Sc2...lacks options? Mass and fling combined with paper rock scissors? I'm sorry, but from those statements alone I would dare to say that you don't know much about Sc2 at all, and are just talking about your initial Bronze league experiences. From the point where people start scouting, counterattacking, dropping and doing timing attacks, that stops being true. And the last time i checked, most players in the higher silver leagues are at that level. From the get go, there are plenty of aggressive builds, cheeses (both economical and agressive ones) you can use to test you oponents defenses. Then there are drops, nyduses, banshees, blueflame hellions, Dts, warp prisms, burrowed infestors and all sorts of shenanigans you can go for that test your opponent in many different ways, are not countered by any conceivable stretch of a rock paper scissors mentality, and whose effectiveness depends on how you control what information your opponent gets. I mean theres a game of TLO (a famous western progamer) vs a protoss where he beats the protoss with just marines and medivacs, with the protoss going colossus, a "counter" (although that word is only meaningfull at the very low levels of play) to marines. He beats the protoss by being agressive, dropping, having great map awareness, having a more mobile army, by making great timing attacks, and by micromanaging his units, where does that fit into your "mass and fling rock paper scissors" mentality?
Most people who are new to the game play it in a ball vs ball fashion simply because they are afraid to move their units out of their base, and are not aware of what options are open to them. The tragedy here is that so many people think Starcraft2 is a ball vs ball game, because they think thats the way it is supposed to be played, and thus never explore beyond that. Starcraft2 is a game where the depth lies in how you use your units, and not the units themselves, and that is incredibly hard for many to see.
I watched the full 39 minutes of unedited footage as a response to your comment, to see if it was warranted. Seeing the full picture and comparing it with what the edited video offered, im almost under the impression that your assesement of "how hard troops try to miss civillians" is pure fantasy.
First and foremost the full picture after seeing the whole video, emerges as the following: Firefight takes place between ground troops and insurgents Gun ship swoops in to survey the area Gun ship finds groups of people that carry objects that could be interpreted as weapons (and this is by NO means clear) Gun ship shoots the shit out of said people, in a style that is best described as "spray and pray" Van that was seen a couple of moments earlier comes around and tries to pick up bodies, the gun ship shoots the shit out of it as well Troops comes around, finds some ammo and wounded children Gun ship keeps looking around, sees some people gathering in a local building that appears to be abandoned Gun ship fires a grand total of 3 missiles at said building and blows it up
In no parts of this video, was there a single moment that indicated that the soldiers were trying to miss anything, let alone civillians. In fact, I cant even recall a single mention of the word (although that may be just an overlook on my part). Additionally, when they fire their first missile at the building mentioned earlier (happens around 34 minutes into the video i believe), theres a seemingly unrelated person strolling by in front of it, who is obviously killed in the following blast, and is NOT EVEN MENTIONED. The guy in gunship is so trigger horny that he does not mention that theres an unidentified and seemingly unrelated target walking in the middle of his sights, like that person was not even a factor to consider mentioning.
I'm more shocked now then I was before. This has even made me consider the possibility that (some or many - undecided on that part) American soldiers honestly don't give a shit about civilians, and are more concerned with shooting at every possible target like it would level up their CoD character.
Just so you know here's the general outline of WoWs history with cheating, botting, and such:
Hacks, cheating and such: Basically a guaranteed ban if you use them more then two or three times. The detection system for any forms of cheat is extremely strong and the times you can actually use cheats for anything usefull are extremely rare (and even more rarely worth the inevitable ban). This part was quite strong from the very beginning and really hasn't changed that much.
Duping: There have been mythical tales floating around from time to time about mysterious duping methods, however I've never found anything that has actually worked, or to be confirmed to have been working at a certain point. For all I know, there's never been a single purposefull sucessful dupe anywhere in WoW, ever.
Botting: Botting was to some degree prevalent early in WoWs history. However, botting has always been dangerous due to extremely agressive stance the playerbase has towards it. Although botting is somewhat hard to detect by an automated mechanism of some sort, it is extremely easy to spot a player using bots from a player perspective, and when you spot some character botting the shit out of your quest mobs, all you have to do is report him to a gm, grab your opposing faction character and have some fun with his scripts while you wait for his imminent ban. Also, due to how the loot aquisition system in WoW works (Bind on pickup etc..), its extremely difficult to use botting for something that would net you significant amount of cash, unlike in D2. Also, blizzard sucessfully sued the maker of a popular bot program, and have been quite good at weeding out botters even without players reporting them. Before i quit a while ago, i hadn't seen a botter in several months.
Due to the online nature of the game, the inability to trade any decent high level items (with certain exceptions), the price of each account (and thus the effectivity of bans), and the complexity of the encounters that drop the good stuff, any form of cheating in WoW has always been a non issue. There have been "exploits" (the exploitation of bugs or flawed game mechanics) that have from time to time inspired controversy in the community, but those almost always used for selfish purposes that do not affect the playerbase of your server in any way. Relative to the economy destroying disasters in D2, WoW has been a game almost free of any form of cheating, with the occasional exploits more often being fun then harmfull.
Now, D2 was full of problems related to cheating because it was made at the dawn of online gaming, the dawn of MMOs. D2s online part was an early attempt at a fully integrated online component, and was perhaps a little too successfull for its own good. Alot of the problems to come were not foreseen in that period, and alot of the problems that arised could not be dealt with in any meaningfull manner without making massive and time consuming changes to a game that was probabbly not planned to last as long as it has anyways. The problems you complain about, the ones you call out as evidence of Blizzard not "caring" about their customers, were all failed attempts at solving an unsolveable problem, but at least there were attempts, however misguided they may have been. Also, for a company that cares so little about its customers, it's funny how they are still updating D2, a positively ancient game with no concievable further profits, even today (the last patch came out a few months ago). Hell, they are even mantaining the old battle net infrastructure to keep supporting D2, which at this point would cost more money then D2 could possibly still bring in. If anything, the history of blizzard with D2 shows a company that not only cares, but also rutinely hands out free hugs and kisses to its playerbase. Being unable to deal with a technical difficulty is a measure of incompetence, and not evidence of them not caring about their players. Luckily, as seen above, they seemed to learn from their mistakes and eliminate that technical difficulty from any future game of theirs. Funny how that works, innit.
I think you all misunderstand what a skinner box is, or at least, you are not using the expression in the right way. A skinner box is designed to promote one kind of behaviour by offering a reward for "doing the right thing" (or removing a reward / adding negative stimulus for doing the "wrong thing"). A pigeon for example, can be learned to do a little spin by offering it a reward every time it turns around, and thus learning it that turning around = food and thus = good. Now, what do kids get after getting their mouth examined by a stranger with icky gloves? Well, a reward of course! aaand I guess you can see where im going with this from now on.
The point is that a skinner box is just a demonstration of a basic mechanism on how we learn behaviour. You could say that every form of activity that involves a reward has some skinnerian elements to it, and as thus you could even make the point that society is in reality a giant skinner box. Making the argument that something is a skinner box is a moot point because all it really implies is that that something involves learning through some arbitrary reward mechanisms. You might say that WoW as a skinner box is "bad" because it promotes certain kinds of behaviour that might interfere with the already learned "good" behaviour (which you got from the society around you). However using the term "skinner box" as a descriptive term of an activity such as playing WoW, is in essence completely meaningless. You could also say that the term skinner box is used to describe something which reduces the reward-behaviour relation to its simplest form, and is thus for some arbitrary reason "bad". However, very simple mechanisms are involved in alot of the learning we do (like previously mentioned reward from dentist), although it is not easily visible as we tend not to regard our own existence, in a particular society, as a closed environment the same way many do with WoW, and thus do not see the same relation with the clean, sterile and calculated skinner box.
Also, i would like to comment on the argument made earlier, where it was said that WoW was in fact a skinner box because it discouraged not playing. Personally I think this comment is completely invalid on the subject of WoW because it concerns social interaction as a whole, and not WoW in particular. Yes, WoW "uses" social elements to keep you playing, but that is due to the social interactions occuring within the game, and not the game itself. Ironically, once you reach a certain part in WoW (i.e the max level) you could basically wait for an entire expansion, and then be on equal footing with everyone else as gear is effectively wiped and everyone starts from scratch (this point is lessened somewhat by the permanence of achievements, collected mounts, pets and such vanity items, but interest in these is socially driven and not what one would call a "core" feature of the game). One could thus say that to some degree the game rewards not playing at max level.
Well actually, a friend of mine recently visited a scientist friend of his working at the LHC. He is pretty "high up" in terms of decisionmaking and excecutive decision (can't recall specifically where he stood). He reported that he was strongly suggesting quitting his work there, and work somewhere else because of serious administrative difficulties. Apparently one of the chief excecutives didn't even attend critical meetings because he feared the scientists reactions.
Of course, this does not mean that the LHC is in serious trouble, but they are definitively having some administrative difficulties right now, and we will probabbly have to wait for a while for those wonderfull results that the LHC is to produce.
And again, this isn't an official report... It is possible and even likely that my friend and me have a distorted view on this situation (albeit slight).
I'm not really referring to the OP here, as it looks like his post is something that should have been modded "Funny", but was modded "Insightful" by people who misunderstand what he was saying. But to you who are so stuck up in your romantic ideas that you believe that what you define as "fresh air" holds some sort of magical spell that makes everything so much better and morally "correct", let me tell you something:
Life is not short, life is not long. Life is life, and everyone, wether they never go out of their basement, or got a nobel price, are equally successful at it. In the end were all corpses, and all the memes and ideas we thought were so meaningful disappear with the rest of your consciousness. Now, stop looking down at people, any people, and especially wow players. By many of the ways that you think you can measure success, they are more successful then you. They socialize more then you do, albeit in a different environment, they have more of what you define as "fun" then you do, although some are more or less mentally addicted to some of the notions with the game. Your narrow minded definition of what is good and what is bad is simply wrong, and just because you don't understand that socialization is not something that disappears just because one does not only do it in what you and others paradoxically termed "Real Life", you are not in any measure generally more successful then those who do play an MMORPG. You are as little and as much meaningful as everyone else, and you are by no means justified in judging others as "wasting" what you call "Life".
*Sigh of relief*
Now that that is out of the way, let me say that i do not hate you, the person to which i reply. I hate the mindset of which that statement generally belongs. Although what i am saying is somewhat paradoxical as i am actually judging people when expressing my emotions about one type of judgement, i felt that this approach was best to get my feelings about that statement across.
And for the record, i played WoW since launch, quitting a year ago. When the last of my IRL friends decided to quit i quit as well, and left an avatar to which i had devoted much time, some of the nicest people i had ever met, and an universe in which i had had a much more rewarding experience than i ever would have had if i never would have played at all. During my WoW playing period, i still went out with my friends, i did not fail at school, and i still went to and arranged parties, even though i didn't find them very fun. However I recognized that i wanted to expand my social network, and socializing "IRL" was by no means something that i was bad at.
Please, abandon the idea that playing WoW equates to the lack of "Life", and that "life" can in fact be lacked. Throw it in a dumpster, smash it with a spade and please set it on fire, and while your at it, throw some of the ideas that that meme brings with as well, especially the idea that fresh air is and has been better then it's opposite (whatever that is). Such ideas just make me so angry, and forces me to post long inflammatory and self righteous posts on a comment section that would otherwise be filled with WoW speak, which is really quite embarrassing.
I think only the structure of the scales was actually known, sharks raising them to obtain a different skin texture is the new part here. I bet all those athletes who paid handsomely for their "shark scale" suits are regretting that purchase just about, now.
Well actually, there is an international school organization, the IBO (International Baccalaureate Organization) that has community work as a mandatory requirement for one to obtain ones diploma. This has actually been a massive success for both the students and the surrounding community, and note that IB schools are stationed pretty much all over the world. There is no forcing involved, so the students can choose to do whatever they want, as long as it is an "approved" activity (note that the only restrictions on "approved" is wether your so called "CAS supervisor" thinks it makes sense as community work). Students must take responsibility for doing 50 hours of community work themselves, and if they don't, they have to wait an extra year for their diploma... Sure, it may be a little tedious, as the IB program is already hard-mode education, but most people i know feel that at the end of the day, they get something out of it.
The point I'm trying to get through here, is not that we should worship the IBO, but that there's other ways to make people do community work then forcing them rake the principals garden. Through proper organization, students can be "motivated" to do it themselves, and with a proper structure around it they can easily conjure the means to do so.
Maybe this is not very realistic, as IB schools are filled with mostly motivated students who diligently care about their education. I can't pretend to know much about US students, but if community work becomes a proper part of school culture, it shouldn't be as uncomfortable as you make it sound to carry out that work. As long as it is something that is expected from the community, people should be more "Primed" to participating to such activities. As long as it is not so
And for students with social anxiety, i don't see how service work is less of a nightmare then going to school altogether. It doesn't even have to be much of a nightmare at all, as long as one has the freedom to do work that doesn't require much social interaction. I also don't see why some people having social disorders should be an argument against a nation wide project to help the community. Quite frankly those disorders cause grief in whatever social context you may find yourself, and it's the condition that's the problem, not the society around it. It's like saying that stairs shouldn't exist because claustrophobic wheelchair users struggle with elevators. It is, if i may allow myself to be so insolent, a quite retarded thing to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Sc2...lacks options? Mass and fling combined with paper rock scissors?
I'm sorry, but from those statements alone I would dare to say that you don't know much about Sc2 at all, and are just talking about your initial Bronze league experiences. From the point where people start scouting, counterattacking, dropping and doing timing attacks, that stops being true. And the last time i checked, most players in the higher silver leagues are at that level. From the get go, there are plenty of aggressive builds, cheeses (both economical and agressive ones) you can use to test you oponents defenses. Then there are drops, nyduses, banshees, blueflame hellions, Dts, warp prisms, burrowed infestors and all sorts of shenanigans you can go for that test your opponent in many different ways, are not countered by any conceivable stretch of a rock paper scissors mentality, and whose effectiveness depends on how you control what information your opponent gets. I mean theres a game of TLO (a famous western progamer) vs a protoss where he beats the protoss with just marines and medivacs, with the protoss going colossus, a "counter" (although that word is only meaningfull at the very low levels of play) to marines. He beats the protoss by being agressive, dropping, having great map awareness, having a more mobile army, by making great timing attacks, and by micromanaging his units, where does that fit into your "mass and fling rock paper scissors" mentality?
Most people who are new to the game play it in a ball vs ball fashion simply because they are afraid to move their units out of their base, and are not aware of what options are open to them. The tragedy here is that so many people think Starcraft2 is a ball vs ball game, because they think thats the way it is supposed to be played, and thus never explore beyond that. Starcraft2 is a game where the depth lies in how you use your units, and not the units themselves, and that is incredibly hard for many to see.
I watched the full 39 minutes of unedited footage as a response to your comment, to see if it was warranted.
Seeing the full picture and comparing it with what the edited video offered, im almost under the impression that your assesement of "how hard troops try to miss civillians" is pure fantasy.
First and foremost the full picture after seeing the whole video, emerges as the following:
Firefight takes place between ground troops and insurgents
Gun ship swoops in to survey the area
Gun ship finds groups of people that carry objects that could be interpreted as weapons (and this is by NO means clear)
Gun ship shoots the shit out of said people, in a style that is best described as "spray and pray"
Van that was seen a couple of moments earlier comes around and tries to pick up bodies, the gun ship shoots the shit out of it as well
Troops comes around, finds some ammo and wounded children
Gun ship keeps looking around, sees some people gathering in a local building that appears to be abandoned
Gun ship fires a grand total of 3 missiles at said building and blows it up
In no parts of this video, was there a single moment that indicated that the soldiers were trying to miss anything, let alone civillians. In fact, I cant even recall a single mention of the word (although that may be just an overlook on my part). Additionally, when they fire their first missile at the building mentioned earlier (happens around 34 minutes into the video i believe), theres a seemingly unrelated person strolling by in front of it, who is obviously killed in the following blast, and is NOT EVEN MENTIONED. The guy in gunship is so trigger horny that he does not mention that theres an unidentified and seemingly unrelated target walking in the middle of his sights, like that person was not even a factor to consider mentioning.
I'm more shocked now then I was before. This has even made me consider the possibility that (some or many - undecided on that part) American soldiers honestly don't give a shit about civilians, and are more concerned with shooting at every possible target like it would level up their CoD character.
Just so you know here's the general outline of WoWs history with cheating, botting, and such:
Hacks, cheating and such: Basically a guaranteed ban if you use them more then two or three times. The detection system for any forms of cheat is extremely strong and the times you can actually use cheats for anything usefull are extremely rare (and even more rarely worth the inevitable ban). This part was quite strong from the very beginning and really hasn't changed that much.
Duping: There have been mythical tales floating around from time to time about mysterious duping methods, however I've never found anything that has actually worked, or to be confirmed to have been working at a certain point. For all I know, there's never been a single purposefull sucessful dupe anywhere in WoW, ever.
Botting: Botting was to some degree prevalent early in WoWs history. However, botting has always been dangerous due to extremely agressive stance the playerbase has towards it. Although botting is somewhat hard to detect by an automated mechanism of some sort, it is extremely easy to spot a player using bots from a player perspective, and when you spot some character botting the shit out of your quest mobs, all you have to do is report him to a gm, grab your opposing faction character and have some fun with his scripts while you wait for his imminent ban. Also, due to how the loot aquisition system in WoW works (Bind on pickup etc..), its extremely difficult to use botting for something that would net you significant amount of cash, unlike in D2.
Also, blizzard sucessfully sued the maker of a popular bot program, and have been quite good at weeding out botters even without players reporting them. Before i quit a while ago, i hadn't seen a botter in several months.
Due to the online nature of the game, the inability to trade any decent high level items (with certain exceptions), the price of each account (and thus the effectivity of bans), and the complexity of the encounters that drop the good stuff, any form of cheating in WoW has always been a non issue. There have been "exploits" (the exploitation of bugs or flawed game mechanics) that have from time to time inspired controversy in the community, but those almost always used for selfish purposes that do not affect the playerbase of your server in any way. Relative to the economy destroying disasters in D2, WoW has been a game almost free of any form of cheating, with the occasional exploits more often being fun then harmfull.
Now, D2 was full of problems related to cheating because it was made at the dawn of online gaming, the dawn of MMOs. D2s online part was an early attempt at a fully integrated online component, and was perhaps a little too successfull for its own good. Alot of the problems to come were not foreseen in that period, and alot of the problems that arised could not be dealt with in any meaningfull manner without making massive and time consuming changes to a game that was probabbly not planned to last as long as it has anyways. The problems you complain about, the ones you call out as evidence of Blizzard not "caring" about their customers, were all failed attempts at solving an unsolveable problem, but at least there were attempts, however misguided they may have been. Also, for a company that cares so little about its customers, it's funny how they are still updating D2, a positively ancient game with no concievable further profits, even today (the last patch came out a few months ago). Hell, they are even mantaining the old battle net infrastructure to keep supporting D2, which at this point would cost more money then D2 could possibly still bring in.
If anything, the history of blizzard with D2 shows a company that not only cares, but also rutinely hands out free hugs and kisses to its playerbase. Being unable to deal with a technical difficulty is a measure of incompetence, and not evidence of them not caring about their players. Luckily, as seen above, they seemed to learn from their mistakes and eliminate that technical difficulty from any future game of theirs. Funny how that works, innit.
Enjoy your spin...which you will be getting aproximately 10 years from now.
Btw, cataclysm nerfs burst damage, has much higher health pools, and nerfs rogue CC.
Problem solved!
WoW is juts a Skinner Box for humans.
What isn't?
Going to the dentist.
NOT going to the dentist is.
I think you all misunderstand what a skinner box is, or at least, you are not using the expression in the right way.
A skinner box is designed to promote one kind of behaviour by offering a reward for "doing the right thing" (or removing a reward / adding negative stimulus for doing the "wrong thing"). A pigeon for example, can be learned to do a little spin by offering it a reward every time it turns around, and thus learning it that turning around = food and thus = good.
Now, what do kids get after getting their mouth examined by a stranger with icky gloves? Well, a reward of course! aaand I guess you can see where im going with this from now on.
The point is that a skinner box is just a demonstration of a basic mechanism on how we learn behaviour. You could say that every form of activity that involves a reward has some skinnerian elements to it, and as thus you could even make the point that society is in reality a giant skinner box. Making the argument that something is a skinner box is a moot point because all it really implies is that that something involves learning through some arbitrary reward mechanisms. You might say that WoW as a skinner box is "bad" because it promotes certain kinds of behaviour that might interfere with the already learned "good" behaviour (which you got from the society around you). However using the term "skinner box" as a descriptive term of an activity such as playing WoW, is in essence completely meaningless.
You could also say that the term skinner box is used to describe something which reduces the reward-behaviour relation to its simplest form, and is thus for some arbitrary reason "bad". However, very simple mechanisms are involved in alot of the learning we do (like previously mentioned reward from dentist), although it is not easily visible as we tend not to regard our own existence, in a particular society, as a closed environment the same way many do with WoW, and thus do not see the same relation with the clean, sterile and calculated skinner box.
Also, i would like to comment on the argument made earlier, where it was said that WoW was in fact a skinner box because it discouraged not playing. Personally I think this comment is completely invalid on the subject of WoW because it concerns social interaction as a whole, and not WoW in particular. Yes, WoW "uses" social elements to keep you playing, but that is due to the social interactions occuring within the game, and not the game itself. Ironically, once you reach a certain part in WoW (i.e the max level) you could basically wait for an entire expansion, and then be on equal footing with everyone else as gear is effectively wiped and everyone starts from scratch (this point is lessened somewhat by the permanence of achievements, collected mounts, pets and such vanity items, but interest in these is socially driven and not what one would call a "core" feature of the game). One could thus say that to some degree the game rewards not playing at max level.
Well actually, a friend of mine recently visited a scientist friend of his working at the LHC. He is pretty "high up" in terms of decisionmaking and excecutive decision (can't recall specifically where he stood).
He reported that he was strongly suggesting quitting his work there, and work somewhere else because of serious administrative difficulties.
Apparently one of the chief excecutives didn't even attend critical meetings because he feared the scientists reactions.
Of course, this does not mean that the LHC is in serious trouble, but they are definitively having some administrative difficulties right now, and we will probabbly have to wait for a while for those wonderfull results that the LHC is to produce.
And again, this isn't an official report... It is possible and even likely that my friend and me have a distorted view on this situation (albeit slight).
*Sigh*
The expression "life" has gotten some funny co-notations these days.
Today, it is possible to not have a "life" actually, and being judged to "waste" it by doing something someone infected with clichés and stereotypes doesn't understand.
I'm not really referring to the OP here, as it looks like his post is something that should have been modded "Funny", but was modded "Insightful" by people who misunderstand what he was saying. But to you who are so stuck up in your romantic ideas that you believe that what you define as "fresh air" holds some sort of magical spell that makes everything so much better and morally "correct", let me tell you something:
Life is not short, life is not long. Life is life, and everyone, wether they never go out of their basement, or got a nobel price, are equally successful at it. In the end were all corpses, and all the memes and ideas we thought were so meaningful disappear with the rest of your consciousness.
Now, stop looking down at people, any people, and especially wow players. By many of the ways that you think you can measure success, they are more successful then you. They socialize more then you do, albeit in a different environment, they have more of what you define as "fun" then you do, although some are more or less mentally addicted to some of the notions with the game. Your narrow minded definition of what is good and what is bad is simply wrong, and just because you don't understand that socialization is not something that disappears just because one does not only do it in what you and others paradoxically termed "Real Life", you are not in any measure generally more successful then those who do play an MMORPG. You are as little and as much meaningful as everyone else, and you are by no means justified in judging others as "wasting" what you call "Life".
*Sigh of relief*
Now that that is out of the way, let me say that i do not hate you, the person to which i reply. I hate the mindset of which that statement generally belongs. Although what i am saying is somewhat paradoxical as i am actually judging people when expressing my emotions about one type of judgement, i felt that this approach was best to get my feelings about that statement across.
And for the record, i played WoW since launch, quitting a year ago. When the last of my IRL friends decided to quit i quit as well, and left an avatar to which i had devoted much time, some of the nicest people i had ever met, and an universe in which i had had a much more rewarding experience than i ever would have had if i never would have played at all. During my WoW playing period, i still went out with my friends, i did not fail at school, and i still went to and arranged parties, even though i didn't find them very fun. However I recognized that i wanted to expand my social network, and socializing "IRL" was by no means something that i was bad at.
Please, abandon the idea that playing WoW equates to the lack of "Life", and that "life" can in fact be lacked. Throw it in a dumpster, smash it with a spade and please set it on fire, and while your at it, throw some of the ideas that that meme brings with as well, especially the idea that fresh air is and has been better then it's opposite (whatever that is).
Such ideas just make me so angry, and forces me to post long inflammatory and self righteous posts on a comment section that would otherwise be filled with WoW speak, which is really quite embarrassing.
I think only the structure of the scales was actually known, sharks raising them to obtain a different skin texture is the new part here.
I bet all those athletes who paid handsomely for their "shark scale" suits are regretting that purchase just about, now.
Well actually, there is an international school organization, the IBO (International Baccalaureate Organization) that has community work as a mandatory requirement for one to obtain ones diploma. This has actually been a massive success for both the students and the surrounding community, and note that IB schools are stationed pretty much all over the world.
There is no forcing involved, so the students can choose to do whatever they want, as long as it is an "approved" activity (note that the only restrictions on "approved" is wether your so called "CAS supervisor" thinks it makes sense as community work). Students must take responsibility for doing 50 hours of community work themselves, and if they don't, they have to wait an extra year for their diploma...
Sure, it may be a little tedious, as the IB program is already hard-mode education, but most people i know feel that at the end of the day, they get something out of it.
The point I'm trying to get through here, is not that we should worship the IBO, but that there's other ways to make people do community work then forcing them rake the principals garden.
Through proper organization, students can be "motivated" to do it themselves, and with a proper structure around it they can easily conjure the means to do so.
Maybe this is not very realistic, as IB schools are filled with mostly motivated students who diligently care about their education. I can't pretend to know much about US students, but if community work becomes a proper part of school culture, it shouldn't be as uncomfortable as you make it sound to carry out that work. As long as it is something that is expected from the community, people should be more "Primed" to participating to such activities. As long as it is not so
And for students with social anxiety, i don't see how service work is less of a nightmare then going to school altogether. It doesn't even have to be much of a nightmare at all, as long as one has the freedom to do work that doesn't require much social interaction. I also don't see why some people having social disorders should be an argument against a nation wide project to help the community. Quite frankly those disorders cause grief in whatever social context you may find yourself, and it's the condition that's the problem, not the society around it. It's like saying that stairs shouldn't exist because claustrophobic wheelchair users struggle with elevators. It is, if i may allow myself to be so insolent, a quite retarded thing to say.