Speaking as a pirate in EVE, I distinguish it with one simple rule:
“Is my CHARACTER going to benefit from this action?”
So certainly, I’ll engage in random acts of piracy on lost, defenseless, or clueless newbies if they’re holding valuable stuff. I have no qualms about ruining a character’s virtual day if it profits my character enough.
The guys who beat up on and/or suicide-bomb random people because it makes the PLAYER giddy to know they ruined some other PLAYER’S day, those guys scare me.
Also, I don’t like **bump’s **“anti-ganker” definition at all. I’m a hardcore PvPer, and I get seriously into my character and get annoyed when some chucklewit cheater or exploiter takes/ruins my character’s stuff.
I have no idea how you play and can’t/won’t try to speak for you. If someone in some star battle-cruiser sat around and plinked someone in a space-dinghy over and over and over again for minimal to no in-game reward, I’d assume he was just being a dick even if he said “I’m role-playing!”. I’m speaking in generalities here since my knowledge of EVE is limited.
I don’t like his definition either. I consider an “anti-ganker” to be someone who will act against gankers in-game, as I sometimes do. For example, if I happen to hear of high level Hordies harassing our newbs in Westfall, I’ll head down there on one of my 85s to help run the gankers off. I’ll report exploiters whenever I see them, and if I can figure out a way to prevent whatever they’re doing, I’ll do that, too.
I don’t like the gold sellers, either. A few months ago, one of those companies made a series of characters, each named one word of the company url. When they stood in the right order, you would see several toons spelling out something like Buygold Cheapat Websitedotcom. So I summoned my mammoth and parked him on top of the goldseller toons while typing the report.
In my experience, 90% of the players don’t actually think of their character as a character. It’s just “me as a paladin” or “me as a shaman” or whatever. And if you think of it that way, then year, there’s no reason to have strict separating lines distinguishing in-character actions from the actions of the guy playing the game. I mean, yeah, there are a few guys who roleplay, but most of the people who disrupted that funeral, I’d bet, did it because they wanted to fuck up someone’s funeral and hurt everyone there.
Oh, I was agreeing with you. My personal test of “asshole” vs. “roleplay” is that you are an asshole if you’re doing things that have no in-game benefit to you (like, in EVE, roasting people in newbie frigates). For “I’m role-playing” to be credible, you have to be generating SOME kind of in-game reward or have a credible reason to care about killing a particular player–for example, I’d have no qualms whatsoever about vaporizing a guy in a newbie ship who was a member of a corporation I had declared war on (which you can’t do to NPC starting corporations, where newbies start out).
I tend to have a very poor personal opinion of gankers.
Now I play on PVP servers from time to time (not always) and for the most part it’s not a big deal. Most people don’t want to fight, and those that do are generally around your level. It’s the people who go out of their way to be utter douches that are worthy of complaint. For example:
People who intentionally venture into very low level areas to kill newbies, despite no gain in the process. They won’t take on people of, or even near, their level because then they would risk something.
People who intentionally ruin the game for others, such as by spawn camping one player over and over just to make them angry, and basically force them to logoff and not play the game, or who take advantage of game mechanics (such as sitting their huge mount on top of a merchant so it can’t be used)
In general, people who go out of their way to be dicks whenever possible and are striving to elicit a negative response from the player (not the character)
Now, you’re “role playing”? Bull-fucking-shit. As a rule, role-players are not gankers. Does your character have a backstory? Does the motivation for your killing people aimlessly fit into the world? Are you avoiding taking advantage of any game design issues in order to gain an advantage? Do you avoid taking advantage of any real-life information when choosing targets? Gankers aren’t role-playing. They’re just being dicks – at least, that’s what I consider a ganker, or a griefer. Mocking their victims using real life slang and l33t-speak is pretty par for the course, too, so if they’re “role playing” they’re doing a shit job of it.
Ganking/griefing to me is far more likely to indicate someone messed in the head than the other way around. Sure, there are some whiny babies who take their characters way too seriously, but honestly, who WOULDN’T be irritated that some moron is deliberately hassling them for kicks? Gankers are the trolls of the gaming world.
Also, to add: people have a pretty deep-rooted sense of fairness and fair play. Just because it’s not in the rules not to do something, I don’t see why other people should think it’s okay, or not get angry.
The rules of Monopoly may not say “It is against the rules to wipe your property and cash against your bare ass before forfeiting them to creditors” and the rules of checkers may not say “It is against the rules to chuck captured pieces at your opponent’s head while singing ‘You are a stupid moron’”, but would you want to play with someone who did these things?
I’m going to not even read much of the rest of the thead until I reply, because I have bad feelings about it, but wanted to address this in particular.
In my experience, 99.9% of role players in MMORPGs - and I use that number deliberately; I literally mean at least 999 out of 1000 - couldn’t role play their way through a sixth grade improv class. Good, evil, bad, lawful, whatever; they suck. As pedescribe alludes to, their characters are either just themselves or Evil Themselves. They can’t play off other characters at all, can’t follow a story to save their lives, and never respect the cardinal rule of roleplaying: I Am A Supporting Character.
So yeah, I’M TEH EVIL is a cop out excuse to act like a sociopath, but frankly I see no evidence that any significant number of alleged role players could play anything more complex than a sociopath anyway. Actually, they couldn’t play a convincing sociopath.
Roleplaying is not the correct word for it i guess but i don’t know how else to describe my feelings on the matter, what else would you call it other than roleplaying when the reason for it is nothing more than “i kill you because you are horde and i’m alliance and that’s what we are supposed to do”? I never considered myself a roleplayer but i simply can’t understand the idea of needing a reason or reward to kill someone of the opposite faction. Your name is red, this is a pvp server, whether level 1 or 85 if we run into each other there be some pvping.
Okay, so those kinds of people? Not griefers. If a player is attacking enemy players indiscriminately, whether they be 10 levels lower or higher, they’re just an avid PVPer. A griefer is someone who goes out of their way to frustrate the person behind the character, by, say, leading them into a dungeon too powerful to handle by themselves and then teleporting away. That’s not even PVP, but it is griefing.
That may be, but shitty roleplayers pretending to be a lesbian elf in love with a lesbian were-cat until a lesbian vampire kidnaps one and they have to RP fight with their god powers are still more benign than an asshole using “I’m roleplaying!” as an excuse to be an asshole.
When I play GTA I drive on the sidewalk while doing missions killing thousands of pedestrians as I go, I can assure you I dont have the same urge irl
table top games are a different breed, assholes in table top games dont get to come back.
I already posted in the other thread. I tend to agree that people who play pvp servers and get pissed over getting ganked for any reason have either a large blind spot regarding human behavior in general or have a lack of pvp experience combined with a stubborn refusal to realize that other players will never play by your rules.
Actually my theory of MMORPG griefers is pretty simple.
The current crop of kids grew up with all sorts of game platforms and computer games. Before online games became so big, gaming was solo on PC, and the original platform games that were played solo. The ‘nintendroids’ were used to playing in a format when everything was theirs - all the mobs all the resources. Everything in game was computer generated - they didn’t have to learn to share. Then platforms went to small groups could play together, so the only things that were real were the other couple of kids they were playing with, originally you had to be in the same room but then limited internet opened up and you could finally play against your ‘team’ but still all the resources belonged to the team and everything else was computer.
So we have the older generation that learned to play well with others in pen and dice games, and a younger generation that grew up in single and small team games. MMORPGs, they just do not recognize they need to share with others so they act like total asswipe buttheads. They will run up to the node that you just killed mobs to get to and mine it out from under you, they will hog mobs that you are trying to kill for quests. The only people they treat as real are in their guild/corp, or rarely if they get in a pick up group.
Why yes, back when I was a GM and had to deal with griefers the majority I spoke with were kids who grew up playing platforms.
Actually your first category there is pretty much the group I’m describing, and having been in the third category when taking out the first category, it’s really, really annoying to get whined, bitched and moaned at about it.
I have no pity for the second category. I don’t see the enjoyment, challenge or sense in whacking newbs, and nor do I see the point in performing what amounts to an in-game denial of service attack just to piss the player off.
I guess what made me think of this was a situation about 12 years ago where my friends and I were playing Ultima Online, and legitimately playing highway robbers- to the point where we’d come out of hiding and say “Your money or your life!”
Naturally, not too many coughed up the cash, so we’d kill them and steal their stuff. We’d let them go if they coughed up their cash and any good weaponry, but I think maybe 1 or 2 actually took that route. Most would instantly resurrect and try and reclaim their stuff before we could carry it all, so we’d kill them again and dismember the corpse so they’d have to walk to some temple to get resurrected, buying us time to go through the stuff and go back into hiding. Essentially we got tired of killing them over and over again.
We got called gankers (or whatever the term was in 1999) and reported, and called all sorts of awful names. Yet there were no exploits, we generally didn’t jack the worthless characters because there was no money to be had, and we always gave people a chance to cough up the loot before we attacked.
The coolest thing was that the good characters eventually formed a posse and hunted us down. We liked that.
But… there’s always some chump that has played non-stop for the past 3 weeks and has all his super stuff, and gets REALLY pissed, depressed and irrationally angry when he gets jacked by in-game highwaymen, even when it’s above board and not ganking.
Those are the people I’m talking about- the ones who play PvP in whatever game, and then bitch about getting killed.
