Are "anti-gankers" (for lack of a better term) mentally ill?

[Kobal2]

@aruvqan

I do not know offhand any MMORPG where if you die your character dies totally as well. Though I do seem to remember maybe abotu 8 or so years ago hearing about a game where you die you have to start a new character, but Ill be damned if I can remember which one it is because I never played it, and I have played a lot of them in betas, or on trial accounts. [Most MMORPGs are fairly forgetable to be honest]

In Star Wars Galaxies, originally at least (don’t know if they ever actually went through with the idea) Jedi characters were supposed to have only three lives. Then your Jedi was officially dead. You could still “play” him as a ghost of the Force (you know, like Obi Wan after he gets a facefull of lightsaber) but those could only move around and talk, nothing else.

And then of course there are the various “Hard Core” servers of Diablo, Sacred and similar hack 'n slash games where you do have only one shot, I believe as a legacy from waaaay back when those games were called Angband or Rogue. You die for any reason, be it a mob, a player, a badly timed server disconnect, a stupid bug, your toon is gone, permanently. If you’re lucky you have a spare character you can race to the location before your loot despawns or goes into the pockets of someone else so you at least haven’t lost everything. If you’re not, well, thanks for playing. Enjoy the trip back from square one.

But these are all voluntary, mind you - each of these games also have “normal” servers where death is just, well, regular death. Lose XP, maybe some gold and get your items damaged, get right back in the game.
And no, I do not get people who play on Hard Core servers. I mean, I get the bragging rights aspect of it and the cheap thrills but fuck me. Looks too much like self-mutilation to me, know what I mean ?

[Lightnin]

@FinnAgain

You are ignoring an essential difference, Kobal. One guy is acting outside of the rules of chess; you can not smack over an opponent’s table. But if he played to win and devastated you in a few moves, that would not be acting like a jerk.

In a game where you can be “PvP flagged”, or a game like EVE where you are always PvP flagged, you are playing the game as it was designed. There, it is not like kicking over someone’s chess table because you can, but other people complaining because you served an ace in a competitive match of tennis, but served too fast for them to volley it back to you.

In my experience, both as a player and a designer of MMOs, griefers are the first to find the loopholes which allow them to ruin the game for other players. When the players complain, the griefers then claim “If the Devs didn’t want us to do it, they’d fix the exploit- but since they haven’t already fixed it, clearly they want us to be able to do this.”

This, of course, completely ignores the Million Monkeys problem- no matter how much you try to plug all the loopholes, there are always going to be more people trying to find the holes. In a complex system like an MMO, developers can’t find all the loopholes.

And when that bug eventually gets fixed, the griefers then look for other ways to force the other players to entertain them.

To continue the chess analogy… is there a specific rule which states that a third party may not flip over the board? I’m betting there isn’t. And if there isn’t a rule against it, a griefer would claim, then the game is specifically designed such that flipping the board over *is *a valid tactic.

[Zeriel]

@FinnAgain

If I had my way, they wouldn’t iterate on Walking in Stations without adding Perforating Fools’ Skulls in Stations.

Heh, I have been suggesting the option to board a station en masse and stab some fool who won’t undock into your wardec for YEARS.

[Who_me_1]

@Oakminster

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 haven’t played WoW in years, but some of my favorite times in game were fighting the Horde in Westfall or fighting something they dragged in from somewhere to pick on lowbies.

[FinnAgain]

@Kobal2

It’s one thing to go to a hostile zone and zap some guy from the other side, take his shit and move on. It’s another to zap that guy. Then go to his spawn point, zap him again. And again. And again. Ignore everyone else but him. He zones away, you follow him and zap him there. He delogs, you put his name on your friendlist so that whenever he pops his head back up thinking the coast is clear, you can go right back to zapping his ass. In short, making it your goddamn mission to ruin his fucking night. On purpose.

In EVE, that’s just business as usual. Someone gives you a reason to want them dead, you go make them dead. You pick the most unfair fight you can, gank them, pod them, and pick up their frozen corpse to gloat over. Then you use a locator agent and find them again if their medical clone was far away, and if required you camp them into a station if they won’t undock and get blasted to hell and back. You may say that’s being a dick, but if someone is your enemy, why wouldn’t you shoot him?

If someone doesn’t want to play a game where every time they go out of their ‘home’, they’re vulnerable and can be hunted down and slaughtered, then EVE is not the game for them. EVE really isn’t the game for everybody, but those who do play it for more than six months tend to play it for years, and love it (well, love-hate it, but that’s another story). It takes a special breed to play and like EVE, and those who do tend to feel more than a little bit elitist about it. The most common joke I’ve heard is that when an EVE player quits to go play WoW, the average IQ of both servers goes up a little bit.

@Lightnin

In my experience, both as a player and a designer of MMOs, griefers are the first to find the loopholes which allow them to ruin the game for other players. When the players complain, the griefers then claim “If the Devs didn’t want us to do it, they’d fix the exploit- but since they haven’t already fixed it, clearly they want us to be able to do this.”

That can be handled like CCP has handled it. Any unintended game mechanics can be classified as an exploit, and if players didn’t know that it was an exploit, they damn well should have and can still be permabanned with no warning.

Finding out “oh, I can put unlimited modules on my ship with no stacking penalty” is a totally different kettle of fish than “if I hunt this guy down with a buddy, I can use an Electronic Warfare ship to jam him out and scramble his warp drive, and my buddy can bring a DPS boat to wreck him. And we can do that until the guy pays protection money to us, or figures out how to beat us.”

[Bosstone]

Oh, they’re not playing THIS game. They’re playing another game, where they win by making you incredibly angry.

Sums griefers up pretty well.

[Kobal2]

@FinnAgain

It takes a special breed to play and like EVE, and those who do tend to feel more than a little bit elitist about it.

For real ? Hadn’t picked up on that You know, thinking you’re the smartest bloke in the room points to a disorder itself, when the room is the size of the world…

Just fucking with you man, I love EVE.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t play the game if it came with a lifetime supply of free beer, for exactly the reasons you’re stating. EVE is a game that specifically caters to…well, not to put too fine a point on it, elitist spreadsheet-loving dicks. Dicks who take it as a point of pride and principle to be more ruthlessly dickish than the next guy over. I love y’all, and the stories never fail to entertain, but that’s about as far removed from my Happy Gaming Grounds as Pluto is from Newark. And don’t try and pretend like you’re playing in a normal or average online environment, either :).

But some shit still manages to come from beyond the pale, even by EVE’s standards of dickishness. Like that guy, don’t remember his name but there was an article about him on Cracked. Sets up his corp as a bank, right ? Serious business, accountants on roll call and everything. Employed dozens of players. Handles the money of hundreds - compound interest, investments, all that good shit. Builds his thing from the ground up, builds rep and cred, becomes a trusted and well respected virtual banker. Does all of that over a period of months if not years. Then, overnight and with zero warning, he takes every last dime his corp has to its name, every last asset, everything anyone has on loan to him at the moment, and he’s gone like Kayser fucking Soze.

Now that would be an eyebrow raising stunt on its own, if only because pulling shit like that in the real world would get you in the pokey for a long, long time. I’m not even convinced there couldn’t be an actual case there even - virtual property is still property, and a con’s a con.

But the story doesn’t end there. The guy isn’t satisfied with just ripping everybody he knows off, oh no. So he puts out a YouTube video where he explains it all, too. Tells how yes Virginia, it was all a scam from day one ; how only him knew about it and his employees were just clueless berks, his clients even worse ; how he proved he was smarter than everyone and fuck all of y’all. Not his character (do people even RP in EVE ?), him, personally.

Now if that’s not grade A, military issue, uranium tipped antisocial behaviour, I don’t know what the fuck is. It’s also hilarious of course. But it’s not harmless fun, not even in the same phonebook as innocent and that guy I believe has honest to god capital i Issues to deal with in the real world. We’re talking Nixon levels of egomania here. At this point, you can’t even pretend that it’s “just the game”.

[Skywatcher]

@FinnAgain

In EVE, that’s just business as usual. Someone gives you a reason to want them dead, you go make them dead. You pick the most unfair fight you can, gank them, pod them, and pick up their frozen corpse to gloat over. Then you use a locator agent and find them again if their medical clone was far away, and if required you camp them into a station if they won’t undock and get blasted to hell and back. You may say that’s being a dick, but if someone is your enemy, why wouldn’t you shoot him?

This behavior is frowned upon outside of null sec, which is why I stay out of null sec.

My main is basically an independent arms dealer who hardly ever ventures below 0.5, even.

[Stormcrow]

@Jophiel

… ha, yeah right. “But I’m EVIL!” is the general cop-out to excuse acting like a sociopath in games.

This, this, a thousand times this. Coming from a tabletop RPG world, I’ve run into the exact same thing. Many (not all) of the people who act evilly in games are technically acting in character, but they chose to play evil characters because that was the way they wanted to act.

[FinnAgain]

@Kobal2

Now that would be an eyebrow raising stunt on its own, if only because pulling shit like that in the real world would get you in the pokey for a long, long time. I’m not even convinced there couldn’t be an actual case there even - virtual property is still property, and a con’s a con.

But the story doesn’t end there. The guy isn’t satisfied with just ripping everybody he knows off, oh no. So he puts out a YouTube video where he explains it all, too. Tells how yes Virginia, it was all a scam from day one ; how only him knew about it and his employees were just clueless berks, his clients even worse ; how he proved he was smarter than everyone and fuck all of y’all. Not his character (do people even RP in EVE ?), him, personally.

Yep, that’s just EVE, where the devs have specifically said that scamming is a legitimate form of earning income that’s not in violation of the ToS or their anti-griefing policy.

@Lute Skywatcher

This behavior is frowned upon outside of null sec, which is why I stay out of null sec.

Eh… bears frown on most types of PvP, many of them want what is in essence a single player game with the option to have consensual multi-play dungeons. Not saying that all 'bears don’t grok EVE, but many of them don’t. EVE is a PvP game that was, deliberately and explicitly, set up around a core of combat and conflict. The fact that 'bears frown on certain types of behavior is inconsequential when the fact is that CCP has deliberately set up the game to include, and in some cases rely on it. After all, they could have disabled all guns/missiles/drones when used on player characters in highsec, just like doomsdays and bombs are disabled in lowsec. They didn’t, though.

[Skywatcher]

@FinnAgain

Eh… bears frown on most types of PvP, many of them want what is in essence a single player game with the option to have consensual multi-play dungeons. Not saying that all 'bears don’t grok EVE, but many of them don’t. EVE is a PvP game that was, deliberately and explicitly, set up around a core of combat and conflict. The fact that 'bears frown on certain types of behavior is inconsequential when the fact is that CCP has deliberately set up the game to include, and in some cases rely on it.

Who said anything about “bears”?* I was referring to the fact that podding ouside null sec results in a severe status penalty.

*Og, I hate that term.

[bump]

@Stormcrow

This, this, a thousand times this. Coming from a tabletop RPG world, I’ve run into the exact same thing. Many (not all) of the people who act evilly in games are technically acting in character, but they chose to play evil characters because that was the way they wanted to act.

No shit, Sherlock. Those of us that do play evil characters do “want” to act that way, otherwise we wouldn’t play those characters.

I mean, IRL, I’m a good husband, father, Eagle Scout, and general all around good guy. Nine out of ten times, I play games how I’d personally try to play them, which is usually some version of Sir Galahad meets Albert Schweitzer.

But that one in ten when I want to flip it around and be diabolical, self-interested, and generally unencumbered by normal social norms, I play an evil character.

Not a griefer, mind you. I don’t exploit game engine quirks to jerk real-world players around, and I don’t do things to jerk around players that wouldn’t also be in-character.

That being said, if my character would get some advantage from stealing from, killing or otherwise doing someone else’s character dirty, then I’ll do it. It’s not about the guy playing the character, it’s about the characters.

This is the whole point I was trying to make- there’s a segment of care-bears and near-care-bears who just get unrealistically attached to their characters and somehow think that because they’re “good” characters, they should be immune from PVP or anything like that, and that anyone who is a PKer or something like that is automatically a ganker.

That ain’t the case, any more than anyone who takes up an advantageous position in a FPS game is always a camper.