AT the end of the day, all games have both explicit and implicit rules. The explicit rules cannot cover every possible situation, because rules don’t, and can’t cover the human element. This isn’t always bad. Some poor games based on the official rules can be made really good with the right player-level understanding. Sometimes the unofficial rules are overly restrictive; people often complain bitterly about other players using allowed but powerful combinations of gear, or tactics that are hard to counter. Quite frequently, these kinds of complaints are neither realistic nor fair.
What often gets missed, though, is that implied rules of social conduct still exist in the digital realm, and violating them is often just as jerkish as in the world. Games need these implied rules to function in most cases, because griefing damages the social fabric necessary to the game’s function.
The burden is in two places. First, you’re right that the burden is with developers to make it harder to engage in antisocial behavior. But it’s also incumbent on individuals to control their own damn selves and not behave in an antisocial manner.
People saying that it’s all in the game are running up against a peculiarity of MMORPGs and the like: in many ways, these “games” are very different from traditional games.
Take a look at this list of games and see how many of them you know the objectives for:
-Basketball
-Chess
-Tic-Tac-Toe
-Croquet
-Slaps
-Blackjack
-World of Warcraft
The first six games all have clear objectives. Moreover, they’re zero-sum games (with blackjack as a possible exception in a casino): achieving your objective necessarily means thwarting someone else from achieving theirs.
But World of Warcraft? What’s the clear objective? What’s the winning condition? Does achieving it necessarily involve thwarting someone else?
Ultima Online, as I understand it, had even less clear objectives. That was both a bug and a feature, of course; many folks like that aspect of MMORPGs, treating them as a social space (in my WOW days, I played in a roleplay guild for awhile–we achieved our objective by hanging out in a pirate boat converted to a bar and shooting the shit in character). Folks could make up their own objectives.
Which is what bump did. Only he deliberately chose an objective that meant keeping others from achieving theirs. He turned the space for everyone into a space that wasn’t what they wanted to be in, all because it amused him. It’s the ethical equivalent of the dude at the park on a sunny afternoon who starts blasting Christian Death just because he likes pissing off the norms.
Can that dude at the park do that? Sure. First amendment, baby. Should he? Nope.
Expanding on the “objective of the game” idea, I read an article a while back by one of the lead devs for World of Warcraft, and he was talking about the single most popular part of WoW. Or rather, he was talking about how there isn’t one. There’s no one part of the game - questing, raiding, crafting, PvP, or what have you - that’s liked by a solid majority of the people who play the game. There are hard-core raiders who never touched PvP, PvP fiends who don’t care about questing, people who are just in it for completing quests who don’t raid, and so forth. IIRC, only about 20% of the player base was really invested in any one part of the game.
Assuming those numbers were roughly accurate for UO at launch, that means that one fifth of the playerbase was basically holding the other 80% hostage, making them play PvP and preventing them from playing the parts of the game they were actually there for.
For what it was worth, my buddies and I deliberately tried to play highwaymen, not just gankers or random PKers. We’d hop out and say “Stand and Deliver”, and then request their stuff in exchange for not killing them.
At one point, it was pretty cool in that the good characters actually got a posse together to try and hunt us down. And we actually chatted with some of them while they were doing it; they were totally down with the idea of evil roleplayers.
You see, at that point, there was a near complete dearth of monsters and stuff for people to kill and get XP for. Like you could go wander the wilderness for hours and not run into anything. Or go into a dungeon and find 40 other people hanging around waiting for monsters to spawn.
So we decided that for our part, we’d be the antagonists and give ourselves something to do and play evil characters. It wasn’t really a primary goal of ours, but we did recognize that by doing so, we also put the crosshairs on ourselves, as most of the other people had no more to do than we did, and hunting bandits was better than wandering looking for some random animal or monster to kill.
I kind of think where some people started getting pissed was with respect to the resurrection mechanisms of the game. You could rez-in-place immediately with some penalty to experience points, or you could wander across the landscape in spectral form to a temple, where you’d get resurrected for no cost at XP, but essentially nude, and far from your home base. Neither was terrific- if you rezzed-in-place, we’d typically let you run off nude without your stuff, but if you attacked, we’d dismember your corpse, forcing you to go to a temple, as where we typically set up was at bridges and choke points that people had to travel through, and it was not unlikely that others would happen upon the fight and join in.
So we’d typically give them one rez-in-place, and then carve them up and scatter the pieces across the road, which in a sort of serendipity, worked as excellent bait to slow down curious travelers.
Mind you, I’m typically NOT the sort who plays evil characters; in general, they’re more paladin/saintly types than anything else.
It was more of a reaction to a somewhat lame online world without enough monsters than it was a desire on my part to grief other people. The point was never to kill people to get my jollies, but rather to actually have SOMETHING to do in the game, even if it meant being the evil character.
And yeah, I definitely pissed some people off, but there were probably some more who liked the idea that hey, they have something/someone to hunt, rather than just roaming the wilderness aimlessly looking for ANYTHING to fight.
It did get worse later on- after we ended up quitting (the network lag made it unplayable for us, so we stopped playing), I fired it up a few months later, and found that it was kind of a free-for-all once you got outside the cities. You’re right- it wasn’t fun, because it was just a bunch of clowns killing each other, with no pretense to doing ANYTHING else.
Personally, I tend to think the cardinal sin isn’t PKing, but rather the extraordinarily juvenile notion of wiping out noobs, or the practice of running an aimbot or wallhack or whatever other cheat. I just don’t see the gratification in getting 25 kills a round… and 22 of them are level 1 noobs who don’t even know how to aim yet, or getting 50 kills because you can see through the walls, or can’t miss. Or running around with absurd equipment because you hacked your gold or whatever. It’s the same sort of mentality writ small, as the canned hunt people seem to have.
PKing isn’t your sin here. It’s forcing others to play the game the way you want, instead of the way they want. Any time you do that, you’re not behaving in a good manner. I don’t give a shit if you wanted to roleplay Buffalo Bill and skin your victims.
What you were roleplaying–your character–is completely beside the point, and you need to separate your actions as a human from your pretend actions as a pretend character. You can pretend whatever you want, I don’t care–but when you make part of your pretend world be the fact that you ruin other people’s recreation, that’s the actual thing you did.
You didn’t put griefing as a primary goal? That’s also irrelevant. You decided on a course of action that was predicated on ruining other people’s fun.
Some people enjoyed it? Also irrelevant. You yourself said that plenty of people were pissed off at it, and you continued doing it even though it pissed them off.
You could have limited yourself. You could have set yourselves up as bandits, only not gone through with robbing people (you know, just pretend), let some other players know what you were doing, and they could try to hunt you down. That’s fine. As long as everyone engaged in the game is doing the thing they want to do, you’re in the clear.
Again: once you go out to engage in an activity that only works when it ruins the fun for others, you’re not behaving well.
At game days, I’ve seen people introduce the “NOPE” card on the table. It’s to keep social graces intact among people who…don’t always have them. If a game is veering off in a direction that’s bothering someone at the table, they can tap the card, let everyone know, and folks can readjust the game to make sure everyone is having fun. (For example, if you have that shitheel at the table who constantly makes menstruation jokes about female characters, NOPE!)
Folks who are treating each other well don’t need the NOPE card usually. Ultima Online apparently needed one.
You’ve decided it’s irrelevant if some people are enjoying the playstyle. You’ve decided to eliminate the part of the playstyle that makes it remotely realistic. You’ve ignored the part where bump gave other players several outs, like paying a ransom.
I’ve come to the conclusion that UO was not a game for you. That’s nothing against you, but it doesn’t mean you get to shit on something interesting bump came up with that fit within the allowed confines of the game.
If someone pulled that crap in a game in person, that would be the last time I played with them. That is the most childish “wah mommy I’m losing” dumb idea I have heard in a long time.
Again, if you don’t like the way the game is played, the problem is either with the game or with you, not with the people playing the game.
The analogy to the park is apt. Just because some folks might enjoy my impression of a drunken Klansman shouting racial epithets, and just because people have an out (they could always go picnic somewhere else!), and just because I researched the Klan before taking on my role, doesn’t make it non-obnoxious. His interactions with people who enjoyed his roleplay are not the problematic interactions.
:rolleyes: It’s not used when you’re losing, dude. It’s used when someone at the table makes one too many jokes about how their character fucks children.
Do you apply this reasoning to other areas of life? If you’re at a restaurant and the lady at the next table over is describing her shits in great detail, you’re totally cool with her, figuring it’s the restaurant that needs to fix things and not her that needs to stop talking about her shits?
As I mentioned in the other thread, there were people who did “orc” roleplay. They would go to a ruins area, clear out the one or maybe two actual monsters that were there, put on the most monstery-looking armor they had and shout orc-sounding phrases challenging people to fight. They’d post on server forums ahead of time, saying they’d be out there from 7-9 tonight or whatever and generally let people know where to go if they want a PvP fight.
That is playing an evil character in a non-jerk manor.
Also, in your case, the rather iffy reputation system came into play. If you jump out and yell “Stand and Deliver!” and I decide I want to fight, the game doesn’t necessarily know that you’re roleplaying an “evil” character, so if I attack, I might get dinged in the rep system because the game logic thinks I initiated a hostile action against another player.
In theory, if your rep was already low enough, it wouldn’t matter, but trying to figure out when I could or couldn’t attack enemy greifers meant that many of those who might want to fight back did not because of the problematic game mechanics.
Fixable, sure, and something that it would have been nice if the game developers had anticipated ahead of time, but you were still being a jerk when you were doing it.
It is, in fact, the restaurant’s problem. In fact most restaurants have posted policies about behavior that will get you removed. If the restaurant allowed that, good for them, but I won’t eat there. If the game allows ganking, fine, but that’s one reason I don’t play MMOs. That doesn’t mean I should tell other people how to play MMOs.
Look, non consensual pvp was intended by the devs for UO. They just had no idea how unpopular it would be and how clever the pk population was with regards to exploits, strategy and hacks. I can’t and won’t blame a normal pk’er for behaving how the game was intended. I also don’t blame those who disliked non consensual pvp for lobbying the devs to change the rule set. In the end the developers did the wise thing, in my opinion, and provided options for each player base.
The separation between character and player does exist, but you can’t make your character evil and use that as excuse to be an evil player.
The most basic definition of evil that I’ve come up with is to do something for your own pleasure or benefit full well knowing it is to the detriment and displeasure of others.
You can play an evil character without being evil yourself–it’s what DMs have to do all the time.
Whose to blame if some are playing the game unaware of the whole scope? Is it the pk’ers obligation to be constrained by another’s arbitrary sense of morality when the game is designed to allow the pk’er to act? In Mario Kart you know the shells are coming and shouldn’ t be too aggrieved. Why should rpg’s be different?
To use an example from just yesterday, I was in the second-lowest zone in the Human area of World of Warcraft, trying to hand in a few quests. Every single time the questgivers respawned, a high level Undead Rogue destealthed, killed them all with a single AoE, then ran away. The game allows players to repeatedly attack enemy settlements even when they are essential to other players’ enjoyment of the game, but that doesn’t make you any less of a shitbag for doing it.
And if all you want is PvP you shouldn’t be in a game without PvP, and if you don’t give a shit about PvP you shouldn’t play pure-PvP games.
I’ve played games where it was possible for players to steal from each other. It was also possible for players to kill each other anywhere. Any of them had gotten self regulated by the players themselves to the point where the amount of stealling and pkilling were whatever people were happy with; generally this turned out to be very low, you were more likely to have someone steal from you in order to trigger a conversation on “do not carry everything in plain sight” than as an actual theft.
It’s not as if you cannot choose not to play a game. Your livelihood does not depend on it, your health does not depend on it, and if your friends or family will get their panties in a tizzy because that’s a game you don’t care to play, it’s them who’ve got the second task of unknotting the underwear!
It is called World of Warcraft. It’s annoying but unless it occurs for a long period of time there is usually something else you can do that is still progression orientated.
The only time I ever fight opposing faction NPCs is for approximately 30 mins max. It is a jackass action to do that all day on certain servers. On other servers you will provoke a counterattack and that can be fun.
The interesting thing is internet anonymity does lead to some vile behavior. I do wonder if a jackass server where the most egregious asshats were banished to would teach manners.
I like playing LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online.)
I like playing PvE.
There are options in LOTRO that allow me (for example) to ignore other players forcing my character to collapse, dance etc. I have those options switched on.
There’s also an area specifically for PvP - I personally have never gone there.
I can still trade with other players and form Fellowships with them to fight dangerous monsters and complete quests.
I believe the game should make it clear whether players can rob or kill each other (like LOTRO does.)
I’m telling other people how to act like decent human beings, not how to play MMOs. The underlying principle–don’t get your jollies at the expense of someone else without their consent–is pretty straightfoward and applies here very directly.
As for whether the game allows for this sort of griefing, note that bump and allies had to find workarounds to avoid in-game consequences for their behavior (i.e., an inability to go into towns), workarounds that had nothing to do with roleplaying: they figured out that they could create alternate characters who could go into town and sell their ill-gotten gains. The claim that they were just roleplaying evil characters, and di not intend to be griefers, is suspect, given that evil brigands usually don’t have multiple bodies among which they can apportion their legal and illegal activities for maximum efficiency.
That’s right, the mafia never had a front organization through which they could launder ill-gotten gains. That is something that has never happened in real life. Nope, burglars always have to fence their goods themselves, never through an intermediary. This only exists in games.
Right–which is illegal, and which can get caught. The loophole he found in the game was that the in-game punishments weren’t sophisticated enough to catch fences; he used this out-of-game knowledge to make it trivially easy to avoid in-game consequences for his misbehavior.
Edit: sure, you can continue to blame the game designers for not having sophisticated algorithms to catch that sort of shenanigans. The point is that people need to have the decency to police themselves, not to exploit loopholes in order to make things shitty for those around them. bump decided not to do so.