So in reading this thread I got to wondering about what I think of as the “anti-ganker”. Not “anti” as in opposed to, but “anti” in the sense of direct opposite.
It seems to be that through the years, there’s a certain stratum of the gaming community that has an unrealistic attachment to their character and said character’s stuff. Further, these characters seem to have an unrealistic expectation that the game designers and the other characters should respect them and their characters as if they would the actual person on the street.
These are the ones who get REALLY worked up if you jack their character in an underhanded, but non-griefer kind of way, even if you’re an evil character. They’re the ones who tend to blur the in-game and real world. They’re the ones who don’t get why that whole WoW raid on the in-game memorial service was absolutely hysterically funny and bitch and moan about how wrong and jerky it was of the actual players, without realizing that the in-game characters were acting IN CHARACTER during the raid, and the real-life players shouldn’t have any concern about the other characters’ real life goings on, since the only way they interact is in game.
They’re role playing games; playing an evil character as evil isn’t a cop-out, it’s a valid, legitimate role within the game universe.
In something like say… EVE or Ultima Online, what’s so wrong about being a pirate or some kind of highwayman? Sure, people who don’t play that way get irritated, but they allow for evil alignments, so why is anyone surprised or even angry if someone actually plays a sociopath?
That’s my complaint with that style of game- there are too many people who don’t draw a line between the game characters and the real players. Just because my character’s an ass doesn’t mean that by extension I am too, or that because I’m not an ass in real life, my character can’t be an ass also. It doesn’t work that way, and nor should it.
I mean, it might be fun to play a totally chaotic evil character. Sure, it would probably piss off the more invested characters, but unless I’m exploiting game rules or otherwise doing something that’s obviously griefing (spawn camping, etc…) it doesn’t make sense that I should quit doing it just because someone else doesn’t like what it does to their character.
Possibly. But the difference is, the anti-gankers aren’t going out of their way to ruin other people’s playing experience. I’d rather have a bunch of crazies who think they are really their orcs than people who get their jollies off slaughtering everyone else.
:rolleyes:
In Everquest, gankers got to confiscate all the coins and 1 piece of gear from the guy they killed. I lost a bit of gear to gankers, but I also gained quite a few nice things. And ya know what? Them’s were the rules. If you didn’t want to get ganked and lose a piece of gear, you didn’t leave the safe zones, or you put everything in bags, or you became such a badass that nobody could kill you.
It’s not that nobody else matters; it’s that everyone knows the rules and chooses how to behave.
I’m saying I’m dubious that their motive is enhancing a game world by sincerely role-playing evil characters versus just acting like a dick and using “roleplay!” as an excuse.
LOL back in Everquest I was an antiganker, I used to run around very low levels in my [at the time] high level cleric stealth buffing baby characters. Of course I also played the ultimate antiganker when I logged in on WintersKiss the Cookie Maker [my GM toon] when I wasn’t actually working on a problem, I was running around passing out cookies and milk, and randomly buffing baby characters, though I admit one of my favorite things to do other than working GM events was officiating at weddings. I still probably have the macros for the different wedding ceremonies I conducted on the old compaq I have that I used back then. [all i needed to do was macro in peoples names, saved a hell of a lot of typing ]
My problem (and I admit up front that I get too attached to my characters and gear, and so I avoid PVP like the everloving Black Plague) is that I always have to wonder -
To all those “it’s just roleplay, we’re just playing evil characters” people. If you’re so invested in playing an evil character (with all the evil actions that entails) what does that say (if anything) about how many times in real life you’re really thinking that you’d just like to slit my throat because I pissed you off, and the only reason you aren’t is because society bears down on random murder pretty hard?
I already don’t like/trust/understand real people, and seeing people running a character that is truly evil makes me more than a little nervous about the person behind the character. The character isn’t the one dreaming up all the activity which is taking place, after all.
I don’t like kicking puppies in real life, and I also don’t like kicking imaginary pixel puppies. I have a hard time accepting and understanding that the second one doesn’t automatically influence the first for other people. I believe them when they say it doesn’t (I married one) but it still squicks me out to see.
However, this isn’t a positive contribution, because as has been previously established, I actually AM mentally ill.
Also, I find it interesting in the thread you linked that people rooting for the gankers make it about generalized ‘pvp’ and the thrill of the challenge or roleplay when the issue is and has always been about hardcore pvp people who are just messing with people: i.e. people who use abuse-able bugs to ruin people’s days, people who attack people who can’t fight back for no gain etc…
Heck, when i played Wow a group of high level Horde had camped out at a remote flight location (killing the flight guy), so I took the boat. The city this boat went to? Another group of Horde were camped at this remote flight location as well. There was no point to that other than the ‘thrill’ of forcing people to have to wait for their hearth to pop back or run quite a distance. The ‘thrill’ was fucking with people.
Any ‘anti-ganker’ who took care of them would be a-okay and not mentally ill in my book.
I hate to say it, but you’re a perfect example of what I’m talking about. You get too attached to your in-game crap, you project your insecurities and mistrust of people in the real world onto people in-game, and also confuse the motivations of people in-game with those out of game.
I sometimes like playing the evil characters because it’s a stretch. It’s emphatically NOT what I’m like in real life (sometime community volunteer, Eagle Scout, gardener, dad, etc…) but it’s interesting and fun to play someone very much not like myself.
Just because you have a ton of crap, and my in-game evil guy does something evil to you, it’s a game thing, not a personal thing. I didn’t do it to piss you off, it did it because that’s what my character would do. He’s not me, and nor am I him. That’s why it’s called a role-PLAYING game. I realize that the posse may be mobilized and a gang of players may come after me. That’s what happens to evil characters, and I accept that. I try to evade of course, but I accept it.
I would agree. I meant “anti” ganker in the sense of opposite of a ganker, not “opposed to ganking”. The ones who are very anti pvp, and who (IMO) get way, way too invested in their in-game stuff and characters, and get mad at players who may kill or steal from them, even if it was above board, and not ganking, i.e. an evil character who didn’t spawn camp, etc…
I think people who roll on pvp servers and complain about pvp have a misplaced sense of entitlement. I wouldn’t call it mental illness, but there is certainly something wrong about the “i pay my 15 bucks a month and should get to do whatever i want whenever i want even though i specifically chose to play on a server where that choice can be taken away from me by other players” mentality.
I see the problem of projecting motivation and mistrust isn’t isolated to the so-called “anti-gankers”.
I suspect the mods will have to repeat the anti-ad-hominem warning in this thread.
Anyway, for what little it’s worth, I do wonder about motivations of gankers, but I know that it’ll never get beyond “wondering” because behavior can have a huge array of motivations, both overt and covert.
And I’ve played RPGs long enough to have played some really evil characters, to the hilt, and yes, I’ve gotten fellow players really mad at me IRL because of my over-the-top evilness… but I’m really no more evil than the average human being (no less, of course, but no more)… in fact, by nature, I’m pretty carebear, but I can stretch myself to the griefing extreme.
And, in a more on-topic sense, I don’t think people who become deeply upset at being ganked are flaming qqing whiners. A lot of it is immediate frustration at being forced to play someone else’s game: having your own free will and personal intentions overridden by anothers. Thats’ frustrating, even if it’s virtual; otherwise, why have any plans or preferences in the game? If I intend to quest, it’s frustrating to be told “no, you won’t you’ll fight me or you’ll die repeatedly”.
Being camped is the ultimate in this. Hypothetically, if I’m logging in to knock off a couple of daily quests or grind some materials, I have some goals in mind, and they have nothing to do with fighting a ganker. And if I’m camped, that’s time lost. I don’t have unlimited time to get these things done. If my sense of in-game accomplishment isn’t satisfied by fighting off a ganker, it’s reasonable to be frustrated that I’m not getting what I want out of the game.
Of course, letting that frustration simmer beyond the game isn’t healthy, or justifiable. It is, after all, a game; if it’s impossible to accomplish what I want within the game because of the in-game equivalent of surprise buttseks, I won’t play the game for a while and let the frustration go. There are other ways to self-actualize, and since they’re IRL it’s a lot harder for someone else to interfere. (IRL, ganking has another name: criminal assault).
And of course, there’s the argument that if we’re being ganked, we signed up for it by being PvP eligible. This argument leaves aside the clever wankers who use exploits and mechanics to screw with you, but this only coincides with real PvP ganking in a couple of cases: such as flagging yourself and covering up a quest NPC so that trying to interact with it is accidentally a melee attack on the flagged person. I see that a lot in WoW at the Sanctuary of Malorne, but there are technical workarounds. It’s not necessarily a show-stopper if you’re very careful.
Anyway, for those of us who are on PvP servers but don’t actually mean it… well, yes, we should probably move off to a PvE server so that we get flagged mostly only when we mean it. For me, I’m cheap; I can’t justify spending $25 per toon to get away from intermittent gankage, when the alternative is to just walk away for a little while.
TL;DR version: neither gankers nor anti-gankers are provably mentally ill. The most you can reliably say is that their motivations are different from each other; you cannot provably say either is evil, stupid, silly, or crazy.
This is the part in the argument when we all begin talking past each other, each thinking of very specific scenarios that are only tangentially related to each other.
There are the PVEers who wander onto PVP servers and complain about being killed.
There are the griefers who abuse loopholes in the system rules to make life harder for PVEers going about their business (killing flight masters, abusing Life Grip, that kind of thing).
There are the honest PVPers who stick to PVP servers and battlegrounds but get conflated with griefers when PVEers complain about the latter.
These discussions always intermix all the various things that happen, with idiot carebears representing the PVEers in the honest PVPers’ minds and griefers representing the PVPers in the honest PVEers’ minds.
