement, there is such a law, which I've pointed out, which sometimes gets broadly applied by certain people to do just that - remedy a trivial insult.
But not really, as I'm saying.
This is semantic, I'll grant you, but it's obscuring the issue.
I can imagine plenty of sympathetic juries who would consider "aggressive" use of the word "cunt" as being "extreme".
Yes, but the law is one thing, not anything you could imagine a jury buying. Many juries would consider a riding-crop in someone's ass to be obscene, but that doesn't mean it is, or that if a law were bent to prohibit filming it that the law would be constitutional.
it is widely considered uncivil to go around addressing people the way you are
And god (a god, take your pick) is widely believed to exist.
It doesn't surprise me that I have to point this out to you
Oh, so you got this far and thought I didn't know?
my sensibilities are not so easily offended as to cause me emotional distress
I see. So you went to my site browsing for material, got insulting, and acted all pompous and holier-than-thou just for the hell of it?
It's not offensive to me when someone insults me for a perceived reason which isn't actually true (i.e., ignorance).
No, it is offensive, but it isn't harmful.
But that's my point, you cretin, that there's no harm from all those things I said to you. I'm just some guy on the internet who knows nothing about you, so nothing I say can harm you if you're sane. That's sort of the definition of adulthood.
You just seem to be under the mistaken assumption that I'm a type of person that I'm actually not, and enjoy insulting me because of that.
No, if I enjoyed harassing you tod
when a cognitive and perceptive individual places his/her concentration on anything, s/he transfers some of his/her perception and cognition to that thing. anything happening to that may make an effect on the individual. you dont need to be emotionally attached to anything for an effect to happen. you are a sentient with senses and reflexes. if suddenly the toon you are paying great attention at 01.00 in silent night gets whacked with a big sound, it triggers all of you reflexes. emotion and attachment hasnt got anything to do with it. its simple reflex.
and, if some disturbed individual corpsecamps your toon just for 'having fun', and you are delayed from doing what you are intending to do at that night for an hour, you get naturally distressed and annoyed.
Read radical news here
and get used to it. you cant freely be badass in a game. because, it is not just 'a game'. you play it along with OTHER people. and OTHER people have their opinions and judgments. no amount of discussion or argumentation, insults and despising on your part will change those people's views, they will STILL keep their judgments. therefore, if you be a jerk in a game, you get what you ask for. thats it, plain and simple.
Read radical news here
"get a life". after all these years on the internet, i still cant put any meaning into such shitty american jargon.
Read radical news here
what i posted wasnt about 'threatening'. it was about being outcast from society. people doing things other people dont like all the time became the pariahs and outcasts in the society. this wont change just because 'its a game'. it has STILL people behind it with their views and judgments.
Read radical news here
society doesnt give a flying fuck about the physics rules. it sets up its own rules. if you be a jerk, which is allowed within the laws of physics, you still get outcast from the society. lawyers and court orders doesnt do zit either, they STILL can outcast you regardless of court orders, or even legislation, and there isnt shit you can do about it.
and, if you try enough, someone INDEED stops you, in a back alley with a bat.
Read radical news here
any situation that involves more than one person ( or even entity ) is a social environment.
anyone playing mmos are actually intending to play in social environments. because they ARE massively MULTIPLAYER online games. if they didnt want such a thing, they would be playing counterstrike after all.
Read radical news here
Pshaw, if I were a true unix stereotype I wouldn't be caught dead walking.
I see your distinction, but it seems weak, and thus retroactive. That law is not for people who got called a cunt any more than a assault is 'for' people who were barely touched. You can cry rape for anything but it's meant to punish people who seriously harm another person not to punish someone for being uglier than you expected when you sober up, even though it gets used that way.
That is not a correct statement, there is such a law, which I've pointed out, which sometimes gets broadly applied by certain people to do just that - remedy a trivial insult.
But not really, as I'm saying.
This is semantic, I'll grant you, but it's obscuring the issue.
I can imagine plenty of sympathetic juries who would consider "aggressive" use of the word "cunt" as being "extreme".
Yes, but the law is one thing, not anything you could imagine a jury buying. Many juries would consider a riding-crop in someone's ass to be obscene, but that doesn't mean it is, or that if a law were bent to prohibit filming it that the law would be constitutional.
it is widely considered uncivil to go around addressing people the way you are
And god (a god, take your pick) is widely believed to exist.
It doesn't surprise me that I have to point this out to you
Oh, so you got this far and thought I didn't know?
my sensibilities are not so easily offended as to cause me emotional distress
I see. So you went to my site browsing for material, got insulting, and acted all pompous and holier-than-thou just for the hell of it?
It's not offensive to me when someone insults me for a perceived reason which isn't actually true (i.e., ignorance).
No, it is offensive, but it isn't harmful.
But that's my point, you cretin, that there's no harm from all those things I said to you. I'm just some guy on the internet who knows nothing about you, so nothing I say can harm you if you're sane. That's sort of the definition of adulthood.
You just seem to be under the mistaken assumption that I'm a type of person that I'm actually not, and enjoy insulting me because of that.
No, if I enjoyed harassing you today it's because of how funny you are when you try to be all proper while being insulting.
Back to that semantic thing though... If you consider that an overzealous policeman could cite you for anything, and there'd be a closest law to it however tenuous the connection, then you could say that there's a law for everything. Cough in public? Ummm, disturbing the peace, engaging in biochemical terrorism, etc...
Or, if you would agree that laws can be over-broadly applied it implies that not all uses of the law are reasonable or valid, they're just random crap that happens to be wrongly prosecuted under this law as opposed to another.
So while I'll agree the law exists, I don't think it, or laws in general, mean quite what you think. Everything not explicitly forbidden is allowed. You seem to be operating on the anything-possibly-questionable-is-forbidden model. Are you in North Korea?
There's a law against killing someone, but not against calling them a cunt.
I am seriously rolling around laughing right now. Cant you see how absurd you are here?
It's not the game, it's merely the premise of the world. MERELY.
And, again, claiming that he was griefing or violating rules or abusing bugs simply isnt going to work. He was petitioned many times, and exonerated every time.
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Sure. Now explain why his own teammates were helping their enemies.
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IMHO this is really poor science, and even worse philosophy. After reading the paper, I see some major research faults here.
1) He didn't inform the participants that they were involved in the experiment : major ethical violation
2) Instead of using an experimental group with a rigid guideline of experimental procedures (eg hiring someone to play CoH as Twixt, giving them a specific list of actions they should do), Myers used himself in the experiment and basically made up the rules as he went along. Myers states "While in the beginning, Twixt played by these rules in silence, as time went by, Twixt became increasingly verbal in an attempt to explain his goals and motivations." In my view this change in Twixt's attitude could influence the test results.
2b) It is clear from his blog site that he was emotionally invested in the game, and thus Myer's research ability was negatively impacted by the desires he imparted on his character. As we all know from Mr Spock, emotion makes bad science.
After reading the paper I think it's rather clear that Myers is attempting to justify his crudeness in the game, and didn't have any real scientific interests in mind when he started the experiment. Either that, or he is a poor experimenter. Basically Myers found a loophole in the game which would make him near invincible and is attempting to justify his characters superiority (and thus boost Myer's self esteem) by writing a paper claiming he did everything in the name of scientific research.
I have my terminology straight, you are (intentionally?) misinterpreting it by telling yourself I meant something else. I didnt.
Taking over a game which other people are playing and intentionally, systematically shutting down play fits pretty well within the category of "griefing" in my view.
[quote]i have played eq, and cross teaming has absolutely nothing to do with this, you're not able to team up with anyone of the opposite faction in cox (only in cooperation zones, but we're talking pvp areas here), you can't heal them etc. [/quote]
But apparently you *can* leave them unmolested to farm in a pvp zone, and then ostracise members of your own team that try to fight them. Which is, as I said, not a perfect analogy but nonetheless obviously very similar behaviour, wrong for the same reason, and yes, in my book as someone who has seen more than one game I once enjoyed completely ruined by it, that counts as griefing everyone that is actually trying to play the game.
IIRC (and correct me if I am wrong) Fansy was mostly known for training mobs on people he was not even allowed to attack. This is not even vaguely comparable.
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1. The research is fundamentally worthless and that should be pointed out to his review committee at loyola
a. He did no form of control group whatsoever
b. There were no parameters established for any kind of experimental protocol
c. This "stranger aggravation" experiment has been done ever since the 50s under properly controlled situations. He didn't replicate established research, and he proved nothing new.
2. In fact, and what should also be pointed out to his review committee at Loyola, what he has done has been to foul the water for anyone wanting to do serious research on sociological parameters inside mmorpgs
3. And, perhaps most importantly, he violated the number one protocol for anyone engaged in such studies, and probably violated Loyola's own ethics standards. He did not reveal that he was doing studies nor did he get the consent of those he was studying. this should be reported to the Loyola ethics committee
4. As to the players he griefed, now that he has outed himself, they can actually complain to the university and even threaten to sue for being used in a research study without their knowledge or consent.
In short, a nerd professor discovered how to be a bully of the sort that used to give him wedgies, proceeded to do so and is now crowing about it and pretending it was research, while violating every standard for such research there is.
He ought to be fired
how a player character could follow the rules of the game, and violate the unwritten rules and social norms that the players had agreed on but did not write down, nor have the game administrators enforce.
He made his character as a loner, who didn't team up too much, and developed a tactic to teleport foes into NPC Robots that shot them to death for getting too close to a safe zone.
I think he violated some ethics as a professor, and may be considered a griefer or jerk to the other players, but he did so in order to show how the other players would violate their own social norms and unwritten rules to use profanity, trying to force him to quit by dirty tricks, etc. In doing so I think he tried to show the other players as hypocrites who gladly violate the unwritten rules, while at the same time accusing his character of violating the same unwritten rules. Meanwhile his character didn't violate any games rules, just social ones the players had agreed to but not written down or enforced.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Cause he was a dick in and out of character. I fully support them beating down on him in game and pretending to be on his side. The defaming and aggression out of game was extreme but it wasn't exactly surprising if he really does have even the most minuscule understanding of the human mind.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
If you consider that an overzealous policeman could cite you for anything, and there'd be a closest law to it however tenuous the connection, then you could say that there's a law for everything.
Right, if you're considering extreme cases. I know my original one-liner didn't explicitly consider anything, but I was thinking it!
Or, if you would agree that laws can be over-broadly applied it implies that not all uses of the law are reasonable or valid
Without a doubt. Sort of like charging someone with intentional infliction of emotional distress for calling someone's mother a cunt. It's a waste of time (including apparently yours and mine), but that's not to say it doesn't happen.
You seem to be operating on the anything-possibly-questionable-is-forbidden model.
That's not me at all, I'm highly libertarian, my original poorly-stated point was that people actually use this law to remedy getting butthurt, not that I would advocate it. It's hard to fit all of my views into one line, lesson learned, I was just responding to a guy claiming that you can't charge someone with a crime for insulting you. People do.
So you went to my site browsing for material
If people picking arguments with me are going to post links to their personal information, I'm going to take the opportunity to educate myself.
got insulting
Live and let live. Converse is also true.
and acted all pompous and holier-than-thou just for the hell of it
I don't really think of myself as pompous, but if that's how I came off it's the only thing I'll apologize for.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
you're obviously just reading whatever you want, i told you over and over again that people aren't sitting around in pvp zones, they are in fact pvping. people who want to team up with others of the opposite faction have zones for that and they use them. there is no farming whatsoever going on in open zones of any kind in cox, all farming is taking place in instances, no one is ever farming in a pvp zone. you haven't played cox, yet you somehow feel like you have a clue how it's gameplay looks like because of reading one ridiculous article, are you kidding me?
twixt was porting people into npcs without much of any chance of him being hurt at all, it's like fansy training npcs, letting them kill everyone with the occasional train that killed him as well. both have not gained anything from the whole thing, other than annoy people and they are both very hard to keep from it since they are either close to npcs that insta-kill or lvl 5 and non-pvpable (only chance then is to train against him). yes they are actually rather similar.
It seems like a lot of the people arguing that this guy was just "doing what the game intended" don't play CoX (most by their own admission). The thing you have to understand about PvP in CoX is that it is broken. The game is balanced around PvE. Very few players would get teleport protection (outside of a temporary tp resist from a buff - "inspiration"), because NPCs just didn't teleport players around. PvP zones were added because there was a large enough player base that said they wanted them. And PvP did occur in these zones, just after a while it became more like structured arena matches than an all-out war, since open PvP was mostly just ridiculous. A lot of people are comparing this to PvP in WoW, which unfortunately, can't really be done. Movement is so available and varied that, in normal PvP (no NPCs getting involved), if someone doesn't want to PvP, you can't force them: they just run away. Almost all players (especially if spec'd for PvP) have at least one power that, if properly buffed, can almost 1-shot another player (and the only reason it can't, is by virtue of the fact that there is a "no-one-shot" rule in place: any attack can only do your hp-1 in damage at most). All players have access to (as with the teleport that Twixt used) invisibility (not just stealth, invisibility). It sounds like a lot of people are saying that he was in the right to use the zone for its intended purpose, that if they didn't want to PvP, they shouldn't have been in the zone. So excuse me while I try to make a WoW analogy. Recluse's Victory (RV, the zone Twixt played in) is not Alterac Valley. It is not a zone where you go in and complete your objective with a limited team. RV is open to anybody that wants to come help (above a certain level), and they can leave and reenter as they wish without penalty. There is no reason to be mad at the people not contributing, because it would be the same whether they were there or not, unlike AV, where if people decide to AFK out to farm honour, you'd be better off replacing them with someone who actually will contribute. RV is more akin to Hellfire Penninsula. You have a zone PvP goal which people largely ignore because they'd rather be doing quests, and every once in a while you'll see someone go take the towers, either for the buff it gives when you control them, or for the quest associated with them. People in HP don't rush to the towers once they see them getting capped, to try to stop the other faction from getting control of the towers, they continue on with what they were doing and mostly ignore it... in fact, a lot of people like it when the other faction takes the towers, because they can then do the quest themselves. What Twixt was doing would be akin to leveling up to 70+, and going and ganking the lvl 60/61s just trying to get the quest done for the marks, because they want the trinket... and then corpse camping them, and killing them as many times as he can until either their flag drops, or they give up and log. He gets nothing from this himself (no HK or honour, because the level difference is too high), and there's no skill involved (because the level difference is too high), and he awards a penalty to his opponent (gold penalty in repairs, and time penalty in the corpse run). If his victims band together to try to take him down as a team, he retreats to Honour Hold/Thrallmar and laughs at them from behind a wall of NPCs. Although he is "technically" following the rules of the game/zone (capture the towers, make sure the other side doesn't get the towers, kill Alliance/Horde on sight because they're the "bad guys"), corpse camping and killing characters a lot lower than yourself is just not done, unless you want to really tick off the person(s) you're doing it to.
Per my subject-line above, & we ALL know why (and you certainly avoided answering ALL 8, this IS certain):
1.) You came into a thread -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28571315 and said I was speaking of the quote data system @ NASDAQ, & you were unable to show anywhere I had stated that was what I was talking about (& all I ever said was it was the OFFICIAL TRADE DATA DISSEMINATION SYSTEM). YOU EVEN ADMITTED FAULT ON THIS ONE, because you could NOT find my stating what you thought & then, you tried to say I "implied it"... bullshit.
2.) Then, yourself, & a few others began "busting" on Windows & Windows users like myself - &, that's when I provided loads of PROOF of the abilities of the SQLServer 2005 + Windows Server 2003 combination being QUITE capable of 99.999% uptime (which yourself & others like k10quaint said was not doable (@NASDAQ on your part) or possible @ all (k10quaint))
3.) When you asked I prove that SQLServer 2005 + Windows Server 2003 were capable of this, I did so (the best example was XEROX in fact, because it pulls many orders of magnitude MORE transactions-per-day than even NASDAQ does on SQLServer 2003 + Windows Server 2003 (MDDS system))
4.) Then, I also submitted where Ken Richmond (VP of market data systems @ NASDAQ) stated that MDDS did the job PERFECTLY @ NASDAQ for them, AND provided "Enterprise Availability", & both prove that 99.999% uptime is happening there (because YOU CERTAINLY REFUSE TO DEFINE THE TERM PERFECT)
5.) You ran like HELL from my simple question of "DEFINE PERFECT FOR US SPROCKET" & gave me all kinds of garbage & word game semantics b.s., but, that was about it
6.) I then asked that YOU PROVE that NASDAQ's MDDS system was NOT capable of 99.999% uptime - YOU STATED YOU COULD NOT!
(My points in #5 here are a HELL of a lot better & stronger than your providing NOTHING/ZERO/SQUAT/NADA - Were I you? I'd learn to shut your mouth, OR, be able to backup your bullshit next time...)
APK
P.S.=> Then, when I asked what your background is in this field, IF ANY? You skated around that & ignored it, + more in that regards... no, you are going to get a "dose of your own medicine" & I will paste this in EVERY THREAD YOU POST IN, so you know how it feels to get humiliated, AND TROLLED, you troll _Sprocket_... time to put the shoe in the other foot + give you a taste of your own medicine (plus, "the bitter taste of defeat" also - & where everyone everywhere you post sees it also, for your trollery directed MY way here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28571315 ...
Get THIS thru your numb head - Putting words in others mouths they never stated + evading simple questions on your part when I asked them of you is a CLEAR indicator you had to run like the useless troll you are... apk
got insulting
Live and let live. Converse is also true.
Not quite, I started insulting. And specifically to make a point.
If people picking arguments with me are going to post links to their personal information, I'm going to take the opportunity to educate myself.
Yeah, you got mad and got even. Cyber-stalker. :)
You also took my random bad words and replaced them with specific, chosen to be hurtful, descriptions. I'll live, I think, but you didn't respond in kind.
I don't really think of myself as pompous
Well, that "I shouldn't need to tell you, but" thing comes across that way... As does not just calling an asshole an asshole - why bother with fat jokes (which will only hurt sensitive people on the sidelines more than me) when you could have just said I was an ass. It seems like you took that course to look better than me - veiled insults are cooler and all.
Sort of like charging someone with intentional infliction of emotional distress for calling someone's mother a cunt. It's a waste of time (including apparently yours and mine), but that's not to say it doesn't happen.
Yes, but that doesn't mean there's a law against insulting someone, just that malicious prosecution knows no limits.
It's hard to fit all of my views into one line, lesson learned, I was just responding to a guy claiming that you can't charge someone with a crime for insulting you.
Actually he claimed there's no law against it, which I still think is right.
I'm pretty sure that he'd admit you could be charged or sued for doing anything though, but that's not a question of law as much as sleeping with the judge and judicial activism (punishing people they find unsavory despite the law.)
... in virtual worlds the rules can be set by the players themselves. The developers in this context are enablers, rather than Gods passing down "rules".
If those user-driven rules are so important for the gameplay, they should just pass them along to the developers so they can add them to the actual rules. That's what we in the real world call "Laws". If they don't like the way things are they should go play somewhere else. Stupid whining babies...
Hold on. If you are playing COH, and you don't like the way everybody else plays, then why don't you go somewhere else? If COH is not your game, then they already ARE playing somewhere else.
.
The other thing about this is that, yes, the rules allow this guy to be a jackass. They also allow much of what the other players were doing (not counting death threats and trying to get his home address). So why is it ok for a griefer to do anything he can get away with, but wrong for everybody else to treat him like the nuissance he is? Why should everybody else be held to a high standard, while the griefer is held to no standard at all?
I started insulting. And specifically to make a point.
Point taken, I thought you were just being belligerent.
Well, that "I shouldn't need to tell you, but" thing comes across that way...
Hmm.. perhaps that's how I picked up my new freak.
You also took my random bad words and replaced them with specific, chosen to be hurtful, descriptions. I'll live, I think, but you didn't respond in kind.
Well, I'm not going to respond to flaming with more flaming. I prefer a precision strike over carpet-bombing ;) Of course, that's not to imply that I was intentionally trying to inflict emotional distress..
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I believe all this conundrum is a result of the mentality behind MMORPG players. As some other posters mentioned, they use PvP zones as chatrooms and pretty much don't engage in conflict. RPG (MM or not) players seek more of an interactive experience that involves exploration, deep stories and character interactions, which is encouraged by the games' mechanics. It's more of a passive gameform, at least when compared to sports or action multiplayer games where the point is pure competition and fast reflexes, and where insults fly around like nobody's business and it's in good taste to hump a fallen player's corpse.
This collective mindset makes situations like griefers, teamkillers, ragequitters and the like much more scarce, naturally resulting in lots of anxiety from people not used to such an hostile environment.
hahahahahHAHAH look at you obsessive COH/V players ineffectually trying to impugn a professor 100x smarter than all of you combined because you couldn't handle a troll. look how stupid you look finding fault with his methodology because it was """mean""" not because it was wrong in any way (it wasn't).
I'm a long time COX player, and the fact of the matter is what he was doing is considered bad form. COH/COV has clear PVP zones. And only one is really built for what he did, Siren's Call. You can use Teleport Foes to place a foe in front of NPC security drones in certain places. This is kinda rude because NPCs cause experience debt in PVP zones where Players don't. If he was using his own bots or other players, its still a bit rough but within accepted PVP gameplay. Honestly, I've done both. But I reserve droning for people who abuse the Teleport Foe power.
After reading some of the comments it seems that many guys who have suffered such "unorthodox" behavior on the part of their team-mates take the professorÂs experiment really personally.
Obviously any gamer who has ever played any kind of a massive multiplayer online would be instantly capable to predict the results of this experiment.
However, it does not diminish its scientific value, or rather the interesting facts behind it:
1. Independently of their designerÂs plan, massive multiplayers will adopt their own set of social norms.
This is an obvious one if we look at the development in the web in the last decade.
2. These social norms do in fact converge into a larger concept based on fairness and equality, independently on the specifics of the game. (numerous accounts of players on diff. platforms stating largely the same stories).
Meaning that there are more poeple looking for order and certainty than the opposite. The human society is by its nature bound to ascend from chaos into some form of ordered co-existence. Usually no one who enters into a society is ready to engage into merciless competition without any rules. (Is this true, or are the people playing MMoÂs more susceptible to be socially formed / adapted. - perhaps one could argue they are looking for a set of rules to adhere to and a person who isnÂt would behave differently.)
Another interesting question is whether the society values order (certainity) more than fairness. :)
What would happen if the professor after becoming a dominant figure, would propose the weaker guys he was killing, to form an (unsafe) allience and spare them in exchange for them to join his way of playing?
My hypothesis is that a vast majority would join him if he would exert a fairly serious effort to prove his superiority.
The results could hint towards the answer to problems such as, Is the human society bound by its nature to guard moral values, or succumb to the supposed safety of a dictatorship without such. Which might gives us un indication whether our future looks more like the Start Trek, or more like the Chronicles of Riddick.
3. A society left with no means to effectively sanction (exclude) its members will fall into despair and eventually desintegrate.
The fact that people threatened the professor does not by itself prove that they value their "virtual" society as if it was their "physical" society (their state, city, block - guaranteeing their physical safety and social inclusion), although their level of emotional involvement is astonishing. (but anyone who ever played some kind of game with his friends has wittnessed such a behaviour at least once :)
What this means for Game designers is an important lesson and that is, that they should limit the possibility of misbehaviour to the minimum, or offer effective sanctioning mechanisms in the game, otherwise they will be continually loosing community members.
You might say... nothing new about that, but it is interesting to research the group dynamics of virtual communities, perhaps they can point out some interesting facts about real-life communities as well.
vlasto
My friend who played CoH/V for some time made a villain and also used to use the teleport foe power to bring people to the drones to get killed and indebted. I instead used a Stalker (stealth hitter with big opening attack) during the brief time I played.
One constant was the amount of whining in-game. Most PvP MMOs dont allow the two enemy sides to talk to one another to lessen this kind of nerd-rage trash talk, but COH does, for good or for ill.
People would whine when I attacked them (note: with no teleport abilites) because they were just in the zone to 'quest'. Well, it has big warning signs all over it when you enter, and I came here to bash some heroes, not drink tea and discuss politics.
So: in short, each game has a different culture. In WoW, if the character regularly used cheese tactics and ganked regularly, people might dislike him, but the playerbase as a whole is far more tough-skinned. Interestingly, the player base of CoH/V skews to an older set, perhaps one not inured to getting defeated in online games by countless hours of getting spawn killed in twitch shooters.
Nothing new here, CoH is a carebear game. Carebears dont like dying. Period.
Id rather he spent his time on EvE - that is a microcosm of real society and would have been far more interesting.
Not to be offensive, but are you really this stupid?
There are two safe areas on opposite sides of a large map. If a Hero strays too close to the Villain safe area, or vice versa, they get killed by the drones.
They respawn in their own safe area, which happens to contain the exit to the *consensual PVP zone* (emphasis mine)
There is no camping here, which would be kind of a dick move, but due to the robots and the fact you respawn in your own safe guarded area (with egress) its impossible, literally.
Really, CoH/V players are the thinnest skinned Ive ever met on the wild and wooly internets, and thats saying a lot.
Look Society makes the rules, Rules don't necessarily make the society. fact is it is well with in the rules of society to start mowing your lawn at an early hour in the morning. Or to have a vehical with a "Legally allowable" loud engine noise. But your going to tell me that if your neighbor fired up either of these you wouldn't be mad? frankly the whole point of this escapes many of you. This is the guy that at 10 pm fires up his truck and wakes you up after you have pulled a 10 hour shift at work on the 4th day of your week. you live and have no choice in the matter. He is legally allowed by law to have his truck at that noise level. (he had it checked by your DEQ or EPA or what ever you call them) yes he played with in the rules and made people mad. But does that make it right? no. and the Response on the forums isn't much diffrent than real life. I mean heck you might even wonder if a person with no respect for others or consideration for the well being of others you might wonder if he doesn't have a shady past. you might even wander it aloud with someone else. That might not be right but it happens. that is society. And for those saying this is just a GAME? well yes it is only a game. but he is trying to impose real life into the game as if it is an accurate example of online communities. Well to some degree he is right. But only on about 34% of the over all internet I mean this is the internet if you can think about it, it is probably here. My point is that this guy did play with in the rules of the game even by game standards. however that doesn't mean he didn't disrupt someone elses life. are you going to pass the blame to the guy that happens to live next door to the guy with the noisy truck?! please. facts are "LIFE ISN'T FAIR" Life isn't easy, Death is the only Guarentee in life. Live with it or don't.
I was being belligerent, your mistake was assuming it was just that. An unpleasant message and we're all too willing to assume it's empty.
As for freaks/fans, it would be interesting to know which posts inspired them.
That's so cute, you've got two freaks. You could get to know them personally.
Well, I'm not going to respond to flaming with more flaming.
I don't think that's very honest...
I prefer a precision strike over carpet-bombing ;)
I don't think you understand precision then. You attacked fat, unix-geek, etc, all broad categories without any idea of what would bug me. Precision would be doing research and saying, "How you treated your younger brother, that was unconscionable", "by cheating on that test you are showing a lack of character", or something else about ME and my actions, not my body or circumstances.
What you did perpetuated the general climate of mockery and ridicule for the fat, etc. Other people reading this thread will feel worse about themselves because you think fat people are worth mocking. Far more collateral damage than simply telling me what you think of me in even the rudest terms.
But that's pretty much my point about this law again, such as it could be bent to the 'Calling your mom a cunt' angle. It's a way to punish those who say unpopular things, like 'bad' words, and is never applied (could never be) to the people who actually make life miserable for others.
Of course, that's not to imply that I was intentionally trying to inflict emotional distress..
Rather, I think it's exactly what you wanted. (Unix is irrelevant, and I'm fat!?).