The problem with that is that if you’re playing a game with people, you did consent to play that game, and if you don’t want to continue playing, you should find a different game, not try to claim that they are going against your consent if they play by the real rules but not your personal rules. No one would start a game of chess with someone, then say ‘oh, I don’t consent to you capturing my pieces, that’s ruining my day and you’re violating my consent’. If you join a tag football game, you can’t just grab the ball then say ‘I don’t consent to being touched today’ and walk to an easy touchdown.
I’m not a fan of griefers, but I’m also not a fan of calling anyone who PVPs in a way you don’t personally like a bad person.
It is natural for any game to be exploited by players finding loopholes in the rules. Basketball has two clocks to force players to move the ball up the court specifically because, originally, a loophole in the rules allowed the first team to score to simply hold on to the ball for the rest of the game. Baseball has a rule that says you can’t throw your glove at a ball to stop it. Hockey does not allow a team to simply heave the puck all the way down the ice unless they’re shorthanded. Poker does not allow a player to fake their betting action. In every case these rules were created because without them players WOULD do those things, because it is logical to so, but allowing them to do so makes the game less enjoyable. You can’t ask the players to not try to win. Well, you can, but some will not listen.
To go back to video games, the “sniper asshole” problem is, obviously, only a problem if sniping is an overpowered mechanic. If people just don’t like snipers, well, sorry, man, you’re playing Call of Battlefield: Modern Carnage and snipers are part of warfare. But if it’s legitimately the case that snipers are dominating the game then the developers need to tone down the snipers.
World of Warcraft gets this stuff right; if you don’t like PVP they have servers were there is no PVP, and even where there is, the ability of players to remain relatively safe when they want to be safe is well designed. As Grumman points out it’s not perfect; allowing an opposing player to slaughter all the questgivers in Westfall so level 10 toons can’t advance is bullshit. There’s no reason why that can even be passed off as roleplaying. But Blizzard could fix it rather rapidly by having a level 92 elite guard sitting near the questgivers, thus exposing the asshole to an unbeatable mob if he exposes himself. If you want to let lower-level Horde players try to fight the NPCs, have it so the guard spawns if and when a Horde toon above level (X) comes without distance Y of that point. That’s a mechanical fix.
[QUOTE=yellowjacketcoder]
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
[/QUOTE]
That’s not a great analogy.
See, in real life, the people involved in a fence have to engage in fencing. If John wants to fence stolen Fetanyl through Henry, who plans to sell it to Sally, then John, Henry and Sally are all taking a risk in return for the reward. John must trust Henry to pay him and not rat on him; Henry must trust Sally to pay him and not rat on him; at every point in the transaction there is physical risk and no one is ever out of risk. Even after giving the Fetanyl to Henry, John remains at risk that something will go wrong and he will have the cops, or rival drug dealers, coming for him.
But in, say, World of Warcraft, John literally ceases to exist when Henry goes into town, because John and Henry are toons played by the same person. John cannot be at risk when Henry is fencing the goods because John has vanished from reality. There is no real life equivalent to that. In real life the problem with being a criminal is that you can’t wink out of the universe for a few hours and reset everything. You always exist, and you always leave a trail, and the cumulative effects of antisocial behaviour start to add up.
First of all, it’s entirely stupid that low alignment characters can’t even go into town on fear of the omnipotent guards/cops instantly figuring out that you’re evil. It’s not like you exude an aura or stench of evil that’s immediately obvious.
Another bad UO game mechanism in the early days, IMO. Had we been able to go into town and transact business as long as we followed the rules in town, or if there had been traveling merchants a-la however many other games out there, then it wouldn’t have been an issue either.
Ultimately, I think intent does come into it; we weren’t in it for the lolz of killing other people just for the sake of killing others. We were serious about trying to level up our characters, get good stuff, etc… just like everyone else. But without a robust monster/animal population, what were we to do? Roaming around hoping to find something to fight is boring as hell, as is being a freaking tailor, or whatever other idiotic occupational skill the game had, without having an actual simulated economy.
And really… what’s the difference between being accosted by a player character versus being accosted by some kind of creature? Both are aggressive, both put up a fight, and both might well kill you. The end result’s the same. Why does it matter that one’s a randomly spawned, game AI controlled NPC and the other’s some guy?
For what it’s worth, we were NOT high level characters ganking noobs. We were maybe mid-level characters, and in point of fact, got our asses handed to us more than once by people we tried to rob. That’s how it rolls; we never got butthurt about it- that’s the consequence of doing what we did.
What eventually made us quit playing was the network lag; we’d get in a fight, and things would get choppy and/or disconnect us, and we’d die, not because we were bested by better characters or strategy, but because our guys would suddenly stand there drooling while the other guys beat the hell out of them while we tried to log back on, or waited for some kind of update.
All in all, I don’t think UO or the world was quite ready for each other in the Fall of 1997/Spring of 1998. Later games, like EverQuest, which we also played, and since there was stuff to do, we were NOT pk-ers. Or any of the follow-on MMORPGs, including EVE, which IMO, does a good job of having various security levels for systems, and making a point that if you go past a certain security level, you’re liable to get ganked. But I’m sure there are some people who go out there anyway, and get their fun ruined because they didn’t pay attention.
It depends on the nature of the exploit and the game.
To go back to my example of common sports, icing the puck in hockey is unquestionably ethical. If you are on the defensive and things aren’t going well it is absolutely the correct thing to do. The object of the game is to win and icing the puck helps you win. Unfortunately, if you could always do it, it would effectively ruin the game, so you can’t do it, unless you’re shorthanded. The rule against icing exists irrespective of “ethics.”
Obviously in any game there is an element of sportsmanship, which is shorthand for not being a dick. In the case of an online RPG the opportunity for assholitude is far higher than in a common game or sport because something like UO or WOW is much, much more complex than hockey, and they have no one agreed-upon objective. I wholeheartedly agree that just because something is allowed does not mean it is ethical, and in my previous post I was quite clear that the example of a high level toon wiping out questgivers in a low level zone is just straight up asshole behaviour.
However, asking people “please don’t wipe out low level zone questgivers” is not an ideal solution. It’s like eliminating the police and just putting out a PSA saying “please don’t commit crimes.” Unwritten rules are not good rules. The best solutions are the alter the rules of the game to prohibit the behaviour. The guy who wipes low level questgivers might not stop when asked, but he will stop when he emerges from stealth and is beset upon by two 100-elite guards that pound him into hamburger. Problem solved.
The other problem with unwritten rules is that no one will ever agree to what they are. Again, to use a simpler sporting example, look at the brouhaha and debate around whether or not a baseball player should be demonstrative in celebrating a home run; it has caused a pointless and seemingly endless feud between the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers, and it lies centrally in the fact that no one agrees what the line is (and it’s not super clear how you could set a rule.)
But rules around wiping out questgivers can be rather clearly set; if you are an opposing faction player and come near an area of questgivers, you will be beset upon by mobs you’ve no hope of defeating. You can run or die. It’s a clear rule with a clear consequence that serves a justifiable purpose.
Getting all this stuff right in an MMORPG is a very tall order; it’s orers of magnitude more complicated than a board game or a sport. UO was hopelessly flawed in this regard not because the designers were idiots, but because they were (among) the first people to give it a shot. EverQuest did a better job, WOW a better job still.
I agree it’s not ideal, because people suck. But even while we put an obligation on designers to make better rules, we also should put the onus on ourselves not to suck.
“It depends” is a “No”, then - there was an implicit “necessarily” between “it” and “ethical” in my question.
Although I agree wholeheartedly it’s best handled by better rules, that’s irrelevant to whether those who do things like PK-banditry in UO are unethical or not.
Personally, as a (very sucky) WOW player, I never played on PvP servers. But if I had no choice, as in UO, I’d also hate someone who does what bump did, because there’s a very real-world cost in time and money on my part that would be being wasted.
Kantian ethics again. You claim the game isn’t very fun, so your solution is to make it significantly less fun for other players. This is clearly not a solution that everyone can engage in; your being able to do it depends on other folks choosing not to do it.
Again, this is different from finding a winning strategy in basketball, where there are clear objectives and both sides walk onto the court choosing to play a zero-sum game. By imposing a zero-sum model on players who are trying to play a positive-sum game (albeit not a very fun one, admittedly), you’re treating them as objects of your fun, unwilling assistants in your fun. That’s not cool.
I also want to point out that the demand that people not “force others to play the game the way you want” isn’t really a realistic expectation in something as free-form as a MMORPG. Nobody can accommodate everyone’s desires in that situation, much as you can’t manage to make everyone happy in real life either.
So at some point, you have to make yourself happy.
Second, if you’re not going to require everyone to be “good”, then where do you draw the “not good” line? What about someone who comes across a party desperately fighting some monsters, and choosing not to help? Is that assholish, especially if they get killed, and the opters-out kill the weakened monster, get the XP and all the loot? What if they just run on by without stopping? What about people who happen upon the dead bodies and loot them? None of this is really “good”, and are points along the line somewhere between just killing players outright for their stuff, and helping them in the fight.
I agree that the design should be such that people who don’t want to engage in PVP shouldn’t be required to. But if there’s no option, the onus doesn’t then fall onto everyone else to accommodate their wishes, especially in a game like UO.
What I’d like to know is what demographic likes the sort of “Lord of the Flies” meets “Thunderdome” style of play that so many online games seem to devolve into. I mean, “Nuketown” is an idiiotic map in the Call of Duty games- way too small for anything other than just running and gunning with no pretense of tactics or anything other than being the first to fire. It’s like a foot-borne demolition derby. But it’s also one of the very most popular maps of all time- a lot of people like it, much like the way UO devolved into some sort of crazy-assed PKer chaos after a short time (we were playing before that, FYI). It’s like some sort of demented ape dominance thing in the online world.
That mentality I think is the biggest problem we face- it’s more important for a relatively large segment of the gaming population to beat up on/bully/dominate other players than to actually be good at playing the game. It’s the same thinking that makes them run aimbots and other cheats, because it’s more gratifying to them to be artificially dominant than to actually play the game for real and take their lumps.
I don’t know if it’s 12 year olds, or if it’s formerly bullied nerds acting out online or what, but it’s a prevalent thing. And for the record, that mentality was NEVER our goal when we were playing UO, and we gave people outs, etc… In my mind, that’s what makes all the difference.
The analogy to chess or football completely fails, because those are games with clear adversarial objectives that both sides agree to when they start. The analogy to the park is much closer–but let’s bring your tag football back in, and say that you go to a park where there’s a tag football game going on in one corner, you’re planning on having a picnic with your family, and someone keeps lobbing the ball at your head and then running over and smacking you with both hands.
Oh, you don’t want to play tag football? You should leave the park, then. Sure, this park is designed for tag football and picnics both, but the footballers who throw the ball at picnickers are just ROLEPLAYING!
They are completely valid analogies, because they are PVP games that you agreed to play by the rules of, just like an MMO. If you play a game with PVP (or, in a game like WOW choose to play on a PVP server or flag yourself for PVP) then you have agreed to the rules of the game, which include PVP. If you don’t agree to PVP, don’t play PVP games, but you don’t get to call everyone who plays a game by the rules a jackass just because you want to nullify part of the game.
No, that’s a broken analogy because when you play an MMO you choose to join a game and agree to the rules, while in this case you didn’t. To be a valid analogy, you’d need to join in the tag football game, then decide to sit down in the middle of it and have a picnic, and complain that the football players are jerks for playing the game you all agreed to, because you want to have a picnic in THIS FIELD.
It’s more like “Oh, you don’t want to play tag football? Well don’t sign up for the tag football game and don’t go on the tag football field, there are lots of areas in the park where you don’t have to play tag football, and there are whole parks that don’t have it.” And nothing I’ve said is about ROLEPLAYING, because the vast majority of PVP is just straight up fighting and playing a game, not what’s typically included in ROLEPLAYING.
I agree, if the people running the game don’t want low-level questgivers wiped out, then they should just make it so it can’t happen. If they leave it as an option for players through a decade of patches, it’s obviously an intended part of the game, and complaining about a player who plays the game as intended by the people who create and enforce the rules is really missing the target.
I think the style of ‘fix’ you propose is part of the problem, though. If you don’t want low-level questgivers wiped out, just flag them as unattackable (like children in the game) or make them turn into a ghost that still gives out quests when they’re dead. Putting in guards signals that it’s OK to kill the questgivers if you can deal with the guards (either kill them off, have someone distract them, or use stealth/range to one-shot the questgiver), and makes the problem recur when people gear/level past the guards. I think that if you don’t want X to happen in a game, just make it so that X can’t happen and be done with it, instead of doing this weird sort-of-blocking it.
This might be a good point to bring up the Bartle Taxonomy for those that haven’t heard of it.
The short description is that there are different player types, which are usually dubbed Achiever (they want the high score, top of the leaderboard, whatever), Explorer (they want to find the lost temple or wield the rarest loot), Socializer (they want to chat and roleplay), and Killers (they, um, want to kill others).
It should be noted that these archetypes are not limitations - an Explorer can also have Achiever characteristics (like wanting to have explored 100% of the gameworld or owning one of each kind of loot), and a Killer can have have socializer characteristics (like a PKer that wants to roleplay a bandit… hmm). To have a healthy game ecosystem, the game needs to support all four of these archetypes. For example, if the game doesn’t have a chat interface, no socializers will want to play - and that means the Explorers won’t have people to show off too, the Achievers won’t be looked up to, and the Killers won’t have someone to gank.
If the game doesn’t accommodate all of these (say, not accommodating socializers by not having safe zones or PvE servers) eventually the game devolves somewhat (or is a somewhat single focused game). UO had technical problems that made it hard for achievers (no monsters to kill so I can level? what to do) or socializers (no safe zones to chat with my guild? Why stay), which is why it turned into a Killer craze toward the end. But that doesn’t mean the killer playstyle is invalid, it just means that not everyone has a playstyle they want.
It absolutely means that the killer style, unfettered, is invalid. Again, if you’re playing in a way that you know others don’t want to play, if you’re playing in a way that’s only made possible by the fact that most people aren’t playing that way, if you’re playing in a way contrary to the way that people who entered the game decided to enter it, that’s not okay, no matter what the rules are.
People entered UO with fundamentally different objectives, as your taxonomy shows. That’s not really how tag football works: people who play tag football all agree to the fundamental zero-sum-game approach. That’s why your analogy to that fails, and the analogy to a park–where people enter with different objectives–succeeds.
In both cases, to play the game within the rules of the game, for enjoyment or bragging rights or to stop Timmy from hogging the ball or whatever reason appeals to you.
“A park” is not a game. UO is a game. They’re different things, and I’m not sure why it’s hard for you to grasp that a game is a game, or that buying an account for and signing into an online game constitutes agreeing to the rules of the game.
If the game supports PVP then PVP play is entirely valid. It’s up to the developers to make sure other play styles can be accommodated by making PVP-free zones or servers or some other option so people who don’t like PVP can avoid it.
To get off of PVP for a moment, you had conflicts with other archetypes in early MMOs. An explorer who wants to see (or participate in combat with) every dragon may come up against achieving guilds who maintain a tight raid schedule and take down the dragons as soon as they spawn for loot to advance their guild. To them, the game is all about being the best, having the best coordination and killing the biggest targets… and you don’t get there by sharing +25 Dragonslayer Swords with random scrubs. More casual players who wanted loot drops for tradeskills or just to see a dragon were out of luck since the high end guilds monopolized the spawns and weren’t interested in sharing their raids with a casual part timer who just wanted to make a dragon-hide purse because it’d be neat to own. Over time, developers have accommodated this with instanced spawns or spawning raid mobs via turn-ins or randomized spawn timers. This doesn’t mean that the hard-core dragon campers were “playing wrong” but that their play style was incompatible with those of other player types.
But the problem was that UO was a broken game, because it didn’t support the playstyles that many people who bought the game wanted. It was a PvP only game out of the box, and at that early stage it wasn’t appreciated that this would happen. Nowadays a PvP only game would be fine, because it would be known as a PvP only game, and only people who wanted that sort of game would sign up for it.
Obviously PvP was expected by the UO developers as a valid part of the game, right? It was something you could do if you were willing to risk it. So they expected bandits and allowed bandits, because they somehow thought it would be a fun part of the game.
But it turns out it wasn’t as fun as they thought it would be, and so modern games have game changes that allow people who want to avoid PvP to partially or totally avoid PvP.
I think we really need to distinguish between PvP and griefing, and they’re not the same thing. Killing low level questgivers is just griefing, because you don’t get anything for it. Killing other players is only griefing if PvP isn’t supposed to be allowed but you’ve found a bug that will allow PvP when it isn’t expected. But UO wasn’t like this. PvP was allowed everywhere, and so some players engaged in PvP everywhere. And people didn’t like getting killed. But how is that griefing?
Sure you do, if you care that you’re an elite group keeping other people from getting things. It’s just a social convention that the objective of a game should be to better your character. If you’re among the best characters because you make it impossible for others to improve, why is that different from attacking to level up? There are many board games where blocking people to improve your relative position, even when you could have improved your absolute position instead, is a valid strategy.
Unless you think it’s a social convention that players should be allowed to receive quests.