Science Discovers That MMOG Players Are Jerks

[NeutralDrow]

See, this is why I like Fiesta. Yeah, its not the best game out there, but I haven't heard of any other MMORPG in which people +45 in levels consistently go to the newbie area and buff and give out freebies and welcomes.

Then you've never played City of Heroes. Most of the higher-level people I've encountered in the game (the ones that aren't powerleveled noobs) are very kind to newbies.

It's part of what the whole "sidekick/exemplar" system is meant to encourage, and while the market added in Issue 10 probably lowered random generosity with Influence (in-game currency) by a little bit - simply by being a large, helpful money sink - it also added more stuff to the game as viable gifts.

 

[foamfollower]

so he goes around greifing folks and takes them getting mad as 'scientific proof' that they are jerks, hmmm very empirical.

i agree that mmo's are full of jerks but what he did sounds like the equivalent of running around tormenting koalas until they bit him and calling it proof that koalas are vicious predators.

 

[Singularly Datarific]

We REALLY needed science to come to this conclusion? I mean, come on..

It's like using metaphysics to show that trees are green.
It provides backing against the few heretics, but that won't change them.

 

[Bigsmith]

Wow, honestly here, playing a game for its original purpose is new on me :S! (I joke)

This guy took some shit, and this shit is normaly avoided in the well run Mmos with only some dedicated servers allowing mass PvP, such as those on WoW, and chosing them normaly prevents u from having to meet the Jerks that don't like PvP.

I personaly Don't give a crap. If some one in a Pvp zone ran up and killed me cause i wasn't as strong. I would just go 'Meh' go and get a few people 2gether and fight back. Then the Horde we would jump on would also get more friends and there would be a small blood brawl. Thats the beauty of the new PvP only area on every server .

This guy is a hero. He trolls them just by playing purely by the book, dominates the servers, and then writes a paper on his trolling of them.

I totaly second that.. unless ur being sarcy.

 

[leviathanmisha]

Yeah, but I've seen people who get so worked up in-game, they throw a fit IRL. I know one such person. We were playing a game together, I PK-ed him cause he was trying to PK me, he yelled at me and called me several colorful adjectives. I told him to knock it off, and he screamed at me some more. I've learned that ppl lose their cool too easily over video games, I only get po-ed at the ppl who can't bother to play the game the way it's supposed to be played.

 

[Irandrura]

haha i think i have just typed a whole chunk of nonsense which i dun think is entirely coherent. for this i apologize. but please can we stop discussing who is a jerk or who is right cuz that is NOT the whole point of TRIXT. I repeat, TRIXT is here to demonstrate to us the natural divergence between System Laws (authorities) and Society Norms/Cultures/Rules (How to live peacefully with ur neighbours)

No, that all made sense, though judging from the posts immediately following yours, people are more interested in assigning blame on the 'jerkishness' front than this...

I'm not really surprised, though it is a shame how people can fixate on something like that. As I see it, you need to read, think, understand, and then post. I get the impression most people haven't read the paper linked in the Escapist article.

 

[keyton777]

huh, reminds me of my first 5 guilds in WoW, kinda like a wannabee highschool gang, i thought it was funny, and really sad

 

[Nageck]

Did the guy who wrote this article actually read Twixt's? The guy was playing like an a-hole. He was using cheap tactics, attacking in ONE SPECIFIC AREA that was deemed a no-fight zone (to make it easier for players to grind), and attacking during spectator fights. Now maybe the community overreacted, but by the way the guy described what he was doing I could see why they were mad.

 

[SsilverR]

sometimes small, tight communities seem to think that they run things and can set the standards .. this guy was basically their cold shower of reality and they couldn't do anything about it so they tried to resort to some serious low blows ... they failed hard on so many levels

 

[mikemart]

i felt bad for the guy at first but i read some of his paper, he was the actual jerk.

the players on that server made there own rules, because they thought it was fair. even in peaceful meetings between players of both sides, he would interrupt those meetings and do as he would.

i do believe though that players went to far as to find him in real life.

 

[SomeUnregPunk]

why was he directly involved in this character? I thought he is a sociologist. Doesn't that mean he should have someone else doing this while he stood back and interpreted the results/feedback? Doesn't it taint his research that he participated in playing as Twixt?

I understand that he is using participant observation of the MMOG, COH/COV, but by the way he does it seems to me that it would taint his objectivity as a sociologist. He played in a negative way to the groups established in the game. If he had one character that played negatively and one positively, then his research would be more accepted than this.

[edit]
cool! I found a blog of his which he responds to posters about the twixt thing.
http://dmyersloyola.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/my-favorite-twixt-insult/#comments

 

[Jursa]

I sincerely doubt he was being called names and hunted down for a bloody reason. Very few people go out of their way to kill a person who just wants to play, bet ya 5 bucks it was his intention to piss everybody off in the first place...

 

[MrBrightside919]

I don't need a science experiment to tell me that they were jerks...

 

[Hiroshi Mishima]

I think this guy is awesome for the fact that, as someone on page 1 said "he trolled them by being good at the game and following the rules". But not only that, I also agree with him that a LOT of people on MMOs are rather annoying. I've heard some people say "Oh, it's just the PC-tards" yet I hear just as many going "Ugh, those console whores don't know shit" so I'm kinda on the fence.

Been playing Megami Tensei Imagine the last couple months, and while the clan I'm in is really cool and fun to hang/quest with, I also know they're generally console players who don't get along with most of the other people. Of course, considering most of the other higher levels (my clan leaders are really high up) are complete douches and give misinformation to keep newer players confused and wreck their stats... I can agree that the game has a bad community on the average.

Strangely, however, I hear the Japanese server didn't have any of this trouble. So I get the feeling it's just more of my Stupid Americans doing what they do best. *shrug*

I prefer single player games anyways, really.

 

[Veret]

Having read the guy's paper, I have to say I find myself agreeing with Nageck--Professor Meyers is being kind of a dick.

A couple years back I spent some time admining a few servers in the original Halo PC. The gametype for all of these was race, meaning that the objective was to get in a jeep and drive around the course, rather than killing your opponents on foot. Every once in a while, though, someone would join the server and just start killing everyone, then brag about what a badass he was for "beating" them at the game he thought they were playing. Most of the time, it's an honest mistake; a good portion of Halo really is just killing, so entering a server where that's the secondary objective can take some getting used to. But some people refused to listen, even after having the rules patiently explained to them several times, and I had to kick them so the rest of the players could enjoy themselves again.

From reading the paper, it sounds like Mr. Meyers is engaging in some very similar behavior. As long as the game's administrators remain silent on the issue he is well within his rights, but this kind of griefing just isn't doing anyone any favors. Frankly, I find it astonishing that he can't see that for himself.

So yes, some MMOG players really are jerks.

 

[Tales of Golden Sun]

Seems more like a City of Anti-heroes to me!

 

[swytchblayd]

It didn't take me five minutes of playing my first true MMORPG (Kingdom of Loathing is more like a single-player game with multiplayer tacked on, as long as you stay out of the clans and whatnot, IMHO) to figure out that the majority of online players are assholes. This has been proven true in almost every MMOG I've come across, sadly enough; even though there are those few people who help others, most everyone else either ignores your existence (still amazed by how many persons that simply don't answer you at all :/ ), or spit in your face and call you a "n00b" when you do even the slightest thing wrong.

By the way, isn't the whole point of CoH/CoV to be beating up bad/good guys and getting loot and whatnot ? I've always thought it silly when people just sit around in a game and "chat", especially when there's content filters applied to nearly every sentence -_-" As far as I see it, chatting is for forums and chat rooms :/

 

[You_have_a_name]

so they are jerks and have no life haha

 

[scrape]

Ironically, that's probably how a traditional comic-book superhero would be treated if one existed in the real world. His powers would be construed as "cheating" by others, his rigid moral code would make him a social outcast and would justify doing "unfair" things with his powers to achieve his goals of "justice".