Hospy

Yeeeeeah, I had a feeling you'd been sodomized repeatedly.

...kidding!

I'm happy to pay out each month for CoH; what I've already got, I still enjoy. And getting power customizations is pretty darn cool, and certainly worthy of an issue's focus in my opinion.

I hope it won't end with 16... I hope they'll do more about letting costumes alter animations. I'd love to have a Hardsuit that actually works for my Electric/Energy Blaster.

Apart from silence, Broadswords are similar to the axe or the mace in how they handle; they are heavy, clumsy weapons that require two hands to use.

Longswords would make better sense for a Stalker.

Enhanced Difficulty Options will definitely change farming for a lot of people.

I agree on the Broadswords, Meph, that looked like an error when I read it.

Gonna talk to our coalition tonight about getting the leaders from our SG's to run teams this weekend.

Best of everything to you today, GP!

And it looks like the patch might have more to do with the Superscience Booster than other, ahem, Mito-gating factors.

* ducks*

Whoops, just read the patch notes-- win some, lose some!

I don't mind the patch updates. We got booted pretty qucik this morning, but it's no huge thing to miss a few hours a day... I sort of expect one each morning, am pleased the mornings when it doesn't happen.

What makes me most happy about this go round, is I am not seeing developers making heavy-handed statements about their unhappiness with players.

If a player finds a way to get from 1 to 50 in 8 hours of play, I think that's epic. It's something that should be fixed and corrected... like, making every Mitos spawn include an equal number of Yellow, Green, and Blue Mitos, without warning... but I don't see a need for anyone to get bent out of shape because players got crafty.

Part of the reason I empathize and side with Dolly in this is, it's happened to me before, but not in PvP. I was active in Victory for a few years before I came to Champion, and there were groups that intentionally did all they could to cause Hamidon raids to fail. And not like Dirty; these folks were pretty l33t and screwing with the server and diminishing the sense of community. This was before Spamming globals caused people trouble, and one of the types of griefing that eventually led to those controls.

I don't have a problem with someone deliberately saying, "If Lascota's toons enter a PvP zone, I will crush them." That works for me. But I have an issue with someone intentionally giving debt and trying to frustrate another player by drone-porting... or doing anything similar that avoids actual game design in favor of causing a player grief.

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But he really can't follow you to the other places if we are using that analogy. Twixt could only torment her in RV. You are saying that if she goes to Grandville, what is to say he won't follow her and stop her xp gain there? Oh wait, HE CAN'T. He can't follow her to RWZ and stop her xp gain, he can't follow her to Cim and stop her xp gain, etc, etc.


[/ QUOTE ]

That analogy still holds true if you go to WoW and the same person gives you grief there... or if you go to Siren's Call instead of RV, or if he, say, works on the hero side to grief a Hamidon raid the player is in. Limiting the player's options to non-PvP is still limiting options.

Dolly doesn't have trouble with PvP, as I understand it... just someone intentionally getting her debt and messing up her badging. (Not to mention taunting and posting these results.)


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You guys have to separate the argument about what a huge [censored] Twixt is from the argument about whether you should continue to participate in a hobby that causes you to cry real tears.

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I was just thinking something similar earlier when I replied. There seems to be a thinking that "Twixt is wrong/bad/whatever, but anything goes in a PvP zone." And that's a contradiction. If anything goes, how was what Twixt did wrong? I don't consider the wrong he did separate from Dolly's reaction; he's responsible for messing with her 'escape' in a way that other PvPers didn't manage to do.

Either he did wrong and should answer for it, or he didn't do wrong, and it's on Dolly. For my two pennies, he did wrong.

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When the place you escape to causes you to shed tears, escape somewhere else.

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We're playing a game that i fundamentally about crime and punishment, and the rule of law. So I sympathize with people who have a problem with the idea that someone can come into the game, work at making other unhappy in their experience, and then skip off and write a paper that justifies diminishing someone else's escape.

My experience with PvP was that when I got over the idea that I was gonna be l33tness, I had fun just accepting that I was low on the totem pole and enjoying the experience, no matter what came. I got picked on... but it wasn't the same as what Twixt was doing. I got some great pointers from folks considered to be nearly as mean as Twixt.

Twixt wrote about the community failing to rise above common social paradigms, but that's a bit like a flasher denouncing the police and the district attorney for putting him in jail with violent offenders. Yes, real-life death threats do take it too far, and yes, those should be petitioned and dealt with. And yeah, it IS only a game, just an escape. But no one should go to my vacation spot and attempt to pass gas constantly in my direction, and then ask why I'm upset and don't go somewhere else... who's to say when I go somewhere else, someone won't do the same thing? Is the solution to my problems always going to be 'go somewhere else', or can I hope to stand up for myself, and can I expect the community to rally for me when they see behavior that does not conform to standards?

Maybe I'm a bit of a crank, but I don't believe having an avatar means having no responsibility for the ideas and interactions a person presents over the Internet. His idea was to make Dolly unhappy in her escape. While he didn't stalk only Dolly, I do believe that if she asked him nicely to stop, that would only encourage Twixt to work harder at frustrating her.

I believe he should be held responsible for that behavior, especially when he repackages the time he spent doing it as a science experiment. (Which, granted, he probably did as more of a last ****-you to the community than actual science.)

? WHF, where are you going with this?

I'm not offended in the least by someone being sarcastic; it's cool. I was chuckling to myself that I should have guessed that someone who has a high post count reasonably ought to know what BMT is for and what MOTD stands for. Not sure why, but you seem offended by that comment.

Are you seeking an argument with me for some reason?

Someone asking that, with a high post count, has obviously been around for awhile, and is probably being sarcastic.

Someone with a low post count, is much more likely to be asking a sincere question.

I should have guessed that was sarcasm by your post count.

He's objectively sitting back and saying, 'look at how crazy these players were for making death threats to me', while selectively disincluding the taunting and the nasty pleasure he got out of frustrating others through web anonymity.

The message of the day for the Global channel, BMT of Champion.

She likes that chick with the bright-colored hair, the 'rocker girl'. I'm trying to keep an open mind. And trying to occasionaly step away from my computer. Just wish I didn't have to miss this!

I love these, and I desperately wish I could, but the fiancé has me out of town during double XP weekend (I agreed to this months ago) to see the American Idol concert.

I'd love to see a map of a battle-strewn Oroborous.

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If everone who complained would just make a global channel and team together, we wouldn't see these kind of threads.

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THIS.

I especially hate seeing a thread like this on a Tuesday, as Monday is an unofficial "Let's play MA" day.

I'm in. I'll have something to post by Monday.

I just do not believe this began as an experiment, and the 'experiment' never met any of the scientific (or legal) requirements of an experiment, so it seems highly generous to even reference it that way as I talk about it.

My best guess is that it went something like this: the prof called it an experiment to cover up the creepy, giddy fun he had being an anonymous Internet taunter, to give himself justification and an air of detachment from the wrongs he was doing once he'd gone to far to restore his reputation.

And when he'd left CoX and began to miss the petty hurts he had previously inflicted, writing the article and then getting it publicized, as well as misrepresenting the scope of his notoriety and his acts, let him get the last word in on the community as well as rewriting the events within his educational scope to remove personal taint from them.

He talks about loss in the article, about what it was like when his campaign began to lose him friends and associates online, but he never once empathizes with the people he is messing with. And the writer of the article never calls him on this, either.

I don't feel a moment's pity for him. He had friends who clearly tried to warn him off this path, and he chose to keep going in that direction. Whether or not you believe he really was conducted an experiment, he made a value judgment that it was more important to continue TP Foe'ing enemies into Drones then to hold on to his relationships with friends and associates.

So either he valued his paper more than the friends he'd made, or he valued the the joy of drone-killing and taunting players more than his friends. Either way, he's kind of empty.

This just in: while the Praetorian zone is featured in Going Rogue, we'll have to wait for issue 17 to enter the land of Dairy Queen.

But I hear once we're in, we'll be treated right.

What's really fun about this is Myers' condemnation of players. He actually judges players who flaunt conventional rules of good social behavior. He is in essence saying, "Look, I refused to respect social norms and others went even further outside of social norms then I did; what sad people they are."

It feels like there are two good questions to explore that Twixt missed--

1) Why do people feel responsible for social norms online

and

2) Why do people NOT feel responsible for social norms online

I sense a book, a really substantial book, about both sides: cultures that form their own rules online, and cultures for people that forego any sense of responsibility online... and how these two groups sometimes become each other.

I think I'll craft a rebuttal of his paper. For a scientist to publish and then publicize a defense of griefing... yeah. That needs a proper answer.

Anyone know what the best, science-based approach to disproving a science paper (mass media or sociology) would be? Are there standards to apply or a template to use?

Would anyone like to collaborate?