Science Discovers That MMOG Players Are Jerks

[DanDanikov]

That experiment was hardly scientific. They guy just judged people's intentions based on what they said. I think most experienced gamers know that when we get frustrated, we'll say things we don't mean. Some high-blood pressure gamers take that to the extreme. While, sure, there are people who might actually go through with such threats (didn't some guy get stabbed with a sword in Taiwan? And there's been numerous other incidents), I don't think trash talk is a good reason to loose faith in humanity.

If he wants to do a real experiment, he should make an address, a telephone number or something obtainable and continue ganking, see how many people actually make good on their threats. It'd also be interesting to consider the motivation behind the people who behave in that manner (rather than for an experiment), why they're ostracised and the benefits and effectiveness of doing so.

 

[Scrythe]

Here's a fun experiment:

1) Buy World of Warcraft.
2) Complete the necessary stuff until you're character is made
3) Level to a decent level, around 20 or so
4) Duel someone

I guarantee that 99.9% of the time, whoever you duel, no matter what class you choose, will accuse you of cheating or will try to put "house rules" on you for playing your class correctly.

How DARE Paladins heal!
How DARE Druids use any form but X!
How DARE Rogues use stealth!
How DARE Hunter use...
And it goes in indefinitely.

Get to 80, and it gets worse. Unless you play this class with this gear with this spec with this these addons, you sir are a fucking FAILURE!

People suck.

 

[Therumancer]

It has been a while since I have played City Of Heroes/City Of Villains however when I did play they had it set up into PVP zones. Honestly if this guy is pwning people then apparently those people are entering into the PVP zones and it's their own bloody fault if they don't want to fight players.

Now on the other hand if NC soft decided to allow free PVP on their general use servers all I can say is that it's the company's fault because honestly the game was never built around that, and yeah... the player base wouldn't go for it. CoH/CoV attracts what is primarily a PVE crowd.

I'd also question whether this guy is playing fairly, because at least when I played the teleportation power set had a lot of issues and was very difficult to use, and pretty much ineffective against players. They either changed it and took it in the extreme other direction, or this guy found some way to cheat hard core.

I had a teleporting super-heroine called Cheshire Neko (Japanese girl, lingerie, cat ears, scrapper. Claws, Telepotation, and Enhanced Reflexs) and honestly after much tinkering around with it I got pretty good at using the teleporation set and what is being described here just isn't happening without at least some pretty heavy mods... again unless they changed it.

Champions Online will be cool when it comes out, but I am hoping they keep the console and PC users seperate simply due to the console users not typically having keyboards to chat with.

I will also point out that groups of people responding to threats and such is not uncommon even in PVP games. I mean what did he expect? The RL attacks were going too far, but if your wandering around beating on people one should expect them to get help from their friends/guildmates/superteam members.


>>>----Therumancer--->

 

[Therumancer]

Oh and as a comment in response to WoW.

I won't comment on the duelling thing since it depends on a lot of factors and where you are and what is going on. In general I don't see duelling as a big part of the game, I sort of recommend just doing 2 vs. 2 Arena PVP if your into that kind of thing and you don't have to worry about responses from sore losers due to the way it's set up.

However when it comes to being level 80, as someone whose current game is WoW, and as a raider I can tell you that people are like that for a reason. Bosses in raid instances require very specific things to be done at a certain level in a coordinated fashion. Classes have specific roles they need to fill, they need to be able to generat at least X amount of DPS using the right abillities at the right times, take so much damage, and/or inflict so much healing. What's more these things have to happen with certain abillities being saved for certain points of the fight. For example not using a shield wall or something until the boss is below X amount of health and starts hitting harder or whatever.

Raiding is very much a team thing, and people aren't being jerks as much as laying down the rules as to what needs to happen to do it successfully. Those people aren't making the requirements, ultimatly Blizzard is by setting the bosses the way they do. You really can't be a unique and special flower in a raid enviroment. It's all about the numbers and yeah... there is a formula to it.

I'm not a great raider and have my own issues meeting some of the requirements (but I raid pretty much every week twice a week, and always do meet them in the end). The best raiding/raid information site is called "Elitist Jerks" for a reason. At least we're willing to admit it, but we're not elitist jerks because we love making people miserable. We are that way because it's what we have to be to win.

>>>----Therumancer--->

 

[AngloDoom]

I read the paper, and while I can see people's frustrations at the fact that he was killing them, he wasn't extorting a glitch but merely using what the game gave him. While people may find it underhanded, the abuse 'Twixt' got was ridiculous; it's like people complaining about an Engineer that gets blown onto a high area and builds a sentry-gun in TF2; it's allowed, but people dislike it because they can't beat it.

Also, if I ever get City of Heroes/Villains he is my first friend.

 

[Archaeology Hat]

If that happened on my WoW server (can't speak for anyone else) no-one would bat an eyelid, he'd be joined by people helping him and YOGS would do it on an industrial scale.

 

[MagicShroom]

So the basic story here is that his scientific discovery is that if you piss people off and they try to get back at you they're the jerks...uh huh...great science...


Also FYI to those who are saying things like "hes only playing the game" or something along those lines in his defense. City of Heroes/ Villains PVP wasn't really a big part of the game for a good period, hell even when players did get to fight each other it was boring and many people didn't even bother. This was partly due to the nature of Heroes being out first (no Villians to mow down) for a while and people tailored characters to PVE. PVP really came out of no where and characters that could actually be successful in PVP had to be specifically tailored for PVP, this often led to a single person completely rolling every other player in sight. While he was technically "playing" the part of Heroes vs Villians, the community (at least when I last played) was not really geared around PVP, instead people played for the PVE.
Thus his acts really aren't that justifiable, its like saying hey I'm gonna start a bunch of shit with people and then see what happens, and keep fucking with people until they decide to do something about it, then I'm gonna play victim and cry foul.

You never have to enter the PvP maps in CoH/V so your argument holds no water. If you want to fight, go into PvP. Otherwise don't.

When I played CoV I'm pretty sure there was no neutral ground for villains to go and chat with friends on the heroes side unless you were in a PVP area. People didn't go to fight they went to chill with their friends, thus my argument still holds true (which is not really an argument of a statement of the events that I experienced during my playtime.)

Their new expanison will have neutral ground (also ability to swap sides)


Other than that I really had no problems with the CoH/V Community sure there's that 10% that ruins the community but that's everywhere.

 

[mendokusai]

By the way, Did we REALLY need science to tell us that MMOG players are mostly jerks?

No, but it's so much more satisfying in arguments to have that kind of ammunition on your side.

 

[MiloP]

Ok, I've read that report thingy he wrote on it, basically, he's using a tactic that could be considered cheap, but its within the rules of the game.

At least he's playing the game, not like the fools that were just sitting there farming Influence.

 

[insanelich]

I read the paper, and while I can see people's frustrations at the fact that he was killing them, he wasn't extorting a glitch but merely using what the game gave him. While people may find it underhanded, the abuse 'Twixt' got was ridiculous; it's like people complaining about an Engineer that gets blown onto a high area and builds a sentry-gun in TF2; it's allowed, but people dislike it because they can't beat it.

Also, if I ever get City of Heroes/Villains he is my first friend.

It's closer to building a teleport outside map boundaries and building a sentry there.

And much like that exploit, this exploit also got fixed.

 

[Kevvers]

This reminds me of RvR in Warhammer Online, and Age of Conan in general. In warhammer online, in my experience, there is no co-operation between the two realms (its sort of part of the game design such that cooperation is impossible, and killing the other realm is a big part of advancement), and it is understood that if you are in the RvR zone you are fair game using any tactics within the game rules. In Age of Conan, since there were entire worlds that were pvp, and anyone could in fact kill anyone else, I think they had actually intended to create this behaviour -- of informal rules of behaviour.

So... He's a griefer that exploits glitches, and he continued to grief and exploit glitches, and the second anyone started getting angry, he ran to the mods? Sounds like a **** to me. No, "it's for science" is not an acceptable excuse.

I think the point of his essay was that the griefing tactics he was using in the rvr zone were within the game rules and not an exploit or a glitch (and not even actively discouraged by the game developers by the sounds of it), but those tactics were frowned upon by a player community which had created another layer of rules -- a sort of code of honour. I did get the feeling while reading the piece, however, that the author was trying to elict sympathy for the griefing character -- if it was sincere science he ought to have attempted to make the piece more neutral in that regard.

 

[AngloDoom]

I read the paper, and while I can see people's frustrations at the fact that he was killing them, he wasn't extorting a glitch but merely using what the game gave him. While people may find it underhanded, the abuse 'Twixt' got was ridiculous; it's like people complaining about an Engineer that gets blown onto a high area and builds a sentry-gun in TF2; it's allowed, but people dislike it because they can't beat it.

Also, if I ever get City of Heroes/Villains he is my first friend.

It's closer to building a teleport outside map boundaries and building a sentry there.

And much like that exploit, this exploit also got fixed.

Ah, I didn't realise it was something like that. I thought it was similar to him teleporting them into a pool of lava; instant-death and viable. So, is he teleporting them from a location where he can't get hurt, or something?

 

[pliusmannn]

that's why i don't like mmog's and mmorpg's, it has no story, it has no enjoyment in killing mobs, it has no enjoyment in cooperating, and so on. maybe someone will ever create a best mmorpg, which i hope will be Project V13, so called Fallout Online

 

[Chipperz]

So... He's a griefer that exploits glitches, and he continued to grief and exploit glitches, and the second anyone started getting angry, he ran to the mods?

Read up before speaking up.

They went to the mods when he refused to treat the area as a happy-fun XP farming area like they were all used to and tried to treat it like it was designed: a hardcore PVP area. The mods refused to do anything, thus validating that he was doing nothing wrong by the intended rules of the area.

Sounds like a **** to me. No, "it's for science" is not an acceptable excuse.

As for all of you going on about how all MMO players must be arseholes because they got angry at a griefer, well, I was going to write something smart, but the idea that this prick can get payed to grief has got me angry so I'll just say fuck you all.

You kiss your father with that mouth?

Not since he walked out on my mum before I was born, no, not really.

The simple truth is that he griefed, and he's trying to cover it up with a "psychological report". I never ceased to be amazed by the lengths griefers will go to, just to not admit they're griefers. It's truly terrifying.

 

[insanelich]

I read the paper, and while I can see people's frustrations at the fact that he was killing them, he wasn't extorting a glitch but merely using what the game gave him. While people may find it underhanded, the abuse 'Twixt' got was ridiculous; it's like people complaining about an Engineer that gets blown onto a high area and builds a sentry-gun in TF2; it's allowed, but people dislike it because they can't beat it.

Also, if I ever get City of Heroes/Villains he is my first friend.

It's closer to building a teleport outside map boundaries and building a sentry there.

And much like that exploit, this exploit also got fixed.

Ah, I didn't realise it was something like that. I thought it was similar to him teleporting them into a pool of lava; instant-death and viable. So, is he teleporting them from a location where he can't get hurt, or something?

He was chain-teleporting unsuspecting people into instakill NPC's - basically the pool of lava with the exception that many characters couldn't hit him before he did it, and that the pool of lava couldn't hurt him.

To add, the NPC kills take away experience where player kills don't. You just respawn when killed by a player. And NPC kills also give no benefit to the character doing it. So some characters are completely defenseless, and the griefer's character lost no XP when killed, and he didn't even get credit for it, showing pretty clearly that it wasn't a way meant to be repeatedly used.

And he ragequit after the devs fixed the exploit allowing his asshole trick. Saying "it wasn't fun anymore".

He's a complete griefer. He just tried to justify being a jerk with "RESEARCH".

 

[RollForInitiative]

The details of precisely what Twixt did are being discussed here: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=17344.0

Apparently, it basically boils down to some really nasty trolling; involuntarily teleportation of players to high level NPC guards that then kill them.

This guy wonders why the community became abusive towards him?

Edit: Ah, beaten to the details above. =)

 

[TheXRatedDodo]

People saying "well, he was being a griefer.."
That's exactly the point.
If I may quote the immortal character from Snatch: Brick Top
"Poke him with a stick and you watch his bollocks grow."
You want to test a human being? Annoy them, place them under some kind of adversity. All the interesting stuff bubbles up to the surface and makes itself known.
90% of people have the capacity to be chill if someone is chill to then. If he were to just go on CoH and hand out tea and crumpets, everyone would get along just fine with him, and we all know that's how it would go.
So what else was there left to do? Annoy them. By playing the game in a manner far more creative, and totally within the bounds of fair tactics. The ability was put there to be used, if people can't handle that, they're playing the wrong damn game.

But hey, he got an interesting reaction, practically medieval lynch mob mentality over a video game from a small, hardened, fanatical fanbase.

As far as I'm concerned, this guy gets major props from me.

 

[Flap Jack452]

I feel bad for the guy, I was interested in that game when it first came out, but it doesn't seem like anyone plays like the box described.

 

[Satoz]

So heres how I see it, though it is a method of accomplishing goals, as one person in the researcher paper said "hes like an npc...he just keeps soldiering on, wondering why no one else helps him" shows a point, he did not think of any other players, so he had no restrictions on any basis but what the game gave him. His tactic was to teleport players into "super npcs" that could basically one shot or quickly kill his foes, not really always gaining him the kill points or causing a penalty but slowing them down, of course he did net a good number of kills too. people asked nicely for him to stop, but nothing, even his own teams hated him. He fell out of a guild because he pissed of an alt villian.

The trouble with his style is that all things considered its annoying. Imagine you are a player who is decently built for pvp, you go out to pit your wits against the heroes, and someone is just warping you into npc characters that can one shot you, there isnt much you can do about it. It is unfair, its not barred, but its something of a taboo. It ruins the gameplay, its not like its even the move or something, its just that it uses a npc that can one shot...

that being said I understand that it was in the purpose for winning, but people had the right to be pissed, it was a cheap tactic, and the researcher knows this. Its not like he had to plan a bunch of tactics, it was just pull in and kill. There are some rules that are made for a reason, its not the wow type of rules, like no healing, but its the type of rule that lets the game be played