Thanks for the feels. I’ve acknowledged that muling and dealing with and through sympathetic non reds/greys was borderline exploiting. That did defeat the intended consequences of anti-social behavior which by reducing risks and costs escalated frequency.
Reds were folks who were flagged by the system as someone who could be attacked with no penalty. Greys I believe were people you could attack without being flagged red. It’s been 15+ years I might be remembering that less than 100% correct.
Yup–and that’s a major part of what makes what he did wrong, IMO.
I don’t think your objection holds water, then.
The problem wasn’t killing other players who didn’t want to PvP, it was…using a game mechanic that the designers hadn’t anticipated, in order to lower the costs of PvP?
What if he’d attacked other players and killed them and looted them and dismembered them, but then just stayed out in the forest and never went into town to sell his ill-gotten goods? Would he have played ethically then?
The fact is, the game supported PvP. Back in the old days when I played WoW, I played on a PvE server, and you could only attack other players who flagged themselves for PvP, or who accepted your challenge to a duel. There was no game mechanic whereby other players could attack me and steal my stuff, and even on PvP servers nobody could steal your stuff or cost you XP.
But Ultima wasn’t like that. It had PvP enabled by design, and nasty penalties for losing at PvP by design. This wasn’t an accident, this was designed into the game.
I understand that you wouldn’t like that game, and many people would agree with you, and I wouldn’t like that sort of game either. The flaw was that since UO was the first “modern” MMO it wasn’t appreciated how annoying this feature would be. And no modern game is designed this way, as a result.
But if someone had attacked you and cost you loot and XP you’d still be annoyed, whether they could use an alt to sell your loot in town or not. That can’t be the feature that annoys you. It’s the PvP when you don’t want to PvP that annoys you. The alt exploit is a red herring.
But you can’t complain that PvP was nonconsensual, because you consented to that when you bought the game. Seriously, you did.
And the big differnce between the PvP in UO and screaming epithets at other players, is that screaming epithets really is against the rules, and they will ban you for it. Even though there is no game mechanic that only allows positive speech over the voice channel. The rule has to be enforced by the admins. And if the admins ban your account for nonconsensual PvP then that’s fine as well, even if there’s no game mechanic that makes it literally impossible.
PvP in a game that allows PvP is not the same as harrassing another player.
First, your last sentence is based entirely on assumptions that you’ve made and not on any poll or survey, right? So we can dismiss that almost entirely out of hand, and we can dismiss it completely once we acknowledge that playing a game with PVP aspects means that you have consented to the game as it is. If you can’t agree on that point, I’m not sure what the discussion is about.
The second point I’d like to make is that if all of life was lived according to the rules you set out, no one would be able to interact with anyone else because that would be “unethical” to engage someone who did not want to be engaged, and you appear to believe that everyone not holding up a sign that says “PLEASE INTERACT WITH ME” does not want to be engaged.
I can already see someone making the argument that you are talking about “engaged in conflict” but the truth is that ANY interaction that wasn’t sought out by both parties involved at least party being interrupted and losing time at doping whatever they were doing before the interruption, so any interaction that isn’t completely consensual would necessarily involve “unethical” behavior according to the Kantian ethics as you’ve described them.
But I am not acting unethical when I go out in public in a garishly colored outfit with large feathers all over it, despite the fact that other people don’t like seeing me in my Toucan Coutre. Nor am I unethical when I speak to someone, even if they are clearly doing something else.
You seem to be arguing that unless people EXPLICITLY seek some form of interaction, they are by default avoiding that form of interaction. That is not an acceptable set of criteria, either in the real world or online. And, to keep hammering the point, by playing the game that has a PVP component, you have, for all practical purposes, agreed to that form of interaction. Again, if you disagree with this, I’m not sure what the point of this discussion is.
Hopefully that’s clear despite my typos, but I’ll offer a corrected version just in case: I can already see someone making the argument that you are talking about “engaged in conflict” but the truth is that ANY interaction that wasn’t sought out by both parties involved at least one party being interrupted and losing time at doing whatever they were doing before the interruption, so any interaction that isn’t completely consensual would necessarily involve “unethical” behavior according to the Kantian ethics as you’ve described them.
ETA: Oh yeah, that should be Toucan Couture, too.
Wrong; it’s based on his own account of how people responded to him. So we can dismiss the rest of your paragraph out of hand.
That’s absurd. Of course we need to make assumptions about the level of interaction people want. The fact that we’re making predictions, and that predictions are faulty, doesn’t mean we throw up our hands at the futility of everything.
“Using a mechanic that the designers hadn’t anticipated.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a lovelier way to describe circumventing the rules :). You have a gift for words.
Remember, that’s only one of my objections.
Consider the person who, in real life, makes his living swindling other people. I might object that he’s unethical in part because he’s engaged in predation on others in order to make a living, and that’s a fair objection. It doesn’t mean that if he took his earnings and set them all on fire, I’d suddenly be cool with what he said.
Seriously, I think some of y’all would do well to anticipate the most reasonable rebuttals to what you post before you post them. The idea that an act can be unethical for several different reasons isn’t exactly some crazy abstruse idea.
That’s one difference in a scenario I’ve not been discussing. WHen I was on Team Fortress, I’d occasionally get someone who’d blast nasty racist music over the team chat channel. I could turn it off, sure, and I did. The rules gave me a good response to his actions. That doesn’t make it okay to blast nasty racist music over the chat channel.
So I guess you’re right. That’s a big difference. The big similarity is that screaming obscenities, like ganking people for treasure because you’re bored getting things the slow way, is a dick move.
No. Screaming obscenities which is technically possible but explicitly prohibited as a violation of the terms of use is a dick move. Ganking people as intended and living with those consequences is actually honorable. Ganking people and giving stuff to a mule or a non pk’er cohort circumvents the spirit of the rules and is approaching a moderate level of dickishness. The problem is that even condemning that level of circumvention is difficult because it’s such an easy and obvious method of circumvention that it’s unavoidable.
The fact is, enough people were sufficiently annoyed by that style of play regardless of any subjective perception of intent or morality that the rules were changed to allow each player to have an option. That is a win win. The only people who suffered were those whose enjoyment DID come from the fact that some people were truly salty from being ganked. Since I don’t like in-game griefers I have no sympathy for them.
In Hearthstone we have jackasses that deliberately rope to annoy. Is that ethical? I’d say no. I wonder what others would say.
No, you really can’t. The fact that you’re relying on bump’s assumptions doesn’t change anything. Maybe those people were contemplating PVP but after getting killed and losing items, they decided it was a shit thing so they lied about heir motives. There’s simply no way to know what the other players really thought.
Nor does it mean that anyone was unethical at making a wrong assumption, especially when all the available evidence indicates that they wanted the interaction that they are now decrying.
A person who goes to a concert isn’t subjected to “unethical” behavior if the artist plays a song they don’t like. A person who goes to an art exhibit isn’t subjected to “unethical” behavior if they see a painting or sculpture they don’t like. But you’re arguing exactly this, while ignoring the most important aspect of the situation: people choose to play games and in doing so consent to play by the rules as they are, not as they wish them to be.
Okay.
octopus, I think the people who deliberately rope in Hearthstone are being dickish (for which a fancier word is “unethical”). Doing something that has the deliberate effect of annoying people, unless you’ve got a very good reason to do it, qualifies.
That’s it? You accept that you can’t dismiss the rest of my paragraph out of hand, but you won’t formulate a new response? And what about the rest of my post? Where’s your response to all that? I thought we were participating in a debate here, after all.
It’s worth pointing out again that the reactions to my banditry were NOT uniformly negative. There were some who definitely did not like it. But there were multiple ones who actually liked it- not because we were just PK-ing, but because we were something to fight, and people actually trying (maybe not as successfully as we’d hoped) to play bad guys and give the ‘good’ guys something to do, as opposed to just boredom-quitting the game. The way the chat worked back then (haven’t actually played it since 1997) is that it was on-screen, so they could actually be hunting us and we could chat with them at the same time without giving away our positions (we had hiding skill of some kind, as well as camouflage-colored clothing)
Nope, still dismissing it out of hand, but I respect that you disagree.
And if you’d confined your play to others who thought it was awesome, it would have been. Seriously, it would have been a great addition to the game. It was (among other things, but most importantly) the involvement of people that you knew weren’t interested that made it a problem.
I guess it’s because I started playing MMORPGs with Everquest but the idea of alts was so prevalent that feeling like it breaks the rules is just weird to me. People used alts all the time to get around faction issues (“My paladin needs a bottle of win from the dark elf city? Time to make a level 1 dark elf alt”). I’m sure that gave Brad McQuaid conniptions back in the day although the development team eventually learned to embrace it to the point of adding “shared bank” slots to make it easier to transfer stuff between characters.
But, ultimately, using an alt isn’t mechanically any different from having a non-KOS friend do the run for you. It doesn’t really play into the idea of PVP being unethical or dickish. The in-game price of your actions is that it’s now moderately more annoying to buy/sell stuff in town which seems fair enough.
And like others have said, in lieu of some kind of server separation, the assumption was that if you’re playing on those servers, you’re down for PVP. It’s not like there was a convention where the people willing to do PVP had red auras, and people who didn’t want to participate had blue ones, or anything like that.
It was supposed to be “Lord of the Flies” meets “Mad Max” once you got outside the cities, and everyone knew that, so why would anyone get butthurt if they left the cities, and then got jacked by some guy lurking in the bushes? And why is that any different than if some outsized monster was doing the same thing? You’re just as dead in-game either way.
I understand all that. Even now WoW has to deal with unintended consequences to incentive systems. So systems that don’t work quite as intended are still used to grief.
The reason it made UO a bit more annoying to play was that by having a mule or a non kos friend it basically took 90% of the intended consequences for playing an evil character away.
You could even get killed in the cities if you didn’t have a help guard macro.
And I notice that you don’t address any of the other points I made; why not? Is it because you realize that you have no way to argue for your position that playing a game with PVP isn’t consenting to PVP? Or is it something else? I think it might be something else.
ETA: I’m also not getting any sense of “respect” from your posts, so you’re failing to make your points in this discussion pretty thoroughly.
How do you think bump “knew” that people weren’t interested in being attacked by him BEFORE he attacked them? Do you think bump should have asked permission before he attacked? :dubious:
I notice that you still avoid addressing the issue that playing the game is consenting to PVP (and related activities).
The reason I can’t quite say it was exploiting a bug is that it’s such an obvious way to get around the supposed consequences of PvP that I can’t believe it was really a bug. It was a poor design choice, not a bug.
But…if someone is screaming obscenities in Team Fortress, you can either mute them, or report them and get them banned. It is explicitly against the rules to scream obscenities, even though there is no automatic enforcement of the rule by the game, it requires the action of an admin.
So if I screamed obscenities at you, you could contact an admin and get me banned. I broke the rules of the game. Now, what if my character shot your character in the face? I understand you don’t want to get shot, it’s more fun to not lose the game. But my shooting you is not violating the rules, and if you tried to contact the admins and complained that I shot you they’d be very confused.
Going back to UO, if a character had screamed obscenities they could have been banned for violating the TOS. But they would never have been banned for killing another character. That’s not just not violating the TOS, that was an intended feature of the game, just like PvP in Team Fortress is an intended feature of the game. No one would ever be banned for nonconsensual PvP.
I agree that ethics apply to interpersonal interactions at all times, even when playing a game or acting in a play. Screaming racist epithets at someone and then claiming that it was your character screaming racist epithets at the other guy’s character doesn’t make it OK. But killing another player’s character in a game is not the same thing, because the other person is not actually harmed.
As for Kantian ethics in UO, “what if everyone did it?” doesn’t make sense. If everyone did it then the game would be a PvP arena. Yes, nobody would get drops from mobs or craft good items, but it wouldn’t matter, they’d PvP as level 1 guys dressed in rags and wielding nearly-broken sticks, and if some lucky bastard found a pair of worn sandals it would give them a huge armor bonus.
But that doesn’t sound like a game I’d want to play, and lots of people thought like I do, and so the game rules were fixed so that wouldn’t happen.