You can tell the hardcore gamer folks in this thread, by how they are hating on the guy.
Let me get this straight…
The game is supposedly designed so that players pick a side, either Hero or Villain. Then, after they have played against the computer generated foes long enough, they are given the ability to enter a special region (pvp) where the player controlled hero’s and villains are supposed to fight each other.
He goes in, and uses his specially designed guy to defeat villains. Possibly abusing a game mechanic, but the end result is that his hero is defeating villains.
Then folks complain and get mad, because he is in a special zone where hero’s and villains are supposed to be fighting, and they don’t want to use it for that. They’d rather chat.
I don’t get why folks are so angry about this guy.
As for calling him a sociopath because he ruined someones game, do you really think so? Really? Because that’s just a tad extreme, imo.
Because the designers set it up so that players wouldn’t get experience debt* when they lost to other players. His technique, however, tricked NPCs into killing his targets for him- so that the players he defeated would get experience debt. He was abusing a loophole, one that the designers are trying to close. And then he wrote a paper on how his technique angered the other players.
On a similar note:
On the XBox 360, online games have been experiencing a rash of players who cause their opponent’s consoles to crash, resulting in a win for themselves. While what they’re doing is not strictly disallowed, it’s not part of the game. It’s clearly cheating. Granted, you could say that the victims don’t have to play online if they don’t want to be forcibly disconnected… but that’s kind of blaming the victim, isn’t it?
*Basically, negative experience- with experience debt, your next level takes even longer to get. Experience debt sucks.
The only thing I see here that’s worthy of any comment at all is that there was a flaw in the game design that let PVP players kill each other too easily, and with too much of a penalty for losing. Whenever you have such a flaw, it’s inevitable that some people will abuse it, and likewise inevitable that the people it’s used on won’t like it. And now they’re fixing that flaw, so that’s not even worthy of comment any more, either.
A sociopath, full stop? No. But it is sociopathic behavior. He displayed a disregard for the social customs of the game – and I am not talking about being friendly and chatting with the other side here. I’m talking about the concept of actually engaging players in combat. Instead he attacked other players in a way that provides no entertainment or reward except the satisfaction of having dicked over other players. That’s griefing, plain and simple. Had he fought other players directly, even if he was better at the game and better equipped such that he beat everyone he faced, nobody would call him a griefer.
At the time, sure, it was allowed by the game, but it was not intended behavior. When you’re dealing with a game as expansive and complex as an MMO, “it lets me do it” is not a sufficient defense. Developers are only almost omniscient, not completely. Bugs, loopholes, and unintended behavior abound. That they subsequently made it harder to use the tactic Myers used is proof of that.
It seems like the teleportation power is fundamentally broken if it makes this strategy dominant. On its face, the ability to teleport an enemy into an instant death environment seems too strong.
So ? If that’s what the community wants to do with these zones, what’s this jerk’s problem with that ? What gives him the right to force everyone else to play “the right way” ? If he so desperately wants to beat on villains, fine, attack them then. And get curbstomped because no one wants to help you fight them.
But hiding at the spawn and TP’ing them onto the one-shot killbots that are supposed to prevent spawn camping and unfair behavior/griefing, just because he can, is an extreme dick move. If you’d played the game, you’d know that, and why.
First of all, because there’s no defense against it, except leaving the area (yay ! fun ! Mission : ruin everyone’s fun a stunning success !). The only defense against teleportation is that it consumes lots of power, so the player using it can’t chain lots of powers after it. Big whoop in this case, since he’s not the one killing the player - if he’s hidden behind the guards, and using the “TP other” power from extreme range, well, no one can possibly hurt him. Yet he can hurt them - but not the “proper way”, the way players are *supposed *to fight each other in these zones : with their own damn combat powers. But this asshole teleports them to the guards, which are extremely overpowered compared to players, and for good reason : they’re here to provide each team with a safe zone where they can regroup, recuperate etc…
By killing them via NPCs, he himself gains nothing, his victims lose experience and, more importantly, they’re not amused. Nor are their friends on the hero side, who not only see their villain buddys get griefed, but can’t attack the griefer themselves. And considering that a suddenly vanishing teammate in the middle of a difficult fight against the computer can quickly spell death, they probably end up eating dirt as well…
As for him being “surprised” that people would dislike him… Well, it’s akin to using a sniper rifle from the stands of a boxing match, then being all offended when the boxers being shot at complain.
It’s like, say, spreading nasty rumors among your friends, then acting all surprised when they get pissed at you and saying “I don’t get why you all are so mad, it’s not illegal, right?”.
Any society has a wealth of unwritten rules to follow. They’re called etiquette, and following them is called ‘being polite’, and ‘acting like a normal human’. It doesn’t matter what social area you’re in, breaking etiquette knowingly and repeatedly is being a dick.
That’s the hell of it: he’s the one who’s not playing the “right” way. The point of the PvP zones is for players to engage in a penalty-free contest to see whose character is stronger. He’s circumventing that entirely - not only is he abusing an exploit in order to win, his exploit penalizes the losing player. Not only is he preventing the other players from using the zone the way they want to*, he’s preventing them from using the zone the way it’s supposed to be used. All of which is enough to make him a dick on its own, but to try to pass this off as both him being the victim, and as some sort of legitimate insight into human nature? The guy’s a tool of the first order.
*Incidentally, I highly doubt the articles description of the zone as a place where there was no PvP going on. I’ve not played City of Heroes, but I’ve played a fair few other MMOs, and I’ve never seen one where the PvP areas were used solely as chat rooms. While I’m sure there was some amount of that going on, I’m betting that description is every bit as self-serving as the part where he’s described as “too skilled” to be beaten by any of the villains.
Until they patch it, it’s fair game. If it never gets patched, or completely fixed, then it’s still fair game. If it were a huge problem, then it’d be patched immediately. It’s not, from the sounds of everyone else talking about “etiquette”, which the game’s designers didn’t put in; the players did. I fail to see these unwritten rules and why they should be followed. Perhaps I’m still not understanding the situation, though.
In my eyes it’s not so much the outside etiquette thing that bugs me as much as it is that he purposefully exposed the other players to more risk than they were willing to take on. If you’re playing a game, going in you know what you’re willing to risk (usually that’s just losing). But by exploiting the game in this way, he opened up a new avenue of risk to players that may well not have known that it was there going into it.
It’s like me challenging you to a game of football for a trophy, and when we win we not only get the trophy, we take all the trophies you’ve gathered home too. If you’d had the chance to agree to that first, it might be fair, but you didn’t. Likewise, in this instance, the other players agreed to play based on the rules they believed there were - the article writer exploited their incorrect belief, and gave no warning that the rules were different.
Usually in MMOs there are ‘the rules’ that the game engine will enforce, and there are ‘the rules’ that are spelled out the the EULA and GMs will enforce. And generally forcing other players into combat with unbeatable NPCs is considered against the rules that players agreed to, even if the game engine lets you do it (until devs patch that bug)
“The game let me do it!” is not a defense against breaking the rules.
Also, no, it would not be patched immediately unless it were a showstopper (game-crashing) bug. Game decisions made in haste always piss off the playerbase, whereas decisions made with thought only piss them off most of the time. Once a problem is noted, methods of solving it need to be discussed and argued over, then they need to be coded in, then they need to be tested in-house, then they need to be tested on the public test server, etc. Development time is usually measured in months. Also, a change can get folded into a batch of other changes, and for that reason too it might see a delay. Issue 13 was a major PVP overhaul which included the change to teleportation rules that prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Something doesn’t go from okay to verboten once the new patch goes live. It was bad before, which prompted the development team to conjure up a fix.
It was also not a showstopper. Don’t let the article and ensuing discussion deceive you into thinking this was a horrible, horrible catastrophe that had the entire game in a tizzy. It was one douchebag on one server using the system to make other players’ experience not fun. It happens all the time. The only difference is this particular douchebag thinks the resulting backlash was interesting enough to write about. The devs did identify it as a problem, but not a critical showstopper, and so they put it on their list of 8000 other prioritized issues to deal with.
Changing tracks: Once again, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. “The game lets me do it” doesn’t fly. The game also makes it possible for you to lead low-level teammates into a dangerous area under your protection so the game treats them as one level lower than you, but you can drop that protection any time. Because the game lets you do that, is it thusly okay? Even when you’re on a mixed team of heroes and villains?
Sirlin’s philosophy works fine for fighting games and other strictly competitive games. It doesn’t work for MMOs, which are not tight, closed systems and which also have a social layer to them that cannot be ignored. It’s not “just a game” when it comes to MMOs, it’s interaction with other people, and social rules come into play that you can not code for.
As has been pointed out by myself and others, what he was doing was NOT within the rules- what he was doing was exploiting a loophole that the designers hadn’t thought to close. MMOs suffer from the “million monkeys” problem- the designers cannot anticipate all of the ways in which the players will break the rules.
I work on MMOs- I’ve experienced it firsthand. In my experience, the first people to find bugs were the griefers, and they found them in order to take advantage of them. We wouldn’t find out about the bugs until the griefers had abused them enough on their victims. Heck, I used to invisibly follow the “problem players” around to try to catch them abusing bugs we didn’t know about.
The thing is, they don’t make the game better. They don’t report the bugs- they abuse them to irritate other players. It can take months for the developers to even find out about the bugs, and during that time, their victims are not enjoying the game. If the bug can affect the game economy in some way, the damage may not be reparable.
