The website SomethingAwful recruits members ‘Goons’ for just about every MMO out there. And interestingly enough, they all have a united platform in just about all the MMO’s they play in: Griefing.
I find it rather fascinating. Every game will have their griefers and trolls, thats not new. But Goons seem to do it on a massed, organized fashion. GoonSwarm in EveOnline is a good example of this, but there are others as well.
Have you encountered them online? Its so over the top I’m not really apalled; its like they spend their days getting a thousand people to go down to the beach and kick over some kid’s sandcastle, come on, really? But the extent (and numbers) are pretty impressive- to the point they seem to descend on an MMO and practically take it over, running the game they want to run it and leaving much wailing and gnashing of teeth in their wake.
I seriously question your understanding of the SA guilds. They’re just community guilds. Sometimes their members get bored and try to do things you’re not supposed to, but it’s pretty harsh to call it an organized troll guild. They’re not myg0t or whoever still operates. What’re some examples of their supposed trolling?
I’ve been playing on Mal’Ganis, where Goon Squad (and its spin-off, Elitist Jerks) resides for a number of years now. I also even managed to somehow land on the same AoC server they did. I’d like to think I’ve got a fair deal of experience with GS from an outsider’s perspective.
They are most certainly a troll guild. Thankfully, WoW handicaps guilds that rely on quantity by instancing everything, so they’re reduced to such mundane things like organizing mailbox sit-ons or spamming trade chat to get their jollies.
I’m sure they’d love to grief more if they could. It seems really the only thing they can do at a competent level. They’re not remotely competitive in PvE or PvP, and every goon I’ve personally encountered seems to be mediocre at best at playing the game to its full potential.
Yeah, I also played on Mal’Ganis. Also on their TF2 servers and as part of their Diablo 2 team in a joining of two communities. It’s a massive community that’s in any game with an online presence. I never saw a single griefer in either of the latter games. Never saw one on Mal’Ganis either, but I was only on it for a few months.
Their WoW guild is one of the largest guilds in the game, if not the largest. They have players of all sorts. Sure, some of them get bored and grief people for lulz or do their best to find all of the holes in the game. That doesn’t make the SA community teams a bunch of griefers. And, yeah, a ton of them are as bad as any other WoW player. They have thousands of members. Their progression raid teams are decently ranked. Somewhere in the top 10 on MG last I heard and top 1000 worldwide. That ain’t terrible. I doubt you’d find a forum guild ranked higher.
That guild is huge. The community is huge. They’re everywhere and do everything.
Their group on Urban Dead just got back into the game. Signed up about a thousand new zombies in a few days.
Last time they were devoted to grief my group and worked to break the game if possible and trolled the hell out of the wiki. They’re back this time because I think they were provoked by some of our success in retaking territory from the remnants they left after the first major incursion.
However, when a horde that size gets rolling it’s damn impressive.
This is probably relevant and I found it interesting even though I don’t play EVE.
Had no idea Elitist Jerks have their roots in Goons, though. EJ forums are pretty good place to find WoW theorycrafting stuff and back when I played I used to read them a lot, though I never created an account to post.
Speaking as a off-again-on-again heavy EVE player, GoonSwarm is not even close to the worst people in EVE. They’re just a particularly effective big group who uses pirate tactics when it suits them (and I say this having lost a Vargur to a GoonSwarm highsec suicide gank–but I (and Concord) took 11 of them with me. =P)
They are definitely not above tactics that are unfair, biased, just barely within the game rules/logic/ToS, but that doesn’t differentiate them from any other pirate corp. A lot of the hatred for them in EVE stems from back in the day when they legitimized the use of disposable ships and new pilots in swarming tactics to defeat much better equipped and experienced players–but hell, MY corp does that.
I used to play EVE when the Goons were relatively new. That they used masses of disposable ships was not the main problem. The problem was that they knew doing so would often crash a node. On more than one occasion they sent in their waves of frigates, forced the node to crash and only then sent in their heavier fighters while the defenders were all trying to log back on. They took a significant capital ship building sector from my old alliance using exactly that tactic (back when you could count the number of Titans on one hand). Yes, it’s possible it was all a massive co-incidence but judging by their own behaviour and demeanour, I doubt it.
Now, we probably would have lost that war anyway but exploits like that tend to take the fight out of you.
I quit shortly after, though I do go back from time to time.
Hmm, I wasn’t out in null for the node-crashing days, so that stuff can get old. But at the same time, there’s the little pirate voice in the back of my head going “wait, you didn’t have a plan for that? If they were getting heavies in, then you should have been able to do so as well.”
Perhaps I should have explained the mechanics of the situation better. We were sitting on the incoming gate defending a choke-point system that had a further two systems beyond it (with our shipyards in). We were all set up in optimal sniping positions around the incoming gate with the usual array of bubbles, webbers, scouts, etc. This wasn’t quite our last stand but it sure felt like it. They weren’t getting through and there was a stand-off.
They were massing on the opposite side of the gate. To cut a long story short, they warped in all their frigates (while holding back anything bigger) and continued to do so until the node crashed. Our system went offline, theirs didn’t. As soon as the system came up they were able to jump in their entire battleship fleet (Red Alliance fleet) while we logged on individually and were warped back to the gate to be picked off.
A few months later BoB showed that is was possible to defend against such tactics. Our problem was that we had all our eggs in one basket. IIRC BoB split their forces in case a system went down. Then again I think a good portion of my alliance joined BoB which allowed them more flexibility.
Goons usually understand the mechanics of a game better than the game developers. I read their paper on Eve grid fu and was amazed by it.
But, everything I’ve read by and learned from Goons leads me to believe that the thing they like about any game the most is ruining the experience of other people who play the game.
I belong to the SA forums and this is not really true for most of the forum-goers. However, I will grant that the SA game guilds are essentially filled with attention whores that revel when people react to their personal or greater Goon exploits, be it in forums, blogs, and especially actual articles. Unfortunately for non-Goons, the quickest and easiest way to notoriety in online gaming is by exploiting the engine and griefing the hell out of everyone.
The whole Anonymous movement (of which SA is a major contributor) is kind of based on the same principle, but towards more worthwhile (IMO) ends. Hell, the Economist even wrote an article on them.
For WoW, the Elitist Jerks forums provide really invaluable resources for character specs and gearing. A lot of it is theorycrafting pegged at a level beyond what most players reach, but resources like Ask Mr. Robot (which relies heavily on EJ theories) are useful for even more casual players.
What’s SA’s connection to Anonymous? I’m fascinated by the SA phenomena - I went to high school with its creator, and have just been amazed at its long-reaching influences.
Something Awful begat 4chan, which is basically an anonymous board full of all the dregs of humanity who were too hopeless even by SA standards. Furries, anime fanfic writers, pedos, unfunny jerkwads, meme spouting trolls and so forth. They still have something of an antagonism going on.
4chan then organically spawned Anonymous, first as a sort of assholish pranking zeitgeist (one anonymous guy posting on 4chan to point at somebody or rant about someone, and half of the board immediately ganging up on the poor victim, dredging up RL info, ordering hundreds of pizzas via phone, mailing their employers etc…) then it became more politicized, notably once they decided to take on Scientology for the lulz.
I’m given to understand that once Anonymous became a thing, many members of SA joined their little retarded brothers to fight the good fight. Or, y’know, send pics of their dicks to cat abusers, whatever.
As for goons in games, I can’t say I’ve ever encountered them in my time playing MMOs but the echoes of them I get seem to be more about creating creative chaos than actual griefing in the way I understand it. Pulling shit like kidnapping a quest-giver and holding the whole server for ransom, that sort of thing. I’m an avid follower of their LP forum, and the guys in there at least seem more interesting and funny, if a little twisted in the humour department, than dickish to me shrug.
