He also seems to have overlooked animosity and how easy that can yield such threats. Seemingly intense, they really are fairly idle online and under the guise of a character. And not very hero-esk teleporting a villain in front of a robot execution squad. Still, some of those threats do seem a bit too intense but he does sound like he was piratically harassing these people.
"side that oppresses strangers whose behavior strays from that of the mainstream. " Yeah, kinda like RL rapists and cereal murders?
Yet again-- "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.. "
Seriously?! He's upset that people are being peaceful towards each other and fighting nonsensical computers instead of terrorizing each other?
yeah, people online can be jerks, but instead of provoking them he really should come up with an idea that helps foster a player-to-player friendly environment.
"Then members of those boards, in another threatening tactic, launched campaigns to discover and publish Myers' real identity and address. "
Wow, frustration can really push people to the brink ._.
^.^; Sorry, i'm a tad ticked about his conclusions and apparent surprise people would bad mouth him when he acts like a jerk/troll. Either way it is good people are doing research into video game worlds as social experiments, but they just need to be smart about it and find meaningful concepts to explore.
Anonymous online communities facilitate the expression of socially unacceptable behavior of all kinds. His griefing, and the response to it, are both examples of this. I'm not sure what the point of this was.
lol now that i have you guys' perspective i'm pissed at him too.
my first impression was that it was an attempt to see if playing the game in the way the manufacturer advertised it without regard to player-created codes of conduct would elicit a disproportionately violent response from the other players.
i do like the idea that he decided to play a villain by acting like a villain, rather than just picking that class and ending it there. it seems like the type of thing someone new to video games would do.
Wait--I thought he chose a hero and started slaughtering villains? Perhaps to fully go against social standards he acted as an evil hero? Although, to reiterate, his virtual conduct was something that would be appalling in a 'high school click'. He's basically killing people in this virtual world and then acting surprised when people are nasty to him...I mean, don't people have bad attitudes towards murders in the real world?
It's also no new discovery that when people have some form of anonymous guise then they act much worse than they normally do (psych test that got out of hand whit normal people playing the roles of prison guards and prisoners, just the shades given to the 'officers' gave them enough anonymity to humilate those in the roles of prisoners...some study done prolly in the 80's).
How can killing enemies be considered griefing? Sure he's a jackass, but it's the game's fault if it let him and encouraged him to kill villains as a hero. Though I'd consider insulting a hero's mother if you're a villain as much a part of the game as killing a villain if you're a superhero, so he's stupid for complaining, as toast pointed out.
Here's one of urban dictionaries definitions: "2. In online gaming where one repeatedly killing the same individual or individuals over and over again, or camping their corpse to prevent them from retrieving it, or otherwise performing actions in a game to prevent the player from enjoying the game."
That basically fits what he was doing. Kinda imagine a lvl 80 character on a pvp realm who is continuously camping a zone and can't be stopped.
How can killing enemies be considered griefing? Sure he's a jackass, but it's the game's fault if it let him and encouraged him to kill villains as a hero. Though I'd consider insulting a hero's mother if you're a villain as much a part of the game as killing a villain if you're a superhero, so he's stupid for complaining, as toast pointed out.
I can roll a horde on a pvp server and camp stv killing lowbie players who can't fight back. That's well within my rights in the mechanics of the game but it's still considering being a cockface asshole who is griefing.
I can do the same thing at 80 if I'm in full Ulduar gear (or full furious pvp gear) and the person I'm camping is a fresh 80. Still griefing.
How can killing enemies be considered griefing? Sure he's a jackass, but it's the game's fault if it let him and encouraged him to kill villains as a hero. Though I'd consider insulting a hero's mother if you're a villain as much a part of the game as killing a villain if you're a superhero, so he's stupid for complaining, as toast pointed out.
I can roll a horde on a pvp server and camp stv killing lowbie players who can't fight back. That's well within my rights in the mechanics of the game but it's still considering being a cockface asshole who is griefing.
I can do the same thing at 80 if I'm in full Ulduar gear (or full furious pvp gear) and the person I'm camping is a fresh 80. Still griefing.
perhaps this fact is one of the noteworthy things. a player created ToS if you will, a sociological construct that emerged organically, and is worthy of study. i dunno.
WoW encourages world PvP from both a metagame and RP perspective. Your character wants to kill horde, and you get honor for doing it to people close to your level, too. Killing another level 80 over and over isn't griefing in any way, at least as long as you're earning honor for it.
I don't know whether CoH offers any material rewards for doing your job as a villain, but I'd like to think that you can't grief if you're trying to "win" at a game in the way the creators intended it. He's a supervillain who killed a bunch of superheroes. That's totally fine in my book, regardless of how or why he did it.
You get dimishing honor the more you times you kill someone in WoW (until after 4-5 kills, when you get zero). It's been that way since blizzard figured out people consider getting camped by one person for over an hour "griefing."
Face it. Going out of your way to intentionally make someone else have "less fun" in the game is griefing. It doesn't matter if you think you've found a clever way to do it within game mechanics.
Erm. He was a superhero. Maybe along the lines of Captain Hammer with his abuse then.
"But Myers sought out player vs player action, and began hunting down "villains"."
Did the article say he was killing the same people over and over again? I didn't remember that part so much. If he wasn't repeatedly killing villains, or killing really low level dudes, I don't really see that the villains have much to complain about. You buy a game that's billed as good guys vs. bad guys, you shouldn't have to sit down and have tea with them. WoW isn't sold as a distinctly PvP horde vs. alliance game, so it's OK that you can sit down to tea with a cow.
I'm with Toast on this. Intentionally causing grief to someone of a much lesser skill or power than you is griefing and as such a dick move. There's one thing to go on a rampage and kill a bunch of lowbies once or twice. It's another thing to deliberately camp a single player(or group of players) who can clearly not defend himself. Game mechanics be damned, the ultimate point of any game is to let people have fun.
George - they didn't seem to describe in great detail exactly what he did, but he clearly did do enough dick behavior to be fairly viciously attacked by a lot of the community. That's something that generally happens only when people play exploitatively or cheaply, not when they play well.
Aye. They said he was using his 'skill,' but it seems like the way he made his char was a big exploit. (high agility--rocket boots--and he can teleport enemies into an instant death with the click of a single button.) It does state people asked him to not kill them anymore and yet he continued, giving him such notoriety that he was flamed on the forums, both game--based and non. Also lead to hordes of villains teaming up on him, but also ending up dead and him relatively unharmed.
So after reading the actual paper this guy wrote it sounds like he was definitely not using his skill to achieve victories over other players, he was using the most annoying possible mechanics to bother people who were either battling other players, or farming and minding their own business. And he was purposefully ignoring their pleas to stop.
Yea, griefing, in the name of science.
gg.
Also, some of the comments about him from others in game and on their forums are pretty amusing.
So sounds like he crossed the line! I just hope that in CoH there is at least some normal hero vs. villain tension and action going on, and not just people having tea parties.
What bothers me the most is that then he goes on to say how online game communities are all petty groups of people trying to maintain some irrelevant "culture", which he was challenging. It's like, no, you were the asshat who was purposefully trying to ruin everyone's fun.
Does CoH have different types of servers, ones that are more friendly than others? From the consumer perspective, if you can't go online and do as the game advertises, ie. fight villains and real live people, then you're not getting your money's worth. Perhaps as a person new to the MMO-RPG experience you might never know you're breaking some sort of online honor system. I certainly was new to all that sort of thing when I first started WoW, and I needed friends to tell me what sorts of things to expect and how to behave.
I think it's cool that there is a world in which you can choose to pursue your enemies, but there has to be a recourse your victims can take to make it fair.
I needed friends to tell me what sorts of things to expect and how to behave.
That article says that people of his own faction refused to help him when he would get attacked by villains because they thought what he was doing was wrong/inappropriate. That should probably have flagged it for him.
You can be as new as you want to the MMO-RPG experience, but still know what would make the game not fun for other people, as long as you can put yourself in their shoes. Generally, if something that you're doing would be aggravating to you if done to you, you should probably stop.
There's obviously leeway in this, as in when you're actively supposed to be killing other people, like in a set up match for world PvP, or in specific battleground-type environments. But that's a far cry from the griefing this guy pulled.
From the consumer perspective, if you can't go online and do as the game advertises, ie. fight villains and real live people, then you're not getting your money's worth.
This.
I guess the reason I'm reluctant to call it griefing is that whatever it is, it's the result of a poorly designed/marketed game. If I'm playing a game, anything that my character would think is okay to do should be okay to do. It seems ridiculous to me that a supervillain would wake up one day and say "Today, I'm going to go and find people who will not be offended by my actions and hurt them only as much as I can before they will get really angry at me, and I'll try and make sure they have a fair fighting chance before I begin!" But apparently that's how they're all expected to behave?
It is, because ultimately it's a game, and people are trying to have fun. I think it's impossible for a game maker to keep up with all the novelty ways that people can come up with to make life miserable for other players, so it's up to the players to try to find some sort of understanding between each other as to the way the game is intended to be played, especially in the more casual air of just the average MMO player.
I think a good analogy of this is fighting games - very often a fighting game will have at least a character or two that are considered "cheap". Sometimes that only extends to a cheap move or two. Those moves, when used constantly against friends who are just trying to have fun in a game, are considered to be annoying and generally make people not want to play with you. Those moves or characters are in effect considered to be "off limits", unless it's agreed beforehand that they're ok to use. Examples include Link in Soul Calibur 2(GC), Shin Akuma in Street Fighter Alpha 3, or fucking Guile in the original Street Fighter 2. These characters would be, of course, totally allowed in a serious game championship or tournament, but when it comes to just playing around with friends, that sort of mode is generally looked at negatively.
I think when it comes to MMOs, people generally assume that the former, casual, mode is what everyone is operating under, unless otherwise specified, such as in a battleground or arena mode. Thus, using near-exploitative griefing techniques isn't ok - or rather, they can obviously be used, but nobody should be surprised when they're responded to negatively.
From the consumer perspective, if you can't go online and do as the game advertises, ie. fight villains and real live people, then you're not getting your money's worth.
This.
I guess the reason I'm reluctant to call it griefing is that whatever it is, it's the result of a poorly designed/marketed game. If I'm playing a game, anything that my character would think is okay to do should be okay to do. It seems ridiculous to me that a supervillain would wake up one day and say "Today, I'm going to go and find people who will not be offended by my actions and hurt them only as much as I can before they will get really angry at me, and I'll try and make sure they have a fair fighting chance before I begin!" But apparently that's how they're all expected to behave?
The flip side is that anyone who buys this game should also expect not to get griefed or taken advantage of in the name of someone else's enjoyment. I guess the only way this can work would be to give everyone the same abilities and level, which would make things pretty bland.
The analogy we could also draw is comparing this environment to something like playing Quake online. Everyone starts on equal footing, and you acquire the items you need for the timespan of the game. Since games are short, there's not much chance you'll be taking a beating for too long, and games are also thrown together somewhat randomly and somewhat based on your winning record, so you can't be targeted by a higher level player and get griefed. The problem here is that you don't have a persistent world in which you can build your own character.
If they could change CoH or other PvP/PvE hybrid MMO-RPGs so that you could only engage people of equal skill level, someone who had a chance of beating you, and make it so you could only kill them once a week or something, that could solve a lot of the problems?
Tim, don't be obtuse. In any social structure, "doing whatever you want" is not a meaningful justification for action.
If you sit on a street corner blowing spitballs at passers-by, eventually someone's going to beat the fuck out of you for being an asshole or you'll be arrested for harrassment. An online game is like a mini society. There are customs and rules. If you act outside of them, you'll either receive retribution for being a douche, from players, or a ban from enforcers for breaking the rules.
The social aspect and the RP aspect of the game should be separate. The game should let people get immersed in it if they want. Why bother even having a superhero theme if you're not allowed to play a superhero
And uh, there's no RP in real life, so I don't see how that's at all relevant. If you really want to compare, then I'd say yes, people should be allowed to have whatever personality they want in real life as long as they accept the consequences that come within the structure of the game. Last I checked, life wasn't billed as a state of being in which you're supposed to blow spitballs at people. CoH is billed as a game where you're supposed to kill your enemies. If they want to add a jail to the game then that'd be cool, but there shouldn't be any metagame punishment for it.
So again, yes he's a dick, no he didn't do anything that shouldn't be allowed. If the devs have an issue with it, they should talk about changing game mechanics, since a large part of it is their fault.
Furi - I'm not really sure how to fix it. I think the problem is that you want some people to do better than others so they feel good about themselves and want to keep playing the game, but if some people end up always losing it's not really fun. You're totally right about the quake thing - you don't have the chance to reset everyone's stats in an MMO. Though WoW kind of does that with its arena seasons... I guess the key is to give people something to work towards (arena rankings, gear) without letting them be overpowering in random world PvP? I'd probably have a better idea if I had any idea why people enjoy playing on PvP servers.
Vasya - Urrite! There's a couple of things though - 1) In an MMO, the devs always have the option of patching. There's no reason why everyone should operate under house rules all the time. 2) When I'm playing an online game, I'm not playing so that everyone can have fun. I'm usually playing so that I can have fun, or just to win. It's one thing to play with some friends (whether in your house or on a TF2 server you like) and have house rules, but in an MMO I'd like the creators to take care of the mistakes they made in designing the game, especially since they always have the option of patching. As long as they don't do that, they should be responsible for what happens when two people who don't know each other meet and want to start kicking each others' asses. If one of them happens to have rolled a warlock during BC, that's not their fault.
"Cheap" weapons, tactics, characters, whatever, are ultimately the designers' fault, and their responsibility to fix.
I think you're right, Tim, that it's the dev's responsibility to fix. However, it doesn't seem valid to say that if the designers chose not to fix exploits and cheap tactics, you're not responsible to limit them in order for people to still like you.
As we've seen in WoW, people who are assholes may be avoided, but if they're good they still get taken to raids etc. They're just shunned socially and often avoided for less skill-intense endeavors, such as non-cutting-edge raids or simple dungeon runs. So even if you act like a complete troll, you'll probably find people who will play with you in an MMO, but you'll still be the guy that people play with and then immediately degroup when the group is done.
I think the question is - are you allowed to complain about people hating you, if you're doing things that are "legally" within the game's mechanics, but which spoil the fun for other players? The answer as far as I'm concerned, is no. You can still do them and be within your rights to do so. But you will deserve the wrath and derision from the player community that you will inevitably get.
huh. I keep impulsively searching for a "like" button on Ama...too much FB here >.<
As long as a person is having fun and not interrupting other people's fun then they should feel free to play however way they want, but the whole point of an MMO is to play within a community. Breaking their codes of conduct and ruining everyone else's enjoyment is where your personal freedoms find their limits. As it is in America we are supposed to have freedom, yet they are limited when it imposes on others. He is in an area where pvp is possible, but they were not interested in fighting. There's also the alternative to fighting NPC scripted mission there as well so he can still fight alongside people who he wants to. Yeah, the game developers should have fixed that, but he should also oblige the other games who asked him to stop.
Crazy Rambles
Tue, 07/07/2009 - 11:42amHe also seems to have overlooked animosity and how easy that can yield such threats. Seemingly intense, they really are fairly idle online and under the guise of a character. And not very hero-esk teleporting a villain in front of a robot execution squad. Still, some of those threats do seem a bit too intense but he does sound like he was piratically harassing these people.
"side that oppresses strangers whose behavior strays from that of the mainstream. " Yeah, kinda like RL rapists and cereal murders?
Yet again-- "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.. "
Seriously?! He's upset that people are being peaceful towards each other and fighting nonsensical computers instead of terrorizing each other?
yeah, people online can be jerks, but instead of provoking them he really should come up with an idea that helps foster a player-to-player friendly environment.
Crazy Rambles
Tue, 07/07/2009 - 2:17pm"Then members of those boards, in another threatening tactic, launched campaigns to discover and publish Myers' real identity and address. "
Wow, frustration can really push people to the brink ._.
Erm, I'm quoting from: http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university_professor_be.html
the link from your link
^.^; Sorry, i'm a tad ticked about his conclusions and apparent surprise people would bad mouth him when he acts like a jerk/troll. Either way it is good people are doing research into video game worlds as social experiments, but they just need to be smart about it and find meaningful concepts to explore.
15
Tue, 07/07/2009 - 2:27pmHe griefed people and then wrote a thesis where he whined about their reaction to being griefed.
Ah, sociology.
John
Tue, 07/07/2009 - 3:43pmAnonymous online communities facilitate the expression of socially unacceptable behavior of all kinds. His griefing, and the response to it, are both examples of this. I'm not sure what the point of this was.
Fap
Tue, 07/07/2009 - 4:09pmlol now that i have you guys' perspective i'm pissed at him too.
my first impression was that it was an attempt to see if playing the game in the way the manufacturer advertised it without regard to player-created codes of conduct would elicit a disproportionately violent response from the other players.
i do like the idea that he decided to play a villain by acting like a villain, rather than just picking that class and ending it there. it seems like the type of thing someone new to video games would do.
Crazy Rambles
Tue, 07/07/2009 - 6:09pmWait--I thought he chose a hero and started slaughtering villains? Perhaps to fully go against social standards he acted as an evil hero? Although, to reiterate, his virtual conduct was something that would be appalling in a 'high school click'. He's basically killing people in this virtual world and then acting surprised when people are nasty to him...I mean, don't people have bad attitudes towards murders in the real world?
It's also no new discovery that when people have some form of anonymous guise then they act much worse than they normally do (psych test that got out of hand whit normal people playing the roles of prison guards and prisoners, just the shades given to the 'officers' gave them enough anonymity to humilate those in the roles of prisoners...some study done prolly in the 80's).
Eh, sorry for rambling >.<
Timmeh
Tue, 07/07/2009 - 10:33pmHow can killing enemies be considered griefing? Sure he's a jackass, but it's the game's fault if it let him and encouraged him to kill villains as a hero. Though I'd consider insulting a hero's mother if you're a villain as much a part of the game as killing a villain if you're a superhero, so he's stupid for complaining, as toast pointed out.
Qyn
Wed, 07/08/2009 - 6:30amHe neglected to mention the fact that people just don't like being beaten repeatedly. They play games to win, not to lose.
Crazy Rambles
Wed, 07/08/2009 - 6:37amHere's one of urban dictionaries definitions: "2. In online gaming where one repeatedly killing the same individual or individuals over and over again, or camping their corpse to prevent them from retrieving it, or otherwise performing actions in a game to prevent the player from enjoying the game."
That basically fits what he was doing. Kinda imagine a lvl 80 character on a pvp realm who is continuously camping a zone and can't be stopped.
15
Wed, 07/08/2009 - 3:43pmI can roll a horde on a pvp server and camp stv killing lowbie players who can't fight back. That's well within my rights in the mechanics of the game but it's still considering being a cockface asshole who is griefing.
I can do the same thing at 80 if I'm in full Ulduar gear (or full furious pvp gear) and the person I'm camping is a fresh 80. Still griefing.
Fap
Wed, 07/08/2009 - 4:00pmperhaps this fact is one of the noteworthy things. a player created ToS if you will, a sociological construct that emerged organically, and is worthy of study. i dunno.
Vasya
Fri, 07/10/2009 - 6:50pmGod, what an asswad. He fucked with people, got them mad, and them reported them? Fuck that.
Timmeh
Sun, 07/12/2009 - 11:15pmWoW encourages world PvP from both a metagame and RP perspective. Your character wants to kill horde, and you get honor for doing it to people close to your level, too. Killing another level 80 over and over isn't griefing in any way, at least as long as you're earning honor for it.
I don't know whether CoH offers any material rewards for doing your job as a villain, but I'd like to think that you can't grief if you're trying to "win" at a game in the way the creators intended it. He's a supervillain who killed a bunch of superheroes. That's totally fine in my book, regardless of how or why he did it.
15
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 7:17amYou get dimishing honor the more you times you kill someone in WoW (until after 4-5 kills, when you get zero). It's been that way since blizzard figured out people consider getting camped by one person for over an hour "griefing."
Face it. Going out of your way to intentionally make someone else have "less fun" in the game is griefing. It doesn't matter if you think you've found a clever way to do it within game mechanics.
Qyn
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 7:39amI agree with this sentiment. He IS a supervillian, he's not supposed to be nice. >.>
Crazy Rambles
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 7:54amErm. He was a superhero. Maybe along the lines of Captain Hammer with his abuse then.
"But Myers sought out player vs player action, and began hunting down "villains"."
Furiouso
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 8:46amDid the article say he was killing the same people over and over again? I didn't remember that part so much. If he wasn't repeatedly killing villains, or killing really low level dudes, I don't really see that the villains have much to complain about. You buy a game that's billed as good guys vs. bad guys, you shouldn't have to sit down and have tea with them. WoW isn't sold as a distinctly PvP horde vs. alliance game, so it's OK that you can sit down to tea with a cow.
Vasya
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 9:27amI'm with Toast on this. Intentionally causing grief to someone of a much lesser skill or power than you is griefing and as such a dick move. There's one thing to go on a rampage and kill a bunch of lowbies once or twice. It's another thing to deliberately camp a single player(or group of players) who can clearly not defend himself. Game mechanics be damned, the ultimate point of any game is to let people have fun.
George - they didn't seem to describe in great detail exactly what he did, but he clearly did do enough dick behavior to be fairly viciously attacked by a lot of the community. That's something that generally happens only when people play exploitatively or cheaply, not when they play well.
Crazy Rambles
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 9:54amAye. They said he was using his 'skill,' but it seems like the way he made his char was a big exploit. (high agility--rocket boots--and he can teleport enemies into an instant death with the click of a single button.) It does state people asked him to not kill them anymore and yet he continued, giving him such notoriety that he was flamed on the forums, both game--based and non. Also lead to hordes of villains teaming up on him, but also ending up dead and him relatively unharmed.
Fap
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 9:57amsounds like he was able to accomplish something pretty impressive!
15
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 10:51amIn WoW terms--it's basically like he rolled a DK with unlimited Death Grip range and just pulled people to boss level guards.
Qyn
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 11:22amSo after reading the actual paper this guy wrote it sounds like he was definitely not using his skill to achieve victories over other players, he was using the most annoying possible mechanics to bother people who were either battling other players, or farming and minding their own business. And he was purposefully ignoring their pleas to stop.
Yea, griefing, in the name of science.
gg.
Also, some of the comments about him from others in game and on their forums are pretty amusing.
Furiouso
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 11:58amSo sounds like he crossed the line! I just hope that in CoH there is at least some normal hero vs. villain tension and action going on, and not just people having tea parties.
Vasya
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 1:54pmWhat bothers me the most is that then he goes on to say how online game communities are all petty groups of people trying to maintain some irrelevant "culture", which he was challenging. It's like, no, you were the asshat who was purposefully trying to ruin everyone's fun.
Furiouso
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 2:46pmDoes CoH have different types of servers, ones that are more friendly than others? From the consumer perspective, if you can't go online and do as the game advertises, ie. fight villains and real live people, then you're not getting your money's worth. Perhaps as a person new to the MMO-RPG experience you might never know you're breaking some sort of online honor system. I certainly was new to all that sort of thing when I first started WoW, and I needed friends to tell me what sorts of things to expect and how to behave.
I think it's cool that there is a world in which you can choose to pursue your enemies, but there has to be a recourse your victims can take to make it fair.
15
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 2:54pmThat article says that people of his own faction refused to help him when he would get attacked by villains because they thought what he was doing was wrong/inappropriate. That should probably have flagged it for him.
Vasya
Mon, 07/13/2009 - 6:20pmYou can be as new as you want to the MMO-RPG experience, but still know what would make the game not fun for other people, as long as you can put yourself in their shoes. Generally, if something that you're doing would be aggravating to you if done to you, you should probably stop.
There's obviously leeway in this, as in when you're actively supposed to be killing other people, like in a set up match for world PvP, or in specific battleground-type environments. But that's a far cry from the griefing this guy pulled.
Timmeh
Wed, 07/15/2009 - 11:19amThis.
I guess the reason I'm reluctant to call it griefing is that whatever it is, it's the result of a poorly designed/marketed game. If I'm playing a game, anything that my character would think is okay to do should be okay to do. It seems ridiculous to me that a supervillain would wake up one day and say "Today, I'm going to go and find people who will not be offended by my actions and hurt them only as much as I can before they will get really angry at me, and I'll try and make sure they have a fair fighting chance before I begin!" But apparently that's how they're all expected to behave?
Vasya
Wed, 07/15/2009 - 11:34amIt is, because ultimately it's a game, and people are trying to have fun. I think it's impossible for a game maker to keep up with all the novelty ways that people can come up with to make life miserable for other players, so it's up to the players to try to find some sort of understanding between each other as to the way the game is intended to be played, especially in the more casual air of just the average MMO player.
I think a good analogy of this is fighting games - very often a fighting game will have at least a character or two that are considered "cheap". Sometimes that only extends to a cheap move or two. Those moves, when used constantly against friends who are just trying to have fun in a game, are considered to be annoying and generally make people not want to play with you. Those moves or characters are in effect considered to be "off limits", unless it's agreed beforehand that they're ok to use. Examples include Link in Soul Calibur 2(GC), Shin Akuma in Street Fighter Alpha 3, or fucking Guile in the original Street Fighter 2. These characters would be, of course, totally allowed in a serious game championship or tournament, but when it comes to just playing around with friends, that sort of mode is generally looked at negatively.
I think when it comes to MMOs, people generally assume that the former, casual, mode is what everyone is operating under, unless otherwise specified, such as in a battleground or arena mode. Thus, using near-exploitative griefing techniques isn't ok - or rather, they can obviously be used, but nobody should be surprised when they're responded to negatively.
Furiouso
Wed, 07/15/2009 - 3:40pmThe flip side is that anyone who buys this game should also expect not to get griefed or taken advantage of in the name of someone else's enjoyment. I guess the only way this can work would be to give everyone the same abilities and level, which would make things pretty bland.
The analogy we could also draw is comparing this environment to something like playing Quake online. Everyone starts on equal footing, and you acquire the items you need for the timespan of the game. Since games are short, there's not much chance you'll be taking a beating for too long, and games are also thrown together somewhat randomly and somewhat based on your winning record, so you can't be targeted by a higher level player and get griefed. The problem here is that you don't have a persistent world in which you can build your own character.
If they could change CoH or other PvP/PvE hybrid MMO-RPGs so that you could only engage people of equal skill level, someone who had a chance of beating you, and make it so you could only kill them once a week or something, that could solve a lot of the problems?
John
Wed, 07/15/2009 - 3:55pmTim, don't be obtuse. In any social structure, "doing whatever you want" is not a meaningful justification for action.
If you sit on a street corner blowing spitballs at passers-by, eventually someone's going to beat the fuck out of you for being an asshole or you'll be arrested for harrassment. An online game is like a mini society. There are customs and rules. If you act outside of them, you'll either receive retribution for being a douche, from players, or a ban from enforcers for breaking the rules.
Timmeh
Wed, 07/15/2009 - 11:07pmJohn - "whatever you want" Who're you quoting?
The social aspect and the RP aspect of the game should be separate. The game should let people get immersed in it if they want. Why bother even having a superhero theme if you're not allowed to play a superhero
And uh, there's no RP in real life, so I don't see how that's at all relevant. If you really want to compare, then I'd say yes, people should be allowed to have whatever personality they want in real life as long as they accept the consequences that come within the structure of the game. Last I checked, life wasn't billed as a state of being in which you're supposed to blow spitballs at people. CoH is billed as a game where you're supposed to kill your enemies. If they want to add a jail to the game then that'd be cool, but there shouldn't be any metagame punishment for it.
So again, yes he's a dick, no he didn't do anything that shouldn't be allowed. If the devs have an issue with it, they should talk about changing game mechanics, since a large part of it is their fault.
Furi - I'm not really sure how to fix it. I think the problem is that you want some people to do better than others so they feel good about themselves and want to keep playing the game, but if some people end up always losing it's not really fun. You're totally right about the quake thing - you don't have the chance to reset everyone's stats in an MMO. Though WoW kind of does that with its arena seasons... I guess the key is to give people something to work towards (arena rankings, gear) without letting them be overpowering in random world PvP? I'd probably have a better idea if I had any idea why people enjoy playing on PvP servers.
Vasya - Urrite! There's a couple of things though - 1) In an MMO, the devs always have the option of patching. There's no reason why everyone should operate under house rules all the time. 2) When I'm playing an online game, I'm not playing so that everyone can have fun. I'm usually playing so that I can have fun, or just to win. It's one thing to play with some friends (whether in your house or on a TF2 server you like) and have house rules, but in an MMO I'd like the creators to take care of the mistakes they made in designing the game, especially since they always have the option of patching. As long as they don't do that, they should be responsible for what happens when two people who don't know each other meet and want to start kicking each others' asses. If one of them happens to have rolled a warlock during BC, that's not their fault.
"Cheap" weapons, tactics, characters, whatever, are ultimately the designers' fault, and their responsibility to fix.
Vasya
Thu, 07/16/2009 - 7:58amI think you're right, Tim, that it's the dev's responsibility to fix. However, it doesn't seem valid to say that if the designers chose not to fix exploits and cheap tactics, you're not responsible to limit them in order for people to still like you.
As we've seen in WoW, people who are assholes may be avoided, but if they're good they still get taken to raids etc. They're just shunned socially and often avoided for less skill-intense endeavors, such as non-cutting-edge raids or simple dungeon runs. So even if you act like a complete troll, you'll probably find people who will play with you in an MMO, but you'll still be the guy that people play with and then immediately degroup when the group is done.
I think the question is - are you allowed to complain about people hating you, if you're doing things that are "legally" within the game's mechanics, but which spoil the fun for other players? The answer as far as I'm concerned, is no. You can still do them and be within your rights to do so. But you will deserve the wrath and derision from the player community that you will inevitably get.
Timmeh
Thu, 07/16/2009 - 5:48pmI uh, basically agree completely. ^5
15
Fri, 07/17/2009 - 5:48amNO I FUCKING AGREE WITH YOU.
Fap
Fri, 07/17/2009 - 6:51ami'm pretty excited about how passionately people discussed this. i didn't expect it.
Crazy Rambles
Fri, 07/17/2009 - 11:40amhuh. I keep impulsively searching for a "like" button on Ama...too much FB here >.<
As long as a person is having fun and not interrupting other people's fun then they should feel free to play however way they want, but the whole point of an MMO is to play within a community. Breaking their codes of conduct and ruining everyone else's enjoyment is where your personal freedoms find their limits. As it is in America we are supposed to have freedom, yet they are limited when it imposes on others. He is in an area where pvp is possible, but they were not interested in fighting. There's also the alternative to fighting NPC scripted mission there as well so he can still fight alongside people who he wants to. Yeah, the game developers should have fixed that, but he should also oblige the other games who asked him to stop.