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City of heroes article

Arctic Man

By Arctic Man,
Posted on: 2009-07-07 05:52 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

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Look at the US, where players can even get deleted characters restored!

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Quick get the worms back into the can!!!!



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Dont make me get started on that again, now that was a REAL experiment

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Exactly, so you of all people know full well that the US operate under different rules to us. What's a "no no" here is often a "yes yes" over there.

@FloatingFatMan

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Posted

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Look at the US, where players can even get deleted characters restored!

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Quick get the worms back into the can!!!!



[/ QUOTE ]

Dont make me get started on that again, now that was a REAL experiment

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Exactly, so you of all people know full well that the US operate under different rules to us. What's a "no no" here is often a "yes yes" over there.

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Yea your right.

 

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Given all that, I invite him to undertake another experiment. Drive your car with no regard for your fellow man. Cut people up, let nobody through, and blare your horn when anyone gets in your way. Tailgate people. While these activities do not necessarily breach the law, they will still incite road rage. (I hasten to add at this point that griefing is NOT a legal activity in City of Heroes, as has been stated elsewhere.) You WILL receive baseless threats. People will wind their windows down and throw obscenities at you. But to truly replicate what this man has done, you will need to harass the same group of drivers in the same place, daily, for weeks. Drive a distinctive car, such as a bright red pickup truck. Make sure people know that you are going out of your way to incite anger.

Can we conclude, therefore, that all people who drive are immature? Beyond that, can we publish a paper on the subject? I don't usually resort to hyperbole when arguing seriously, but...

No. Because that is stupid.

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I think you missed the point TBH. If he drove badly outside of the law he'd get banned from the road. Or killed in an accident or something. A better way of putting it would be to drive to the law in somewhere like Paris or Rome (or many parts of Africa) where the laws are less observed/followed, his 'safe' driving would incense the other drivers. As an old person doing forty on a country road does in this country.

As for the griefing side of it, the only definition of griefing from the devs I have seen is when a game mechanic is used to grief a single person or group to their detriment. I don't think you can say that all the enemy PvPers in a zone is a single group. It is a player convention that TPing into drones or mobs is griefing and not a rule used by the devs. TBH the fact that he didn't get banned by GM_s rather implies that he wasn't griefing... just very annoying.

 

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I think you missed the point TBH. If he drove badly outside of the law he'd get banned from the road. Or killed in an accident or something. A better way of putting it would be to drive to the law in somewhere like Paris or Rome (or many parts of Africa) where the laws are less observed/followed, his 'safe' driving would incense the other drivers. As an old person doing forty on a country road does in this country.

As for the griefing side of it, the only definition of griefing from the devs I have seen is when a game mechanic is used to grief a single person or group to their detriment. I don't think you can say that all the enemy PvPers in a zone is a single group. It is a player convention that TPing into drones or mobs is griefing and not a rule used by the devs. TBH the fact that he didn't get banned by GM_s rather implies that he wasn't griefing... just very annoying.

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Yes, I never implied that you should go out risking life and limb to incite road rage. I probably wasn't clear enough though. There are ways to 'grief' drivers within the law.

As for the definition of "grief", this doesn't seem to be well-defined in this thread. Let's rectify that.

From Wikitionary:
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(online gaming) To harass and annoy other players of a game in a deliberate attempt to interfere with their enjoyment of it; especially, to do this as one’s primary activity in the game.

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Wikipedia:
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A griefer is a player who plays a computer game in order to irritate and harass other players, rather than in pursuit of game objectives.

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Someone on Wikipedia has also written a short essay on the subject.

What we can take away from all this is that griefing is the act of disrupting other players for no other reason than your own enjoyment.

Deaths resulting from Drones and NPC mobs grant you no rewards, so that wasn't a motivation. You say that "all enemy PvPers" aren't a 'group', but it's entirely possible to simply grief everyone. I shan't name and shame him, but we all remember a man who routinely spammed the request channel during Hamidon raids. That's about a hundred people being griefed right there, more than the average population of Recluses Victory by a factor of five. But there is no ambiguity here; disrupting the Hami raid was griefing.

I'm not arguing with you about what griefing is, the real issue here is what the devs say is griefing. Which, sadly, is where myself and Paragon Studios do not see eye to eye.

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TPing people into holes in the geometry in PvP zones is a petitionable offense, as is the use of language that breaks the EULA, but other than that, everything goes in a PvP zone. Trailing NPCs to another player is perfectly legal, as is killing someone repeatedly, popping lots of inspirations, interrupting duels and rep farms, stopping someone from getting nukes, using your tier 9 before you go into sirens, or really anything else you can think of.

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The mere fact that they mention these acts defines them as griefing, but they also specifically allow them. However, we are all agreed that what this man was doing is, by definition, griefing. This would be the difference between the law and the highway code.

Necrobond - 50 BS/Inv Scrapper made in I1
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Ivory Sicarius - 45 Crab Spider
Aber ja, nat�rlich Hans nass ist, er steht unter einem Wasserfall.

 

Posted

Actually I think that while we define griefing as this... and I'm with you on that. What the guy was actually doing was playing the game as it can be played. Doing some form of PvP in a PvP zone. He became nearly universally reviled because he wasn't following player convention on what is griefing. Not because he was griefing (based on what the devs say is griefing).

If you look at his report as a report on PvP or misbehaving in an MMO, you can rightly say his methods and conclusion is bunkum. But if you examine what he is saying about how people interact when you remove societal rules, I think he does make a point. He in effect behaves like a sociopath (in the sense of someone behaving as they feel is right without moral or social values, to the detriment of public and social values). If he had done the same study IRL he'd have ended up doing jail time, or in the US on death row.

And if he'd done it to me I'd have called him names and probably stopped PvPing when he was on. Or more likely based on the large amount of US severs, switch to a different server.

However I don't think three servers or one game is enough to base his conclusions on. Targeting the PvP population even in the US os only a tiny subset of the community rather than the majority. And with the way the game is built he can't even check to find out how many unique accounts/players he is actually facing. Doing the same in several other MMOs would have made his conclusions far more worthwhile. As it is its a case of:

Act like a [censored], be treated like a [censored].

 

Posted

The sad thing about this study is that it could have been interesting. The guy has a point - but then he's managed to go about the whole thing entirely incorrectly.

PvP zones are exactly what they say on the tin - there are warnings all over saying you have to accept you can be killed. And yet, the zones have always had "fight clubs" and people shouting for 1v1 fights. If you attack those, people throw an absolute fit, even though the people attacking are using the zone for its intended purpose (open PvP), and the people running set fights have been warned they're open to that risk, and could go use the arena.

If this guy had actually bothered to do this properly, he'd have become a good PvPer, perhaps enlisted a couple of friends to help, and then disrupted these kinds of fights with standard PvP.

Instead, he did something that people have been banned for in the past, which I do think nullifies his argument rather a lot. Also, nowhere does the game say the intended purpose of the PvP zones is TPing people into drones. And not only that, but having TPed people, it sounds like he went out of his way to verbally provoke them.

I think one of the earlier posters may be right in the assumption that this guy knew exactly what he was doing and basically has gotten himself a grant to sit and grief people. Either that, or he is very, very clueless. Like I said, it's a shame, because there is actually a point in there. I've always found it absolutely mad how angry some people will get for people PvPing in a PvP zone. Or using insps. Or any number of other acceptable things the guy could have done that were nowhere near as questionable as TPing people into drones.

 

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Nice of him to inform his intended victims they were part of his sick experiment.
What a Jerk!

 

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Rooks wrote:
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Swatting an annoying fly isn't the kind of thing you brag about to your mates.


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FFM wrote:
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Exactly, so you of all people know full well that the US operate under different rules to us. What's a "no no" here is often a "yes yes" over there.

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These two posts so close together made me think of the US president's recent display of fly-striking prowess...

OK - I doubt Obama bragged personally, but he didn't need to with the news networks making bad puns about a new SWAT team at the whitehouse.

By my mohawk shall ye know me!
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I must say that this is a truly fascinating discussion. Personally I think that the experiment was somewhat flawed in that it did not expand to include the other social aspects of the game or, for that matter, other games. It concentrates on the single aspect of PvP within COX whereas a more meaningful result could have been gathered by drawing comparisons between different games, with different mechanics, but the same, underlying, social progression.

There was little mention that the players social situation and general sense of right/wrong were becoming obvious in the interactions within the zone. The creation of "unwritten" rules of etiquette could be considered a mirror to real life rules where such anti-social behaviours are very much frowned upon.

Are we actually well balanced!?

I'm definitely not the author, but I do hope he reads the discussion here. I would like to think it would broaden his view of the COX community. Especially here in the EU.

Union: @Ban-Sidhe

 

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It was bad science. Simple as that.

However, it turned out that Smith was not a time-travelling Terminator

 

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It was bad science. Simple as that.

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Mad science would have been more fitting

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No, no, no - OK, he has the delusion that he's the most Evil and Hated man in Paragon City, but there's clearly not enough ranting OR hyperbole to go with his self pity and he'd need to have some sort of Scientific Invention to apply the Evil Results of his Largely Pointless Experiment to. He's clearly stark staring sensible! He wouldn't last a second in the likes of Doctor Aeon or Vernon von Grun's academic circles!

And he never even bothered with a Dramatic Unmasking! The man's clearly a rank amateur to this super villain lark. Why, I bet he doesn't even have Sinister Incidental Music...

This is how his paper should have gone...

'Mwhahahah! Fools! FOOLS! FOOOOOOLLLLLSSSSS!!!!! Little did those unsuspecting City of Heroes players believe that the unrelenting thorn in their sides known as the fiendish, evil Twixt was none other than I, Professor David Myers, PHD!'

Dum dum dudda dummmmm!!!!!

'No one suspected that as Twixt lured villains to their DOOM by the hundred that they were part of a dramatic experiment that I, Professor David Myers, PHD, have chosen to call... The Experiment!'

Dum **** dummm dummmmm!!!!!

'Those buffoons never realised that the gathered data on mildly annoying people on-line would become the basis of my latest, and greatest, invention - none other than the Antagoniser!'

DUM DUMMM DUMMMMM!!!!!

'None will be able to resist my new found power to be mildly annoying in social situations! With the Antagoniser in my power, soon I, Professor David Myers, PHD, shall become the Supreme Power In the Universe!!!!!'

DUM DUM DUMMMM DUM DUMMMMM!!!!!

That's how a Mad Scientific Paper goes...