I just read this article that was linked from slashdot, and I was wondering what the SDMB CoH players think about it.
The first thing that struck me was that if this guy was able to design a character that even a huge mob of villains could not manage to defeat, then there’s something very wrong about the game design. But I’ve never played CoH, so I have no idea what’s going on there.
Do heroes and villains really sit around chatting on PvP servers? Does this happen in other games?
Did anyone play on the same server as this guy? Do you generally think that the PvP server players should get what’s coming to them, or was this guy just being a total jerk?
He’s not relying on any particular character design but abusing a game mechanic. It’s like the CoH equivalent of camping a spawn point.
There aren’t any PvP servers but rather PvP zones in each server. There are other zones that are accessible to both sides but do not allow combat between the factions.
Snarking aside, here’s a fast and furious discussion on Twixt on the CoX forums. Naturally it paints him in a different light than the article. Quite honestly, given my experience with MMOs and City in particular, I strongly suspect the article is overblown. He was hardly the most reviled player, just another douchebag.
That said, sure people use the PVP zones in City to chat. There’s not many places in the game where you can do so. City is a pretty roleplay-friendly game, so it’s not terribly surprising. Some games like Warcraft make the barrier thicker; there is no possible way to communicate freely with the other side except via canned emotes like /wave.
ETA: Hyperstrike’s post in the thread I linked to (post 21, or top of page 3 using the default view) is a pretty reasoned analysis, IMO.
My favorite part is where it says that a professor studying online videogames was “was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game’s rules”, and then later says the other players were using “medieval and crude” methods to manipulate others (especially hilarious given his tactic of teleporting villains around).
He’s seriously complaining that people don’t think the rules of the game are the only guidelines for behavior? And he thinks that’s unique to videogames? Yeesh.
Actually, it is sadly true that CoH is not well designed for PvP. The game mechanics were designed with PvE in mind, and in CoH PvE and PvP are very different games. It’s not hard to create a build that isn’t very useful for PvE, but can defeat most standard PvE builds in PvP.
Any build would be successful in PvP when the player’s sole strategy is to teleport foes into aggro range of drones and teleports themselves out of danger when outnumbered.
Exactly. That’s not a useful tactic in PvE, but a build based around that power combination will be able to ‘defeat’ most targets in PvP, especially those which were optimized for PvE in the first place.
I have a hard timing reviling him for that. If there’s a zone in which all bets are off and it’s player versus player, then people are within rights. “We just chat here and don’t fight” isn’t a good defense. Use email, instant messenger, or a phone, but you can’t bitch about standing in the way of something that’s going to stomp you out when you’re not in a no-stomp zone.
Let me see if I can follow this professor’s theory. I’m just a layman, so I might be missing something here, but it seems as if he’s discovered that, when you repeatedly do things to annoy someone… they get really angry!
My God! Someone get this man some grant money! This is the psycho-sociological breakthrough of the century!
Tune in next week when he exposes the terrifying truth of trash talking on xBox lives, followed by a scathing expose on the ocean – does it really get people wet?
No shit. That guy is just another egotistical dick playing video games. However, his dickishness is redeemed by the fact that he is tormenting such pathetic carebears. “omg I got pvp’d in a pvp zone! aaahh!” All of those people need to stick to one-player games, and plain old chat rooms. And guess what… somebody will STILL try to hurt their feelings!
Just another douchebag taking advantage of bad game design. Common, everyday griefing. The only thing remarkable about this example is that most MMOs would patch something like this out in relatively short order. Teleport Foe was obviously broken the moment they added PVP to the game, I’m surprised they still havent’ done anything about it.
For folks that haven’t played CoH: this isn’t PVP. He’s not doing something clever to best his opponents in a battle of wits or skill. He’s pushing a button and teleporting enemies on top of invincible death-machine NPCs while he himself is in near-total safety. The game allows virtually no defense against this except to specifically tailor your character solely to either do exactly this, or combat exactly this. This, obviously is Not Fun, and is completely useless in the PVE part of the game, which is by far COH’s primary market.
Most people realize that this is Not Fun, and intentionally avoid it. This guy, apparently, is not one of them…and is surprised that people hurl abuse his way? Duh. This isn’t exotic social behavior in the least.
I can’t believe that this is supposed to be news. He’s doing the equivalent of running around kicking people in the shins, day in and day out, for weeks on end, and they get extremely frustrated when nothing can be done about it. Mix in a little internet anonymity, and you get childish insults and idle threats.
Also, the way that article paints him as a victim here is laughable.
Not least because it doesn’t actually grant anything to the person doing it. You get no kind of reward for killing people in this manner except the satisfaction that you just fucked with someone. Like I said, sociopathic.
And don’t believe for an instant that it was only carebears who he did this on.
How could it be considered to be anything other than griefing?
The designers of the game set up the rules such that player-vs-player incurred no experience debt punishment for the loser. His tactic (teleporting opponents into crowds of NPCs) resulted in experience debt for the loser. All he was doing was abusing a loophole that the designers hadn’t anticipated.
Even more telling is that he has quit the game- just as the designers are releasing a patch which makes abusing that loophole much harder.
What’s more, according to the forum thread linked above, he was hardly the innocent victim the article portrays him as. He routinely taunted his opponents when he defeated them- how can he act shocked when the other players got angry with him? As someone pointed out, his paper is hardly impartial- he wasn’t observing the situation, he was actively trying to get the results he wanted and which supported his playstyle.
I’m missing something. I don’t get how he’s just a griefer. True, he’s teleporting people to instant death, but he’s doing it in zones in which those things can happen, right? I’m having a hard time seeing why what he’s doing is so bad.