The Goon phenomenon

The Game Room
21

See, that kind of thing is absolutely hysterical. Just like that clip of that one clan/guild/whatever attacking that other one during their stupid ass online, in-game memorial.

I think there’s a fairly big percentage of MMORPG players who take it way, way too seriously. Probably because they pay by the month to play, and play a ridiculous amount of time.

Know what? It’s a game. First and foremost. People play it to have fun, not to worry about what some over-sensitive WoW dork half a continent away thinks.

I think the Goons realize both of these things, and play accordingly, with little sympathy for the over-serious types. Personally, I think it’s great. (and I’m not a Goon or a SA member either)

22

People who wish to punish others for Playing The Game Wrong invariably take games extremely seriously. People who don’t take it overly seriously do not care how others enjoy it.

23

That’s roughly my take on their ongoing shenanigans in EVE. Heck, along they way they redefined what fleet combat meant and (IMHO) made null politics and tactics actually interesting again instead of “oh boy, ANOTHER Tempest Sniper Blob With Logi Carriers”.

24

You know, I can’t actually tell who you’re directing this at: people who want to punish guys like the Goon Squad for being jerks and screwing up their game, or guys like the Goon Squad for screwing up their game.

It’s real damn hard to ignore people choosing to enjoy the game a different way when that way specifically involves ruining your own fun.

25

That’s actually one of the central paradoxes of Goondom. The more they talk about how un-seriously they take things, the more it looks like they’re really taking it quite seriously, in their own way.

26

At bump and, in so far as he is correct regarding their motivations, the Goon Squad.

27

Quite. I actually don’t know if it was the Goons who crashed that online memorial, but that sentence pretty much puts the lie to the rest of bump’s post. He’s clearly judged the memorial to have been stupid and too-serious and therefore worthy of being fucked with. That right there is the definition of being too serious and caring about how others play the game.

Edit: And I realize I sound kind of serious about it all myself. I suppose I am, but it’s not because WoW Iz Srs Bsns. It’s more because treating other people as people is serious business. You don’t automatically get to be a tool just because you’re online.

28

It’s certainly the truth that Goons take games seriously. No one who’s not being serious could spin off GoonSwarm/GoonWaffe in EVE or ElitistJerks in WoW.

Their central ethos has always seemed to me to be less about “don’t take the game seriously” and more like"The game is its own context, separate from non-game contexts. There are no rules in the game context except the ones the game’s structure actually enforces." if that makes any sense. Put another way, there’s nothing “wrong” with a bunch of Horde Goons crashing a memorial for a guy who died in a car accident and killing all the attendees, because “car accident” and “empathy for real people behind the characters” isn’t a part of the World of Warcraft context, but “farming honor points from an unprepared and unequipped crowd of enemy PCs” is a useful thing to do in the World of Warcraft context.

Same with EVE and “deliberately and within the rules crash the system node, while having forces in place for optimal combat in ‘right-after-node-reboot’ conditions” being useful, while “fighting with honor and according to the unwritten rules” is out of context and un-useful. Nothing in either EVE’s TOS or game engine at the time prevented Goon from attempting to leverage their membership to cause a local overload in the game servers, so they did it.

29

Pfft. It’s a GAME. Half (or more) of the fun is playing in a way totally unlike the way you’d be in real life.

I’d never be a murderous, thieving pirate in real life, but it’s damn fun to play one online.

People who get mad when People Play The Game Wrong have missed the entire point- there really isn’t a Correct Way to Play the Game, just the way they think it ought to be played.

For example:

I played Ultima Online back around the initial release- not right out of the gate, but maybe Spring 1998.

My friends and I tried playing it straight- we had dumb characters like tailors, etc… who were horribly boring to play. We tried adventurer sorts, but without any monsters to kill, that was boring as heck too.

What we ended up on was as highwaymen. Not just random a-hole pk’ers or griefers (although we were called those things), but honest-to-god highway robbers. We’d got clothing that was more or less camouflage, and trained up our stealth skill (or whatever it was called), and what we’d do was lurk near well traveled roads, pop out, demand the cash, and then based on what the victim did, let them go with a lighter wallet, or slay them mercilessly if they didn’t.

Somehow, despite trying to play characters with evil alignment and not being random PKers or griefers, many people pitched an absolute shit fit because they didn’t like the idea that we’d kill their characters if they didn’t pay up.

Nobody’s characters are sacrosanct; our first set of highwaymen eventually got caught when a big posse got organized and finally hunted us down. We thought that was grand fun, actually.

Too many people get way too invested in their characters and games; if you’re not willing to have that risk in a game, don’t play it.

It’s like bitching about getting pk’ed in null sec space in EVE… you pays your money, you takes your chances, you know.

And Zerial has it exactly right- there’s no place for in-game memorials and stuff like that in most MMORPGS, and if you do them, you shouldn’t expect pity or quarter from anyone. At the very least, there should have been pickets to sound the alarm or something, but they totally dropped the ball, and paid the price.

30

That wasn’t funny, it was shameful. There was absolutely no reason to disrupt the memorial the way they did. There is absolutely no excuse for that sort of thuggish behavior. Every damn one of them should be flogged on the courthouse lawn.

31

But that’s just it - there HAS to be a separation between the game world and the real world. What’s acceptable behavior in the real world may not be acceptable in the game and vice versa.

Look at it this way… is it reasonable behavior in the game world for those guys NOT to have attacked those other guys? Of course not, any more than thugs should show up and rob a funeral in the real world. Blending the two together, and somehow not expecting to be attacked is imposing one world’s set of values on another, and that shit just doesn’t fly.

That’s the problem with MMORPGS- that online & fantasy vs. real-world line gets blurred for a lot of people, and they invest way too much of themselves in the game and in their characters, and then overreact when people play the games in ways that they don’t agree with.

Zeriel’s saying the same thing, only he’s using the term of context instead of worlds. And by serious, I mean letting that fantasy/reality line blur too much, not playing the game seriously.

32

You’re kidding, right? You realize that these are social games.

I remember that memorial when it was news. I think it was bloody stupid of them to do it on a PVP server. But that doesn’t mean I think the event itself was stupid nor that it should have been crashed. That you do shows that it goes beyond ‘just a game’ for you; you’re passing actual judgment on other people’s actions.

33

But in a game-context sense, there exist patrolled, safe spots in the game for that kind of activity, and dangling a large number of valuable targets and saying “no, no, you can’t attack us!” is nonsensical in the game world context. Frankly, in a game-context sense, the funeral-goers were at fault for not having defensive pickets or scouts out–it is a choice to play on a PvP server, after all, and everyone involved consented to play in an environment allowing for exactly what happened.

That said, the shameful conduct of the people involved in the forums afterward DOES deserve every bit of beatdown one could conceive.

I note for the record that it wasn’t Goon that pulled that particular stunt.

34

Absolutely agreed. You go on a PVP server, you take your chances. But I have absolutely no respect for people who play to ruin other players’ fun.

35

Let’s not put TOO many words in my mouth–I love in-game memorials and suchlike, and I love RP servers so fuzzy-huggy much. I just also acknowledge that trooping a bunch of legal targets in formal dress not-armor out into the middle of nowhere with no guards or pickets is asking, nay, begging to get ganked.

That is, the event was not stupid in and of itself. It was just ill-planned given the circumstances, and it was not particularly evil to assault it in the game context.

36

No thanks, I like the way I look at it just fine. Bunch of immature selfish punks that like to grief others for amusement.

It would be perfectly reasonable for them not to have attacked. Or at least to have stopped the attack when told what it was they were disrupting. Just because you can do something in a game does not mean you should do it.

I could log on tonight and go to a newbie area, kill all the NPCs, quest mobs, and any newbies dumb enough to flag themselves for PVP without breaking a sweat. Doing that would be jerkish behavior, and ruin the night for a lot of other people trying to play the game normally. So I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’ll go to one of the battlegrounds and pick on people my own size, who can and will fight back.

37

I’d agree with you if it was an everyday activity. This particular event was more than that. A real person died, and his friends wanted to do something in game to remember him. The gankers could have waited until the memorial ended, or gone after other targets. Instead, they chose to be assholes.

38

Beautiful story, by the by. That’s about how I roll in EVE–my corp made (hiatus, kid, y’know) a nifty habit of declaring war on much larger opponents and repeatedly raiding their logistics lines and people foolish enough to fly solo while on a war footing, then running out (with the help of cloaked pickets) just ahead of the massive retaliation.

Aided and abetted by mangled Blues Brothers’ quotes. :smiley: Went into a 2-vs.-4 on the short side, killed three and watched the 4th (the ranking fleet officer on their team) play undock/redock games and not engage, then docked up ourselves just as 40 more enemies jump into the system.

39

The thing is, not all jerkish behavior is necessarily griefing. It all depends on context, and just because someone doesn’t want something done, doesn’t mean that it’s going to fly in-game.

Case in point: If a game gives you the ability to steal things, and the ability to choose “Thief” as your character class, are you griefing people if you steal their stuff?

40

Honestly, my sympathy for that is tempered by the clear distinction between PvP and non-PvP servers in WoW. The nasty part of me is borderline offended that they were sufficiently ill-prepared on a World PvP server that they didn’t notice a full-on mounted-up raid coming in.

The other mitigating factor for me is this–how would you feel if it were a random raid group attacking what looked like a large and yet disorganized (that is, ripe for the picking) conglomerate of the other faction with no prior knowledge they were actually hitting a memorial service? My feeling is that all of the bad things about this event were external to the game itself, because one guild announced they were going to essentially be easy targets and the other decided to infiltrate and kill them.