the original eq trinity was warrior, cleric, enchanter, dps was just added fancy. sadly most games after eq felt like removing the finesse of crowd control that actually matters, which left us with todays tanks, healer, dps trinity. as far as i can tell it won't change anytime soon, since people love it, even though they always complain, especially mmorpg veterans, people always lean towards the very traditional mmorpgs.
well yes, the interesting part of PD is if it's not a one-shot game, and as you pointed out in reality you will hardly ever face a one-shot. but there is no actual dilemma in a one-shot PD if you only care about yourself (which is what i was answering to), however there is still a dilemma present if you consider empathy and the hope that everyone can work together and be happy (in a real life experiment you will see that in a one-shot PD many people will not choose the dominant strategy even though they're aware of there only being one iteration).
Actually, that's not really 100% either.
In a single play of a prisoner's dilemma, you still don't know what's best because you don't know what your opponent is going to do; you can only hope that he's going to hold his tongue, but since he won't, you'll both rat each other out no matter what.
no, the whole point of it is that every player has one dominating strategy, meaning no matter what the opponent does, this one strategy is always the best. what your opponent does changes your actual win, but in a one-shot PD it never influences your choice.
They've done studies on comparing those who watch The Daily Show with those who watch news on Fox, CNN, and NBC. Those who watch The Daily Show are better informed.
that is not because the daily show broadcasts better/more news, it's because you will only watch and understand the daily show if you have a clue of what is going on in the world and follow the news through reading the paper, online articles and interesting pieces on tv. you can't take someone whose watching fox and sit him in front of tds, hoping that he will now be better informed, because he will not. (he will actually get aggressive, throw something at the tv or at least turn it off)
You say the Daily Show is crap, I say it's not, you quote detailed samples, I use your own samples to point out the equivalent dearth of fact on other shows, and the people reading this thread will probably be left with an impression that more closely approximates reality than they possibly could have by watching a TV show about it.
so what exactly made you say that i think the daily show is crap? the fact that i said "i like it" or that i said "i watch it 4 days a week"? seriously...
i am not attacking the daily show, you can't reply to me by defending what they do and tell me they are the only ones pointing out what ridiculous stunts the news networks pull, i know that, i watch and like the show, remember? what you guys here are saying is that the daily show covers as much news as other media, they don't, they take the most ridiculous pieces out of other news coverage, reports about hilarious events, odd trends and a guest and make 20 minutes out of it.
i do not care if you think tv is not made for news, it doesn't help your case either way, since both the news networks and tds are on tv, so what tv allows for and what not, does not matter in the discussion around tds.
and you are not using my samples for anything, in fact you are straight out ignoring them. show me how the last three tds contain the news of the last six days, because that is what you are defending here, the position of tds as a news broadcast.
lastly i would like to point out that the american news networks are an abomination created by american television, it's not what news is like in general. check a short news section of 20-30 minutes on normal tv (i am not american, i have no clue how your normal channels handle news, just talking from what we have here) and you will see a dense block of news without idiotic comments and unimportant stuff. tds does not want to and never will have that much information in a segment, simply because they_are_not_a_news_brodcast.
that rating is based on the the 2004 dem and rep conventions and one debate, where the daily show didn't report much of anything else than that, so yes i see how you might feel like the daily show isn't too bad for news. but let me just list here what the daily show reported on this week, which should, if it compares to actual news, cover the news from last friday till this wednesday:
the house passing the health care bill
shortage of flu vaccine and who got it first
interview with kit bond
satire about the medias coverage of the 20th anniversary of their coverage of the fall of the berlin wall
report about the use of old footage by fox in a wrong context
interview with serena williams
grateful death archivist
discussing 'blackfacing'
report on the car shortage for demolishen derby
interview with clarence clemons
first of all we can delete all interviews, they are not news, and were hardly interesting at all. then we can remove the coverage of the berlin wall reporting, which was satire of news coverage without any content. blackfacing had nothing to do with news, it's just a social commentary, also the piece about a grateful death archivist can be removed. let's be nice and tag everything else at news, we're left with about 20 minutes of coverage (or 4 reports) for 6 days.
even jon stewart laughs at people who say that the daily show is a replacement for actual news (go search for the quote), i like the show, i like the colbert report, watch them 4 days a week, but they are not news, they do not replace news in any way, they are not meant to and they never will.
it has to be pointed out that the independent review they talk about in the article seems to only look at the link between seasonal flu shots and severe cases of swine flu, while the original study looks to be about the link between seasonal flu shots and swine flu, which is obviously not at all the same thing. obviously there are still a lot of questions around selection bias etc, but there is nothing in the article that would be any indication of it being debunked.
from the article:
Butler-Jones says so far, the independent assessment that it commissioned has found no evidence of a link between seasonal flu shots and severe swine flu.
(...)
"The most important question is: Is the seasonal flu vaccine associated with enhanced severity of disease? And there's no evidence whatsoever from Canadian data that there is," Plummer said, referring to the analysis done by PHAC.
we actually know nothing at all other than that we somehow exist (we don't know if the existance is corporeal), descartes' demon sends greetings. nothing you see has to be true, when you talk to someone, there is no way of knowing that you are actually talking to the person you think you're talking to. still no one goes around and says that he doesn't believe in anything there is because there is no way of actually telling it is true. agnostics should go and check out what an agnostic atheist is and i am sure most of them would see that they aren't really agnostic. if you're agnostic you can't not believe in god, you have to stand absolutely neutral. there are lots of people here posting about them being agnostic but feeling that there is no god. that doesn't work, either you withhold judgment and call yourself an agnostic or you have to pick a side.
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.
there is a lot of stuff going on in that direction. tabula rasa was the first mmorpg to not have auto targeting, many mmorpgs already have cc like stun etc which you optionally use to interrupt your enemy, in the near future champion releases which does have a block ability and then also mortal online which has no targeting and blocking etc, all in first person. the problem imho though is mostly that many people actually do not want this, the fun in mmorpgs is for most players that it's not an fps like combat, where you have to aim and evade all the time, so most of the mmorpgs going in that direction will either fail (like tr) or simply get a niche.
and no, i don't think darkfall was worth mentioning here.
yes 12 million can be wrong, in fact several billions can be wrong. that said, mmorpgs have been stagnating after wow released and most developers are simply trying to get something very similar to wow, in the hope that people will get tired of the wow world and then hop onto another mmorpg that is essentially the same in a different wrap. the few games that have really deviated from wow were all failures (tabula rasa, darkfall). that said, wow wasn't much different from the first generation mmorpgs and simply picked the best elements of each of them and mixed it up, they didn't reinvent the wheel, but arguable made the last "big" successfull step. the actual reason why wow is as popular as it is, has mostly to do with blizzards name in the gaming industry, the popularity of previous warcraft titles and the suction generated by many people playing, sucking in more etc.
also: there are f2p mmorpgs with far higher populations than wow (as far as those are correct) like maplestory and stuff like that, they still suck though.
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?
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.
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.
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.
yes it's almost like in real life where people go around and murder while the rest tries to stop them by throwing them into prison and forcing them to do therapy to change them. or how if you go around being an asshole to everyone they start hating you and will avoid you and try to make you nicer, so that you might actually be able to have a conversation with another human being once in a while. you're right, it is madness. and before someone tells me that the rules of the game are like laws in rl: the game's rules are rules of nature in rl, the player's rules are social contracts which you should abide by, but are able to break, there is no law enforcement because prisons etc are not implemented in mmorpgs.
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...
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.
wait, what? in a prisoner's dilemma mutual cooperation wins every time? what?
i have not ever seen a majority of people choose the communication channel to actually get a reduced sentence for both parties, the usual behavior of a one-run prisoner's dilemma is that nearly everyone chooses egoistically, this mostly even persists over multiple runs in my experience. the only real reason to actually go for a mutual cooperation is if you know that the game will continue for many rounds, else your best chances are to be egoistic and lie to your opponents about your choice (if you have communication, if you don't, then the egoistic route is always the way to go).
i am still waiting for a small tablet with a keyboard on it's back. that might sound kind of crazy and it probably is, but i imagine it being absolutely awesome. a keyboard that doesn't take any additional space and can be used by just normally holding the device, it would be split, one keyboard-half for each hand (stuff that already exists for desktops) and obviously would be rotated some. the only problem is that you can't see it and need to actually know where the keys are, but any frequent user wouldn't have a problem with that, so gimme my tablet with back-keyboard, now!
Slashdot Mirror
the original eq trinity was warrior, cleric, enchanter, dps was just added fancy. sadly most games after eq felt like removing the finesse of crowd control that actually matters, which left us with todays tanks, healer, dps trinity. as far as i can tell it won't change anytime soon, since people love it, even though they always complain, especially mmorpg veterans, people always lean towards the very traditional mmorpgs.
well yes, the interesting part of PD is if it's not a one-shot game, and as you pointed out in reality you will hardly ever face a one-shot. but there is no actual dilemma in a one-shot PD if you only care about yourself (which is what i was answering to), however there is still a dilemma present if you consider empathy and the hope that everyone can work together and be happy (in a real life experiment you will see that in a one-shot PD many people will not choose the dominant strategy even though they're aware of there only being one iteration).
Actually, that's not really 100% either. In a single play of a prisoner's dilemma, you still don't know what's best because you don't know what your opponent is going to do; you can only hope that he's going to hold his tongue, but since he won't, you'll both rat each other out no matter what.
no, the whole point of it is that every player has one dominating strategy, meaning no matter what the opponent does, this one strategy is always the best. what your opponent does changes your actual win, but in a one-shot PD it never influences your choice.
They've done studies on comparing those who watch The Daily Show with those who watch news on Fox, CNN, and NBC. Those who watch The Daily Show are better informed.
that is not because the daily show broadcasts better/more news, it's because you will only watch and understand the daily show if you have a clue of what is going on in the world and follow the news through reading the paper, online articles and interesting pieces on tv. you can't take someone whose watching fox and sit him in front of tds, hoping that he will now be better informed, because he will not. (he will actually get aggressive, throw something at the tv or at least turn it off)
You say the Daily Show is crap, I say it's not, you quote detailed samples, I use your own samples to point out the equivalent dearth of fact on other shows, and the people reading this thread will probably be left with an impression that more closely approximates reality than they possibly could have by watching a TV show about it.
so what exactly made you say that i think the daily show is crap? the fact that i said "i like it" or that i said "i watch it 4 days a week"? seriously...
i am not attacking the daily show, you can't reply to me by defending what they do and tell me they are the only ones pointing out what ridiculous stunts the news networks pull, i know that, i watch and like the show, remember? what you guys here are saying is that the daily show covers as much news as other media, they don't, they take the most ridiculous pieces out of other news coverage, reports about hilarious events, odd trends and a guest and make 20 minutes out of it.
i do not care if you think tv is not made for news, it doesn't help your case either way, since both the news networks and tds are on tv, so what tv allows for and what not, does not matter in the discussion around tds.
and you are not using my samples for anything, in fact you are straight out ignoring them. show me how the last three tds contain the news of the last six days, because that is what you are defending here, the position of tds as a news broadcast.
lastly i would like to point out that the american news networks are an abomination created by american television, it's not what news is like in general. check a short news section of 20-30 minutes on normal tv (i am not american, i have no clue how your normal channels handle news, just talking from what we have here) and you will see a dense block of news without idiotic comments and unimportant stuff. tds does not want to and never will have that much information in a segment, simply because they_are_not_a_news_brodcast.
first of all we can delete all interviews, they are not news, and were hardly interesting at all. then we can remove the coverage of the berlin wall reporting, which was satire of news coverage without any content. blackfacing had nothing to do with news, it's just a social commentary, also the piece about a grateful death archivist can be removed. let's be nice and tag everything else at news, we're left with about 20 minutes of coverage (or 4 reports) for 6 days.
even jon stewart laughs at people who say that the daily show is a replacement for actual news (go search for the quote), i like the show, i like the colbert report, watch them 4 days a week, but they are not news, they do not replace news in any way, they are not meant to and they never will.
it has to be pointed out that the independent review they talk about in the article seems to only look at the link between seasonal flu shots and severe cases of swine flu, while the original study looks to be about the link between seasonal flu shots and swine flu, which is obviously not at all the same thing. obviously there are still a lot of questions around selection bias etc, but there is nothing in the article that would be any indication of it being debunked.
from the article:
Butler-Jones says so far, the independent assessment that it commissioned has found no evidence of a link between seasonal flu shots and severe swine flu.
(...)
"The most important question is: Is the seasonal flu vaccine associated with enhanced severity of disease? And there's no evidence whatsoever from Canadian data that there is," Plummer said, referring to the analysis done by PHAC.
there is no point, opening it would not tell you whether there was a basilisk in it when you were initially asking the question.
we actually know nothing at all other than that we somehow exist (we don't know if the existance is corporeal), descartes' demon sends greetings. nothing you see has to be true, when you talk to someone, there is no way of knowing that you are actually talking to the person you think you're talking to. still no one goes around and says that he doesn't believe in anything there is because there is no way of actually telling it is true. agnostics should go and check out what an agnostic atheist is and i am sure most of them would see that they aren't really agnostic. if you're agnostic you can't not believe in god, you have to stand absolutely neutral. there are lots of people here posting about them being agnostic but feeling that there is no god. that doesn't work, either you withhold judgment and call yourself an agnostic or you have to pick a side.
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.
there is a lot of stuff going on in that direction. tabula rasa was the first mmorpg to not have auto targeting, many mmorpgs already have cc like stun etc which you optionally use to interrupt your enemy, in the near future champion releases which does have a block ability and then also mortal online which has no targeting and blocking etc, all in first person. the problem imho though is mostly that many people actually do not want this, the fun in mmorpgs is for most players that it's not an fps like combat, where you have to aim and evade all the time, so most of the mmorpgs going in that direction will either fail (like tr) or simply get a niche.
and no, i don't think darkfall was worth mentioning here.
yes 12 million can be wrong, in fact several billions can be wrong. that said, mmorpgs have been stagnating after wow released and most developers are simply trying to get something very similar to wow, in the hope that people will get tired of the wow world and then hop onto another mmorpg that is essentially the same in a different wrap. the few games that have really deviated from wow were all failures (tabula rasa, darkfall). that said, wow wasn't much different from the first generation mmorpgs and simply picked the best elements of each of them and mixed it up, they didn't reinvent the wheel, but arguable made the last "big" successfull step. the actual reason why wow is as popular as it is, has mostly to do with blizzards name in the gaming industry, the popularity of previous warcraft titles and the suction generated by many people playing, sucking in more etc.
also: there are f2p mmorpgs with far higher populations than wow (as far as those are correct) like maplestory and stuff like that, they still suck though.
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?
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.
yes those comments are all true, i played cox for some time (5 max level chars) and this study is simply a joke.
chicks dig rebels, he was just trying to score!
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.
he can't, the study is a total joke.
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.
yes it's almost like in real life where people go around and murder while the rest tries to stop them by throwing them into prison and forcing them to do therapy to change them. or how if you go around being an asshole to everyone they start hating you and will avoid you and try to make you nicer, so that you might actually be able to have a conversation with another human being once in a while. you're right, it is madness. and before someone tells me that the rules of the game are like laws in rl: the game's rules are rules of nature in rl, the player's rules are social contracts which you should abide by, but are able to break, there is no law enforcement because prisons etc are not implemented in mmorpgs.
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...
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.
wait, what? in a prisoner's dilemma mutual cooperation wins every time? what?
i have not ever seen a majority of people choose the communication channel to actually get a reduced sentence for both parties, the usual behavior of a one-run prisoner's dilemma is that nearly everyone chooses egoistically, this mostly even persists over multiple runs in my experience. the only real reason to actually go for a mutual cooperation is if you know that the game will continue for many rounds, else your best chances are to be egoistic and lie to your opponents about your choice (if you have communication, if you don't, then the egoistic route is always the way to go).
i am still waiting for a small tablet with a keyboard on it's back. that might sound kind of crazy and it probably is, but i imagine it being absolutely awesome. a keyboard that doesn't take any additional space and can be used by just normally holding the device, it would be split, one keyboard-half for each hand (stuff that already exists for desktops) and obviously would be rotated some. the only problem is that you can't see it and need to actually know where the keys are, but any frequent user wouldn't have a problem with that, so gimme my tablet with back-keyboard, now!
it's not chinese fireworks, it's freedom fireworks!