The Price of Serenity?
In the World of Warcraft, Serenity Now - a hardcore Player-verus-Player (PvP) guild - attacked an in-game memorial service held by another guild for a guild member who passed away in real life. They made a video of the exploit, apparently for recruitment purposes. In their wake they left many questions...
This story has been around for a couple of weeks and is now leaking out into the greater gamer consciousness. I find myself as ambiguous today about that event as I was. Often one hopes for clarity with exaggerated examples - this one is certainly that, e.g. a guild of self-described "assholes" trashing a personal moment embued with gravity.
Yet, in its time, in its place, there was a drama of some scale , complexity in motive, and personal choice.
PvP combat tends to be a third-rail topic in MMOG circles. Players have strong feelings one way or the other and discussions tend to polarize quickly. This example likely is not the best vehicle for a nuanced "PvP is good" versus "PvP is bad" exchange - given its exaggerations. A rough sampling of forum discussions (refs below) certainly reinforces this.
A subtler question might be how much of the excess surrounding this event would you have to trim away before you became (un)comfortable with PvP - depending on your original view? Put it another way, where are your boundaries?
Perhaps, however, the more interesting question is the meta one. Do you prefer your virtual worlds as mixed up places capable of outrageous excesses and surprises or do you find more carefully orchestrated world experiences - scoped by styles of play, role-playing demeanor, RL geography, nationality, and yes PvP, more to your taste?
Other echoes of the world-y world versus game-y world debate, perhaps.
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Refs.
Good discussion (Joe Rybicki)
AFK Gamer's post (including archived drama thread)
Posted by Nate Combs on April 15, 2006 | Permalink
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Comments
Just thought I'd point to a link for a hi-res torrent for those inclined.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 3:03:42 PM | link
That's why they call it griefing! And while we're making hilarious death-related puns, "Sorry for your loss" - I kind of doubt the joke there is intentional, but if it was it's a very good joke in very bad taste.
One of the nice things about MMORPG's is how they're like a laboratory that executes thought experiments faster than you can think them up. Anyone interested in the ethical status of gameworld actions just got a nice Easter present.
I wonder if this analogy helps:
A member of a local Tennis club dies. This guy really loved Tennis. The club gets together and holds a memorial service on his favorite court. Members of a rival Tennis club show up and disrupt the event by hitting Tennis balls at the mourners.
vs.
A member of a local Tennis club dies. This guy really loved Tennis. The club gets together and hosts a Tennis tournament on his favorite court. Members of a rival Tennis club show up and compete in the event (which, again, involves hitting Tennis balls at the mourners).
What is the meaning of an in-game funeral? Is it a regular funeral that is hijacking the MMORPG infrastructure in the same way the Tennis club appropriates the gamespace of a Tennis court in example one? Or is it genuinely in-game? Is having a funeral one of the things you can do *in* World of Warcraft, just like you can have a conversation or have a guild or have a rivalry?
If the second, then it seems like one of the essential properties of a WoW funeral is that it can be attacked by the enemy faction. And, if so, it seems to me that this is kind of an *improvement* over real-world funerals. When was the last time you went to funeral where everyone died and lived to talk about it? (and talk and talk and talk...)
The fact that this funeral, whose ontological status is unresolved, turned into an orgiastic display of the "little death", the feigned death around which the experience of WoW is constructed, is sort of wonderful.
In other words, the fictional status of game actions is not a deficiency - it is their essential property and the source of their great power. (But this is a longer battle.)
Another thing that was clear to me from this video was how much more fun world combat is than battlegrounds. In the context of a role-playing game, this is the kind of PVP I like: messy, chaotic, layered with multiple contradictory narrative meanings. Not the tidy little sporting events of Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and Warsong Gulch.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 4:43:48 PM | link
Considering that the text is unreadable in much of the google video, thank you Jeffool. In regards to the question, while I wouldn't appreciate the act I can see a number of reasons for it to occur including 1. It was a result of a conflict between roleplaying and hack-and-slash mentalities. A number of people defending SN suggest that those holding the eFuneral are to blame for not only make the time and place public but also for no anticipating an attack. That's the hack-and-slash mentality. However, when is the last time you brought weapons to a funeral? Those who are used to living in a role will be drawing on their real life experiences to best fill the roll and good luck finding someone who has been attacked at a funeral. The other direction some of the SN apologists have taken (quite similar to Frank Lantz's second analogy) is SN was simply playing its role as an alliance guild striking at an off guard horde gathering.
The forum posts (and their unique grammar) are another matter but my standards for eCivility are without a doubt much higher that could ever be expected in an anonymous environment.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 4:51:23 PM | link
Nate asks the meta question: Perhaps, however, the more interesting question is the meta one. Do you prefer your virtual worlds as mixed up places capable of outrageous excesses and surprises or do you find more carefully orchestrated world experiences...?
It seems to me (anecdotally) that many of those who prefer a "suprising" (i.e. PvP-laden) experience are also those who champion the currently fashionable idea that MMOs do better with stupid monsters and unimaginative combat.
I can't explain this paradox except to point out that when monsters get "ganked" they may not provide the same outraged responses that drive the sense of schadenfreude that accompanies the quasi-bullying actions of non-consensual PvP -- as amply demonstrated by the funeral crashers.
Whether to include non-consenual PvP in a game is the developer's decision. It troubles me in cases like this much as it does in cases like whacking prostitutes in GTA: its presence as a valid action in the game provides a sense of license and entitlement. What's wrong is right, because otherwise why would it be in the game? The logic seems to be along the lines of White's "everything not forbidden is compulsory" -- or at least completely defensible (see the comment above about the attackability of funerals in WoW being one of their "essential features" and thus an "improvement" -- from whose POV, I wonder?). The linking of ability with defensibility enables those who whack others to rationalize away their effects and avoid any depth of ethical consideration with such sidesteps as, "cry more n00b! It's only a game!"
I don't personally see any real difference between a guild of socially pathological bullies descending on a virtual funeral or a lone player ganking a lower-level character along the road someplace. Both do so just because they can, because any reprisal is either trivial or irrelevant to the glee they get in ruining someone else's play, and of course because the game entitles them to do so.
Given that, this story isn't really all that remarkable. Ninja-PvPers -- aka PKers or griefers -- have been behaving this way (including crashing weddings, funerals, and anything else they could) for as long as games have allowed (and enabled) them to do so.
What's remarkable to me is that developers and operators still cater to this socially pathological market -- and then wonder why their customer service costs are so high.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 5:14:38 PM | link
Curiouser and curiouser...
To me, it raises very similar questions to the whole RMT discussion that I just took part in a few posts back. Questions about RL values in a virtual world, when the narrative of the world itself is highly violent and markedly different than the narrative we live daily. Questions about different players playing the same game at the same time... but not really at all, in terms of what they consider "the rules." Questions about bringing different flavors of play into the game.
The funeral was for a real-life person. That broke one rule of some RPers. Which is that you shouldn't really be bringing real-life stuff into the game. I'm not going to argue the point, or say that for people who really love/live a particular hobby/game/medium, it's wrong/right to do so. They can do it, they did it. But if they didn't want the virtual world to interrupt a real-life event, they could have hosted the funeral in a non WoW chat forum. Again... shades of a discussion we've had about characters/players/issues overlapping from one world to another. This is what happens when you bring "stats" -- in this case, real world grief -- into WoW.
But having done so... didn't the other PvP Guild have every "right" to bust up the event? In a strange way... I almost feel as if they were showing respect. I know nothing about the poor player who died, his grieving friends/guild-mates, nor the gankers. But I know that, in a strange, sick way... would I want my virtual funeral crashed by a mad, blasting blaze of screaming enemies? Maybe... yeah... maybe I would. In the "metaphor" of the game, stepping up is a way to show respect, ain't it? The opposite of "love" isn't "hate" in an MMO... it's disdain.
Let's kick the question up a notch and see if we get any takers. Death, while really, really bad... is final and, thus, somewhat cut-and-dried.
Note: I'm about to pose a hypothetical situation that is really, really sick. In order to push the envelope and check out where the "light side" really does end, and the dark side begins. If you don't cotton to that kind of philosophizing... walk on by.
Suppose we had a WoW player who had to stop playing because he/she had been brutally assaulted in RL by another player he/she had met through the game and had been tricked into meeting in RL. His/her guildmates post info about and hold an in-game meeting to discuss the matter and to inform/educate their guildmates about the situation, the status of their injured comrade, how to avoid similar situations, what may be happening from a legal standpoint, etc.
What if that WoW meeting were to get attacked by another, enemy PvP guild? What if it were the guild of the person who had assaulted the player in RL? What if they bragged, in chat, about the RL assault during the PvP fight? What if the player (alleged perp) him/herself was among the characters involved in the fight?
What if the whole RL side of the thing turned out to be a hoax?
What if it wasn't a hoax, but some of the players on the perp's guild started that rumor?
The lines are very, very blurry.
That's one of the reasons I was ranting, for quite a few pages of text, for rules, rules, rules (related to the subject of RMT). In a game, rules help define "this action is bad and wrong" (broken rule that hurts everyone) vs. "this is good and wrong" (broken rule that hurts nobody), vs. "this is bad and right" (no rule broken, badly played, you lose).
When you get 6.5 million people together to play a game... some of them spending 20-to-40 hours (or more) a week... a game that involves lots of emotions... and, sadly, real-life issues...
Well... "virtual world" doesn't mean it doesn't intersect with the real one, eh? Not in terms of money, love or death.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 7:28:38 PM | link
It's WAY simpler than all of that. The players involved chose to play on a PVP server. They got attacked in PVP. Whoop-de-doo. We should care why exactly?
Posted Apr 15, 2006 7:43:50 PM | link
People like this guild are why PVP tends to be very unpopular in MMPORPGs. It's not that PVP isn't liked by people, it's that "PVPers" aren't.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 8:06:58 PM | link
Mike>
It troubles me in cases like this much as it does in cases like whacking prostitutes in GTA: its presence as a valid action in the game provides a sense of license and entitlement. What's wrong is right, because otherwise why would it be in the game?
Andy>
That broke one rule of some RPers. Which is that you shouldn't really be bringing real-life stuff into the game... The lines are very, very blurry.
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I stated in the post that I was having problems with this incident - I can see both sides. I think Mike and Andy's points begins to circle the problem I'm having: to what extent are we expected to buy into the narrative of these world systems and to what extent are we accountable to what we've bought into (RL exemptions?).
In a world where space marines are expected to kill aliens except when some aliens are played by humans...
OTOH
The game world is also a system of shared experiences by all players on all sides. Shouldn't the rules of Cricket and fair-and-decent play apply.
If I agree with anything, it is with Frank's point: its a rich and confusing ethical testbed.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 8:14:37 PM | link
Wow. It's like a mafia hit.
Anything-goes PvP allows players to create interesting scenarios. As Will Wright says, player stories are often more powerful than scripted stories. Remember the Eve Online heist?
Posted Apr 15, 2006 11:21:52 PM | link
Thanks for the information.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 11:36:04 PM | link
Sure, they might be more powerful, but then the true crime stories in Reader's Digest are somewhat powerful as well. That still doesn't mean I want to be one of the people in the story, and honestly that heist story was enough to make me avoid Eve Online.
It'd be nice if there was some middle ground here - a way for players to create their own stories, without needing to screw over other players to do it. It's probably never really happened because computer-run enemies in MMOGs have never really been antagonistic, and players rarely respond well to it.
Posted Apr 15, 2006 11:49:51 PM | link
Mike, my sentiments exactly. Do I think its wrong, sure, but as a game designer I'm not going to impose that morality on the sandbox I create. The only bad thing about WoW in this case is the griefed have no means to exact justice beyond the soon to be forgotten social justice of blacklisting the guild. Hell the blacklist might even make the guild more popular to some, hence the recruiting video.
Bottom line in that scenario is if its ok to give the Godfather an Oscar and praise the story up and down Hollywood, then why when a much less powerful story comes out of a game, do we look to condemn those that played the part of the antagonist? Someone has to play the part or the story doesn't get told. As game designers is it our job to white room the antagonistic situations so that no one gets their feelings hurt? If we're expected to white room everything then we should remove as much player story telling avenues from the game as possible so that we retain ultimate control ... Not that I think anything of the sort can be done....
There's no social implications of this action that imply anything we already didn't know. It's not the lowest form of PvP. Desecrating graves/ceremonies has been part and parcel of many stories for centuries. Telling this story in this new medium does not suggest anything from a socialogical standpoint in my eyes.
Nate: In other IT arenas like telcos and ISPs they've discussed the idea of liability from involvement in the content that takes places over their lines. MMOs need to take the stance that they provide a service and nothing more. I think that when a MMO starts imposing morality on its players they get into lots of legal murky water. Look at the GLBT issue WoW had. They got involved in a situation that had nothing to do with game play and was primarily in the space of player to player interraction. By putting their heads in there, they were forced to backpedal from their remarks just to avoid a big nasty law suit that would have come forth if they stood strong on their morals. From a legal standpoint, I've always been told that you want as little to do with this type of stuff as possible, thereby reducing the amount of "responsibility" you could be attributed. Nothing Serenity did in game violated game play mechanics therefore the "story" surrounding the attack remains firmly in the realm of player to player interractions. Let the players figure out what to do about it. Besides, those kinds of stories will get you four page free advertising articles in PC Gamer.(See Eve Online example)
Posted Apr 16, 2006 12:09:04 AM | link
Let me throw more kerosene on the fire. How much of this event was essentially encouraged by the design of the game? Specifically, that Horde and Alliance can't communicate with each other, and that there is no real in-game consequence for such actions.
The PvP design that was in favor when WoW was being developed prevented communication between different factions in the game. The goal of this was to reduce verbal griefing, with the result that enemy factions basically behaved like intelligent monsters. In effect, this dehumanized the enemy.
In this particular case, I think the design had an unintended result. The Alliance guild had no way to have any meaningful connection with the player that passed away, or to have any connection with the players mourning the loss. The Horde people there were just intelligent monsters lining up in a row. Therefore, they didn't see the disruption as anything major: it was just like attacking a bunch of NPCs at a "funeral".
Admittedly, it isn't quite that simple. The Alliance guild knew this was a funeral, and they knew these were characters controlled by players. You can't really argue that the people attacking the funeral were completely blameless. But, the question remains: would they have acted differently if they had the opportunity to communicate with their opponents?
The second problem is that there is little consequence for these actions. What are the Horde victims supposed to do, kill the people that disrupted the funeral? Even if they were to hunt down everyone and kill them, there is little to be gained in this. Their enemies will just resurrect and get more PvP fighting that the obviously want. The game was designed to minimize the in-game effect of combat, so there is an imbalance in power here that allowed the Alliance players to inflict a significant harm on the Horde players (disruption of a solemn event), but there is no way for those Horde players to inflict any revenge on the Alliance players or characters. They can only really bring social pressure against the Alliance players, but that is only outside the context of the game (through forum postings, etc.)
So, in the end, we have mechanics which were intended to keep the game fun for everyone, but that really encouraged fairly monstrous behavior from some people. Their enemies were dehumanized and made impotent to defend themselves meaningfully. Another lesson in unintended consequences.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 12:43:50 AM | link
I find it to be a poor assumption that only "roleplayers" were involved in the funeral. I see this as more of a socializer's event- and as some of Nick's data suggests, socializers aren't necessarily roleplayers.
Now, imagine someone you knew ONLY online died. For "real life" friends, you'd have a funeral- a viewing- some way to say "goodbye" but:
1) you might be geographically separated
2) you might not even recognize the real person, you knew the avatar.
Still, the friendships are real. The void you're going to experience is real. The loss is real.
Yes, you could have a private moment to think about the friend, but we assemble in funerals IRL as much for the living as for the dead. It's a social tool that exists for a reason.
It's a gesture to the family, expressing an understanding of their loss. It's a gesture to the friends, showing that they're not all alone in their grief. It's a time to come together and realize just how many people were impacted by this person.
These aren't people who went to a real-life funeral, then enacted it online. These are people coming together for many of the same reasons they would in real life but couldn't. They were saying farewell to a friend that they only knew in a medium that doesn't really facilitate such social structures.
---
Should they have prepared for the inevitable grief attack?
I would have, but I'd learned long and hard through organizing player events and Player-GM'ed competitions that any announced event will be crashed- particularly if it looks like the prey will be unprepared.
Even if I didn't know the person, I'd be volunteering for and organizing a perimeter guard that would allow those that need to express their final farewell.
So, perhaps they should have kept their guard up... but they shouldn't have had to.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 1:14:22 AM | link
Derek: ...as a game designer I'm not going to impose that morality on the sandbox I create.
It's not nearly that simple. We inject a morality of our own choosing -- consciously or not -- into any game we design. The Sims, KOTOR, GTA, and Wow (to call out just a few) each have a definitive morality woven into them. GTA's morality seems to be almost entirely focused on the transgressive; The Sims' morality is more subtle and even subversive than it might first appear. KOTOR was interesting because it played with a dual morality overtly, and in a way that hasn't been seen in MMOs. WoW's morality is drawn in stark lines, as Brian notes, that dehumanize every enemy.
Does that make it acceptable to act in ways that you as a player know to be violating another player's expectations and wishes? I can't see any possible defense for such behavior that would stand up in any other social context. This is just playground bullying with new labels - Horde and Alliance in this case.
Bottom line in that scenario is if its ok to give the Godfather an Oscar and praise the story up and down Hollywood, then why when a much less powerful story comes out of a game, do we look to condemn those that played the part of the antagonist?
Yes. Because when a theatre full of people watch The Godfather, they all have substantially the same experience. None of them are selected to be slapped every time someone on-screen gets shot. Nor are those who choose to go out to the lobby seen as valid victims by those who stay in the theatre.
Movies are one-way, passive entertainment. Online games are multi-way, interactive entertainment. This changes the context and social consequences at every level.
MMOs need to take the stance that they provide a service and nothing more.
The "common carrier" argument is used by Second Life, but it's not really an MMO like other game-worlds. IMO, any game that tries to say, "hey, we just run the service" will find itself without many customers real quickly. The service of a game includes the entirety of the experience, not just the technial aspects or even the game systems. Imagine the employees at Disneyland saying, "someone slapped your family around? Sorry, we just keep the rides running. Go slap them back."
Let the players figure out what to do about it.
Without giving the players the tools to be able to actually do anything about it (oooh, I know, we'll kill them more!), this is an exercise that the players will quickly realize is futile. In such situations, you as the game operator are lucky if they just leave. If they don't do that, what invariably happens is they take all their frustration and ire and turn it not onto those who have given them a bad time, but onto you, Game Developer, both corporately and individually. You become the Bad Guy, and the game for such a disaffected player who doesn't just fade away becomes seeing how they can twist the game for others into the worst possible living hell.
Such downward spirals aren't the best way to run a thriving service-oriented business.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 1:41:46 AM | link
Blizzard deserves much of the "blame" for this. With their watered-down zero-loss PvP that has been largely moved into the antiseptic Battlegrounds, Blizzard have helped create a disgruntled PvPer minority that are always looking for new ways to actually _affect_ their victims.
If you remove that desperation to actually have a strong effect on the gameworld through PvP, then perhaps Serenity Now would not have done this.
Then again, maybe they would have anyway. Nonetheless, the desperation is undeniably there.
When game designers assume that all PvPers are griefers and that their influence must be bottled up very carefully, they end up with games that PvPers will either not want to play, or will play but will always try to break the barriers that have been imposed from above.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 3:01:37 AM | link
If you remove that desperation to actually have a strong effect on the gameworld through PvP, then perhaps Serenity Now would not have done this.
Those assumptions of grief in pvp are based on hard repeated evidence.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 11:32:01 AM | link
No, it has yet to be shown that "everyone is a griefer" (which is the assumption that I discussed).
The fact is that those oppressive mechanisms aimed at curbing the grief behavior of a small minority of the PvP playerbase end up creating a significantly larger minority of PvPers who are willing to grief when they see the slightest opportunity to do so. When an entire group of players sees its possible actions/influences inelegantly controlled from above, there is a general desperation to not be kept bottled up, which manifests itself when otherwise mild-mannered PvPers do things that they would not have done if the game's ruleset allowed for a bit more freedom of action.
I can give you an example of this type of desperation. When I played WoW, I was quite horrified at the fact that people lost nothing at all when they died in PvP. They did not even have their equipped items 10% damaged, which is the penalty that Blizzard reserved for when a player died to a creature. When I PvPed I would, whenever possible, allow a creature to get the final hit on my victim, so that the player would get a tiny penalty for doing something he probably should not have done. This was to try to avoid, or at least minimize, the bindrush effect (where a player dies and instantly runs to his body, at which point he either attacks you or goes on doing what he was doing, etc.).
When a player finds a game offensively oppressive, that player will (before quitting the game in disgust) often act as a bit of a freedom-of-action vigilante.
As I said in my earlier post, some people do not need to be "desperate to influence", as grief-play comes to them more naturally than to others. The point, however, is that one creates a much larger number of people willing to use grief-play when one's game has mechanisms that control and severely limit player behavior.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 12:48:26 PM | link
From personal experience, I have to agree with grax. I started PVPing with UO, moved on to EQ and played everything else along the way until finally ending up at WoW. I never griefed in UO or EQ. In fact, I rarely pvped. In these games, killing another player really felt like you were doing harm to another real life person. I was a fairly nice guy, but I enjoyed playing on PVP servers nonetheless, because of the realistic communities it formed. I tried PVE servers in EQ, but after playing PVP I felt too restricted and the relationships with my fellow players were less important to my success in the game.
Enter WoW. You can't even communicate with the people you are killing. Death is so painless, that I don't even blink when someone kills me. These two factors, lead to a situation where enemy PCs appear more like amoral NPCs and to have any affect on the game or your fellow players you must grief people into realizing that, "hey I killed you." The amount of griefing I did and the amount of griefing I experienced increased 100 fold when I started playing WoW.
I believe grax is onto something here. The most tame PVP I ever experienced was also the PVP with the least restrictions (ability to speak with the enemy, lack of safe zones, etc) and had the harshest death penalty (exp loss, item drop, etc). I can remember the numerous times in EQ where enemies would stop me and question me, only to let me go on my way because I was simply doing a corpse run or trying to get to a new city. This would never happen in WoW, where PCs are no more than flashly looking NPCs. In neocron, due to the FPS nature of the weapons, people would often accidently kill bystanders. They (and I) felt so bad, that they would apologize and make sure they were able to get their items back. These weren't members of the same team. Heck, they didnt even know each other. But, death stung enough, that people wouldn't dish it out without reason. In fact, I'd argue that Neocron is one of the safest PVP games out there. You can walk through any area of the game, and at worst you'll probably get a warning from other players to get off their turf. And yet, it has one of the harshest death penalties (item drops, money penalties, exp penalties, etc) and the pvp is completely unrestricted by faction, level, area, etc.
In the end, when you assume your players are a bunch of immature 12 year old griefers and you design your game with them in mind, more often than not people will act like immature 12 year old griefers in response to your design decisions and against their own better nature.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 4:18:38 PM | link
I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that, in WoW, there are plenty of places in which the opposite faction cannot attack you.
I am one of those people who hates PvP servers, or rather, the players I tend to find on them. I hate minding my own business, questing or chatting or whatever, and then being ruthlessly attacked. I hate dealing with griefers and corpse campers. I take the whole thing very personally, and that's why I just don't play on PvP servers. It's too stressful for me.
I'm also a very social player, and I totally understand the guild's very real emotional need to say goodbye and bring some closure.
All of that being said -- this guild could have chosen any number of perfectly safe locations in which to hold the funeral. It kind of baffles me that they didn't.
If I were playing on a PvP WoW server and I wanted to hold a funeral event, I would have handled it one of two ways. One, if I wanted a peaceful and contemplative funeral, I would have found an appropriate spot in a non-contested area. Two, if I wanted a cathartic event and it was appropriate to the personality of the deceased, I would have worn my best PvP gear, gathered somewhere in a contested area, and hoped to honor the dead by having the biggest slaughterfest ever seen.
What I can't understand is going to a contested area in formal wear and expecting everyone to walk around on tiptoes, especially considering the very real fact that WoW does make it almost impossible to communicate with the opposite faction, as Brian Green pointed out.
I agree with Mike Sellers 100% when he says, "I don't personally see any real difference between a guild of socially pathological bullies descending on a virtual funeral or a lone player ganking a lower-level character along the road someplace. Both do so just because they can, because any reprisal is either trivial or irrelevant to the glee they get in ruining someone else's play, and of course because the game entitles them to do so." Because I agree with this point, I avoid PVP servers unless I very specifically want to deal with that aspect. And because anyone who's spent any time in a MMORPG, especially a PvP server, must know that there are always a few people out to ruin someone's game experience and hide behind "it's just a game," I have trouble understanding why the funeral was held as it was, where it was.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 5:41:39 PM | link
My question, directed rhetorically at the people who organized the funeral is:
Why did you organize a funeral where you could be attacked? There are "safe" places (Cities, plus Newbie Zones) to hold a funeral where Serenity Now would have had to mount a raid of some difficulty in order to get at the funeral.
But no, the organizers held the Funeral in Winterspring (a high level zone for non-players), far away even from Everlook, where it would be (I would argue likely) for the funeral to be attacked, even not on purpose. As folks have already mentioned, WoW PVP keeps cross-faction talk totally cut off, so Alliance who didn't know about it might have attacked, and there would have been no way to tell them to stop.
Are SN a bunch of jerks? Sure, but we knew that already. If you play on a PVP server, you have to assume that stupid crap like this is going to happen.
Of course, the victims could always retaliate by turning in the makers of the video in to the copyright holder whose rights were clearly infringed by the public release of this video, especially Apple Music who I hear is particularly thrilled about the the internet age.
"LOL PWND"
Posted Apr 16, 2006 10:16:02 PM | link
I don't WoW, so I'm not sure of the game mechanics at play here, but I'd suggest that, from what I've heard, the zone was selected so players from both sides could pay their wishes (weak excuse, maybe... I don't know the mechanics)
The fact that one of the cameramen was a "spy" in the line to pay respects supports the idea that the service was multifaction.
Posted Apr 16, 2006 11:07:25 PM | link
Ah. That could be. It would be a little odd, though, in that as mentioned before, it's incredibly difficult to have in-game communication between Alliance and Horde*. I guess Alliance players might have gotten to know the person via message boards and still wanted to pay their respects. But it would take an awful lot of trust for an Alliance player to approach a Horde gathering and believe it would be tolerated.
* I won't say impossible because, on a non-pvp server, I was in an Alliance pair and "grouped" with a Horde character a few levels higher than us. It slowly became clear that we could all benefit one another by alternating pulls and then, once first hit had been established (which is what determines loot and xp rights in WoW), all beating on the creature. All of us were able to progress a lot faster, and a lot more safely, than we could have without the cross-faction help. That being said, it's hard for me to imagine establishing this kind of behavior on a PvP server, where it would be so easy to whack the other guy when his HP are low. Maybe it wouldn't be so hard to imagine for someone who plays on a PvP server every day.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 1:02:03 AM | link
With regards to PvP and MMO(RPG), I notice that there are several people here who dislike PvP, and those who take a hands off approach. Yet in all of this discussion, and for that mater, discussions on any board , there is little if any discussion of the effects on the people who are the "victims" in these situations beyond the game effects such as loss of items/experience/loot/time. What I am talking about, and why I do not PvP, are the psychological effects.
Most people tend to think of violence as restricted to a physical medium, and if one is not physically hurt, there was no violence. Yet I think that anyone who has been in an abusive relationship, or has suffered being sued, can assuredly relate how violence can take many forms. While physical hurts can be shown to anyone, and can be recognized for what it is, psychological wounds, in my opinion, can be far more serious.
When a person attacks another "in game", they are attacking an avatar of the person playing, most likely a extension of the individual through either exploration of various aspects of their personality, or a reflection of themselves. In either case, it is a part of the person that is being attacked.
Therefore, when such an attack comes at a time when the attention is elsewhere, or the person is unprepared, etc..., this comes as not an attack on the avatar, but upon the person. The ego has not had time to prepare, and it becomes "personal". In such a case, I believe that this attack upon the individual IS harmful, and does have real world effects, up to and including change of personality, hostility, anger, and perhaps even hatred. These are not healthy emotions, and I doubt that the person playing even realises it is happening.
As for those who argue that it is just a game, that is a silly argument. Basketball is just a game, as is football, cricket, soccer, etc..., and look how people react in the real world. There are definite real world consequences, and we ignore it at our own peril.
Look at it this way for a moment. MMO(RPG)s allow people around the world to play and communicate together in a sophisticated and interesting manner. I would argue that most people play because of the social aspects of the game, because you can get better storylines and action from a single player game. In this social aspect, most people (IMO) probably spend more time talking to other people than they do questing or any other action. If they are attacked by a PvP griefer, this disrupts that persons connection to other players, if only briefly. Still, it might be likened to opening a letter you send to a friend far away, and some jerk at the post office opens it, scribbles on the letter, and seals it back up. When your friend gets it, the letter from you has been despoiled by a stranger. I think that PvP has much the same effect from time to time.
Let us also seperate the types of people who PvP. There is the type who wants to challenge themselves against others, because it is much more difficult that going against a NPC script at any time. The other type has been adequately described earlier as a psychopathic bully, who enjoys hurting others, while hiding behind the "game" facade. It is the second category of individuals that cause the most harm to others, changing the game experience from a social one, to a hostile one.
In the case that brought this up, those individuals who were paying tribute to a friend found themselves in the midst of an unwelcome and, tragically, negatively transforming event, turning their tribute into something else. If the alliance players knew what was happening, then they are without conscience. If they didn't know, then at least it betrays their willingness to commit offence to others. In either case, the alliance players sound to me like a bunch of spoiled children at best, and possibly dangerous people who commit violence in the game world where they would not dare in the real world (I hope).
Let us not keep deluding ourselves that games cause no harm, and look at the psychological effects, and what it says about our morality. Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should, and when we create systems that not only allow for these behaviors, but even reward them, let us not shake our heads and claim ignorance. Just because it is "virtual" doesn't mean it doesn't have real world impact. If a scientist creates a weapon, and then gives it out, let him not be surprised when someone gets hurt.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 3:13:35 AM | link
Games are about conflict.
The essence of games is that they are capable of transmuting conflict into art, of transforming the will to power into a mutually beneficial form of self-improvement by taking the psychopathic bully within us all and submitting it to a topological shift that turns it into something not just harmless but potenitally transcendent. Larry Bird, Tiger Woods, Garry Kasparov, Muhammad Ali, Zileas, Wayne Gretsky, Shusaku, Babe Ruth, and so on.
The key ingredient of that phase change is the special status of game objects and actions as existing outside the domain of regular life.
To remove the stylized conflict at the heart of games would be to nerf them out of existence.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 5:42:12 AM | link
PvP offers the opportunity to do many things in virtuality that would be not only morally unacceptable in most cultures, but also often illegal.
As the non-gaming world slowly catches on to the existence of virtual spaces, real-world lawmakers and enforcers will begin to take an interest. Incidents like this, for example, could clearly result in both civil cases for damages (stress-related loss of earnings following the shock and trauma of the attack, for example) and in criminal charges too, should, for example, the shock of such an attack lead to someone having a heart attack or stroke at the keyboard.
All this sounds fanciful now, but if MMOs do become the mass entertainment that is often predicted, there will be a lot of people involved who don't subscribe to, or understand, gamer behavior conventions. And there will be potential money to be made out of lawsuits.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 6:08:18 AM | link
I have done a considerable amount of PvP, but I do share some of Delos Mace Jr's issues with it.
No matter what the game may "allow," I don't enjoy stalking prey that would have very little chance at detection, evasion, or retaliation- (I don't enjoy BEING that prey either). If cross-faction communication is allowed, I give my foe an honorable /salute and compliment them on their style.
Some argue that the "added danger" contributes to the fun, but I'd argue that the adrenaline rush of danger is one thing, but a danger that's preventable / counterable by some user action is much more preferred to danger that cannot be reasonably prepared for or responded to.
We've used sports analogies in the past- commenting that things like "high sticking" in hockey are technically assaults, but not treated as such in-game (even though the attack is in violation of the game's rules, too).
PvP can be as fair and offenseless as a sporting competition. Both sides consented, both sides know the rules. Both sides may enjoy playing within those rules or playing elsewhere.
Foes in PvP are providing each other content. Foes that stay within the rules, or show respect to their enemy, will find their enemy more willing to compete with them. Foes that push the limits of the rules sets perform the equivalent of a "high sticking" and will, over time, alienate their competitors.
A game that insures that each battle is relatively balanced could get away with greater penalties on death, but too often, the latest runs of PvP have focused on level disparities that predetermine the battle's outcome. A bottom-dweller will attack prey with little to no chance of evasion or defense and expect substantial penalties be applied upon them for a loss they were powerless to prevent.
These are games where actions, responses, and decision-making should affect the success or failure of a mission, but this PvP takes all that away from a player- where a single orange-conned foe can slay an entire team- where stealth is a toggle that's counterable only by a few select classes, and a stealth-attack can mean instant death.
A good game designer would think twice before developing a zone for a specific level range, then adding content that could not be taken on by people of that level, but that's often exactly what is done in PvP.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 9:16:40 AM | link
kathygnome said:
People like this guild are why PVP tends to be very unpopular in MMPORPGs.
That was the received wisdom between Trammel and 15 months ago. Take a look at the balance between pvp ruleset servers (substantial majority) and non-pvp servers on WoW and it turns out that we were all wrong.
This also kinda pokes a finger in the eye of all those who are saying how broken Blizz's PvP zero-loss implementation is. People seem to like PvP MMOs when it's just a laugh an nobody gets hurt. Give 'em what they want. I don't play on them myself, but I can see the numbers.
In this example, there is nobody to blame but the griefers. Saying that the attendees got what they deserved for playing on that server sounds awfully like saying "she was wearing a short skirt". No, the parallel is not exact by any means, but I am wary of blaming the victim for the actions of those who gained pleasure from causing grief and discomfort to others.
This is where someone like Raph can suggest systems which try to impose real consequences on grief play without the possibility of those griefers being able to use those consequences against thier victims. If the consequences are taking away the right of a character - of an account - to PvP then sandbox ftw!
Oh, and it needs saying that Serenity and their like are kids and dorks who, if they tried their bullying in real life, would receive a much-needed lesson in non-zero-consequence PvP.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 9:27:09 AM | link
I don't have any sympathy for people who claim "the mechanics let me do it." It's not like the Hand of God comes out of the sky and stops you from murdering someone in real life. If you're a jerk in an anonymous, punishment-free game, that doesn't make you some kind of nihilistic revolutionary testing the philosophical limits of on-line spaces. It means you're a jerk that's not brave enough to do anything that might have real consequences (though I suppose a few griefers are jerks in real-life, too).
I wouldn't blame the lack of cross-faction communication, either. If anything, DAoC and WoW have friendlier PvP than other games because they don't let people taunt and brag and whine for hours (though I've been... ah... contacted a couple times by someone who made a cross-faction alt just for that purpose). Would these players have acted differently if they could talk? Yes. They would have called the funeral attendees fags and emoted raping the corpses.
Enemy players are not just "smart NPCs." Regardless of whether the game mechanics encourage that impression, griefers are fully aware that enemy players are, first and foremost, the avatars of real humans. Humans who can be hurt, annoyed, and scored on. Grief behavior only makes sense in the context of attacking players instead of avatars. Or: why don't griefers brag about ganking low level NPCs?
I agree that the lack of any death penalty in PvP contributes to the problem. I don't think WoW would be improved by letting people call each other names, but I think the PvP would be friendlier if death had more sting, at least in open PvP (I'm not sure I'd add any death penalty to the Battlegrounds). Gankers would get more joy because they could "punish" other players, but greater joy comes with greater risk, since victims would have a greater incentive to track down gankers and take revenge (which would hurt--ideally, you'd want to punish gankers more, perhaps with PvP ranks that are reset to zero with death). At least, that's how it seems to work in other games.
Personally, I'm in the "love PvP, hate the PvPers" category. I'd appreciate a PvP game that didn't make policing, defending, and taking revenge (bounties?) an order of magnitude more difficult than ganking and hit-and-run tactics. DAoC's RvR achieved this to some degree, even though it wasn't open PvP. I didn't last a month under WoW's PvP ruleset, but I often walked around PvP-enabled on an RP server. Most other players were honorable prior to the introduction of PvP ranks. After that, it was chancy.
Ideas matter. Incentives matter. Most MMOs make PvP incentives that reward PvP without context. I admit, coming up with unexpoitable rules for rewarding "fair" PvP is tricky, perhaps impossible. The "Honor System" didn't directly discourage honorable PvP, but it rewarded all PvP kills without context (i.e. running around in a full group while killing lower level players is just as rewarding as a more even matched fight). Plus, it locked out the higher ranks from casual players by making rank competitve against your own side and based only of total kills instead of a win/loss ratio.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 10:30:05 AM | link
This is where someone like Raph can suggest systems which try to impose real consequences on grief play without the possibility of those griefers being able to use those consequences against thier victims.
Designers have tried to impose "real consequences" on griefers in many MMOs. We tried a number of ways of dealing with this in M59, from the classic of making those who kill others killable themselves without penalty to creating negative karma to summoning a powerful undead to relentlessly hunt you down when you kill an innocent of lower level than you. You'd think that combination would have been a powerful disincentive to grief-PKing, but it wasn't.
The fundamental lesson of such ideas is that at best they only partially work: they're game mechanic solutions being applied to social situations. That is, they aren't penalizing the griefer/PKer/bully in a way that is significant to them. If a griefer dies to a revenant or is attackable by city guards or whatever, this is just "the cost of doing business" that doesn't diminish the fierce enjoyment they get from ganking others. They're also willing to bounce back from death again and again (others are correct that this is made easier in games like WoW with little death penalty), honing their skills faster than their victims tend to, as the victims are playing a broader game.
The only in-game way I know of to provide balance against non-consensual PK (or similar activities, if you're going to allow them) is to make such actions strongly self-limiting in terms of the character's abilities, and to put the limitations in the hands of both victims and bystanders. This is what happens when you're ostracized from "civilized society" in real life. Unfortunately the analogs to this are difficult and thus far clunky and porous -- meaning that invoking them penalizes the victim (forcing them to "play" a part of the game they have no interest in) and ultimately provides little disincentive to the grief-player.
All that said, I'm curious about the popularity of the PvP servers in WoW. I have a character on one because of friends who play there, but I don't much enjoy the paranoid style of gameplay this breeds. Given the availability of consensual PvP and battlegrounds on PvE servers, why are the PvP servers as popular as they are?
Posted Apr 17, 2006 10:40:20 AM | link
Endie> Oh, and it needs saying that Serenity and their like are kids and dorks who, if they tried their bullying in real life, would receive a much-needed lesson in non-zero-consequence PvP.
Ok, I'm more interested in the full post, but the end is the most quotable.. :P
I'm glad to see PvP servers becoming more common- and Endie's right- it takes zero-loss PvP to get its popularity to the masses.
As mentioned, the griefer was the characteristic barrier to PvP- one griefer could make alot of PvP-neutral players prefer "no-pvp" just to avoid the idiots. With zero-loss, they can just accept the respawn as the easiest way to "get away from the idiot" and get on with play.
However, I believe we shouldn't have had to resort to such limitations to curb such idiocy. Grief-players are damaging to a robust, healthy PvP community, and we've had to severely curtail risks AND rewards to minimize their impact.... and for this, I put some of the burden on the developers.
Developers often say that they don't want to impose social rules on the players, and scholars studying MMO's often want to watch for "emergent structures" rather than suggest community-building structures. Together, we take away many of the methods a community could use for self-policing, for self-regulation, and for truly building community rules- methods to express values of what's acceptable or not acceptable.
Is it any wonder why our worlds appear to be populated by sociopaths?
(FINAL NOTE: Don't include "PvP server count" as too much of a metric for PvP's popularity. There are many PvE-centric players who want to leave the OPTION TO PvP available, rather than be denied any chance at PvP. Previously, not being PvP-centric was a death sentence on PvP servers. I think many of them are finding the no-loss PvP safe enough to participate.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 10:41:28 AM | link
Mike Sellers: Why are the PvP servers as popular as they are?
Because playing Chess (with some House in it) is more interesting than playing House (with some Chess in it).
/mc
Posted Apr 17, 2006 11:31:35 AM | link
[i]Given that, this story isn't really all that remarkable. Ninja-PvPers -- aka PKers or griefers -- have been behaving this way (including crashing weddings, funerals, and anything else they could) for as long as games have allowed (and enabled) them to do so.
What's remarkable to me is that developers and operators still cater to this socially pathological market -- and then wonder why their customer service costs are so high. [/i]
If WoW were like the original UO, I _might_ agree with you.
WoW is not like UO at release. The people on this server _chose_ to play on a PvP server where this sort of event is possible. They weren't forced to play in this environment, they elected to do so. This is not a developer decision, other than to make the option of playing on this server type available.
Additionally, there are "safe" places, even on PvP servers that a funeral could be held. Basically, publicly announcing that there was going to be a big gathering of people in a non-safe area at a given time on a server with a ruleset that specifically enables non-consentual PvP(a term that carries little weight when you choose to play on such a server) is essentially begging to be attacked.
This situation is precisely why PvPers choose to play on PvP servers. If you don't want unplanned PvP, don't play on a PvP server, basically.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 11:52:19 AM | link
duckilama> This situation is precisely why PvPers choose to play on PvP servers. If you don't want unplanned PvP, don't play on a PvP server, basically.
However, it's an all-or-nothing decision: Many people WANT TO PvP, but prefer PvP in moderation (meaning they'd have to maintain an alt account with enough activity for guild relationships) or have to be comfortable enough with griefer-deaths to weather through- something that the "no risk" PvP enables.
(That's for server-based PvP. Zone-based PvP- where most PvE adventure zones are PvE only, allows for the sometime-PvP'er, makes the stalking of half-dead PvE'ers less possible, and allows you to enforce zone controls to minimize the level disparity. You can usually expect a player in one of the few PvP zones to be there TO PvP)
Both server-based and zone-based PvP has some problems, and that is that a few people we'll just characterize as 'overly aggressive' can ruin it for the masses... and if these people have too much power, people will just leave.
So, the devs have minimized penalties over and over, trying to encourage the casual PvPers to remain despite the aggressive player, and doing little about the root problem. They took away inter-faction chat to minimize the harsh words. They took away looting and loss, made spawn camping more difficult, all to make the "overly aggressive player" less damaging to the PvP world.
But the problem remains- now, PvP is rather meaningless, and the aggressive players still experiments with new, improved ways to make others feel like crud. Players who remain sensitive to even that level of watered-down cruelty (so remarkably thin-skinned as that may sound) still opt out of PvP. But now, for many "hardcore"... PvP is too bland.
We can't keep taking things away. There's not much left as it is.
I'd like to see a fresh look at PvP- one that allows players to take more control- and for once, allows them to define acceptable behavior, and acceptable "levels" of investment.
PvP is a competition- a sport- with professionals, semi-professionals, ametuers, and people who just casually play with friends. They each have different values and different expectations from their competition and each other, yet we lump them all together.
How long can we expect the casual ametuer leaguer to play against a pro after the "celebrity awe" has worn off? How many times will they be willing to lose... or to play with rules that cater to the pro-carreerist?
What do we do to insure that the "ametuer leaguers" don't have to worry about a pro "ringer" coming in and dominating things?
If players were able to organize their own rivalries, they could define the "rules for participation" and even the "prizes" for the victors. Players could enroll in the "leagues" that best fit their style and compete against other players that share those values. "Overly Aggressive" players could form their own leagues based on the values they espouse, but can be "thrown out" of leagues where they abuse or misuse the system. Active league leaders would be encouraged to do so, as enough dissent would result in players leaving to form another league.
Of course, with the level ranges that we see in a modern MMO, this wouldn't work very well: It can take long enough to find a rival within x level ranges now, with only 2-3 factions. Imagine when the player base is divided among 20-30 "leagues." (Many other current game design assumptions would also need "tweaked")
This model would, however, at least acknowledge that PvP is very different for different people. Some want each battle to be a tactical competition. Some see "building the template" as part of the battle. Some want to "control the battlefield" by expelling all defeated foes to a faraway place- or put zone-entrance timers, while others don't want the "hours of inaction" that such a tactic might cause. Leagues could define their values, recruit members of similar mindsets, and give rewards as they see fit.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 12:45:51 PM | link
PvP is irrelevant. This is about psychological violence deliberately inflicted on other human beings.
The attack on the funeral was not just an attack on Horde characters. The players who attacked the funeral had read the messages posted by friends of the deceased player. They were fully aware that the dead player's guildmates felt authentic human grief about the loss of their friend.
Serenity Now attacked the funeral because they derived pleasure from behaving in a cruel way toward other human beings.
We can talk endlessly about the contested perimeter of the magic circle, but we should also look at *where* the violence takes place. In this case, the virtual violence against game characters is not the issue; we should be concerned with the psychological violence inflicted on the mourners themselves.
Regarding the location of the funeral, there was some sort of reason given by the organizers. Perhaps it had something to do with their friend's affection for that particular lake?
++++
In light of the many cases of on-line deception in virtual worlds, I'm still not convinced that this story is entirely true. Has anyone been able to track down specific details about the person who died in real life? If so, it would be great to see more details here. What was his or her name? Where did he or she live? How old were they? What did they do for a living?
It would be nice to ground the discussion with these tangible details.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 12:46:58 PM | link
>(That's for server-based PvP. Zone-based PvP- where most PvE adventure zones are PvE only, allows for the sometime-PvP'er, makes the stalking of half-dead PvE'ers less possible, and allows you to enforce zone controls to minimize the level disparity. You can usually expect a player in one of the few PvP zones to be there TO PvP)
I've been saying for a long time, DAoC got zone-based PvP right. It needed better rewards, but the actual mechanics of PvP was good.
>>PvP is irrelevant. This is about psychological violence deliberately inflicted on other human beings.
I disagree. It's a game. Someone found out when and where there would be enough targets to make a guild "raid" worthwhile and set it up. Yes, there are other people playing the other avatars, but it's a game with many metagames.
>>Serenity Now attacked the funeral because they derived pleasure from behaving in a cruel way toward other human beings.
How do you know that?
Posted Apr 17, 2006 1:12:07 PM | link
>Grax "Blizzard deserves much of the "blame" for this. With their watered-down zero-loss PvP that has been largely moved into the antiseptic Battlegrounds, Blizzard have helped create a disgruntled PvPer minority that are always looking for new ways to actually _affect_ their victims."
I think it goes farther than just looking for ways to affect their victims, I think there's a deep need to affect the game world itself. One of my biggest complaints with WoW is that there is no way to change the face of your world. Transfer your character from one server to another and except for the people logged in, you'd have no way of knowing things were different. This was deeply frustating for me, especially coming from games like UO and EVE Online where players have more of an active role in what the game looks like. I couldn't stand the fact that I was just another [insert archetypal WoW character] lost in a sea of identical servers.
For better or for worse, Serenity Now was able to do something that made them and their server stand out, even if just for a few moments. It reminds me of the guild that tried to hold the AQ event for ransom. It seems like people just trying to carve out their own piece of history in a game world that tries its hardest to clone everyone and everything.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 2:43:41 PM | link
Others have touched on this, but to draw it out a little more: Isn't what's going on here a difference in how people define "the game?"
It sounds to me like the funeral-goers tended to think of "the game" as being the stuff that characters in the game do -- whacking NPCs and critters, traveling, trading, consensual dueling -- basically, "the game" is whatever developer-provided actions yield tangible in-game rewards. So although the people behind the characters were actively using their characters to get together virtually with their guildmates for a funeral of a real person, they weren't "playing the game."
Meanwhile, the SN folks appear to define "the game" in a much broader way. For them, it's not about what characters solely within the virtual world do -- it's about what they, the players behind the characters, can do to the human players behind the other characters in the virtual world. The game isn't limited to the virtual world's code; it encompasses the real people interacting with that code. So crashing the funeral was just "playing the game."
The resulting "how can you think like that?!" debates look an awful lot like a clash of definitions.
----
Side note: The first thing I thought of when I read the funeral-crashing story as Nate relates it was the story of Loki showing up uninvited at a party in Valhalla. Next thing you know, the wonderful Baldur is dead after Loki weasels the blind Hod into firing a mistletoe arrow into Baldur's eye.
Enabling PvP has always encouraged griefing.
--Bart
Posted Apr 17, 2006 3:08:22 PM | link
In reply to my comment that the griefers derived pleasure from behaving in a cruel way, someone asked for more support for this claim.
The appended quotes were apparently posted by Serenity Now members in the Blizzard forums.
These excerpts alone are depressing, but the way that players in other guilds emphatically supported the attack is even more disturbing.
In all of the social hysteria about video-games and virtual worlds, critics have worried that gamers would lose the ability to distinguish real life from the gameworld.
It is strange to realize that we've reached a point at which the exact opposite condition is far more serious. A significant number of gamers -- including a few who have posted in this forum -- seem unable to comprehend the common humanity that they share with other players.
"bombing the memorial was by far the funniest/most fun thing i have ever done in wow. learn to move on people, this thing is taking over your lives"
"lol you all are such a bunch of whiney #@%$!es. jesus christ, how many more threads must you eknights make about this subject? bombing the memorial was by far the funniest/most fun thing i have ever done in wow. learn to move on people, this thing is taking over your lives."
"A chick died. Memorial tried. SN fried. People cried."
"Life without introspection or philosophy is pointless. The game as a conduit simply fails for making real connections. If WoW is your base for friends or real emotional solice. Then you sir are amazingly damaged person. Get out live real life. Funerals are meant for people who really knew them. Its like all the retards who show up at celeb funerals. You dindt know this person to an extent that gives you a right to mourn them. If you did then its another cookie cutter non person we are talking about."
"Why not ?
Just Because
Wanted to be %@$%s
It was real PVP
Its funny
For Efame
To be hated
To incite nerdrage
We were bored
Pick one, no matter what you choose others will try and convince you your choice is wrong, some will even wish for the very thing they are lambasting to happen to you. Thats the real funny."
These excerpts do a good job of establishing that (a) the members of Serenity Now understood that other people were mourning their friend's death, (b) they knew that they would be even more upset after the funeral was attacked, and (c) they clearly took pleasure in the entire process.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 3:31:39 PM | link
To me, Aaron, on a handful of those statements meet all 3 of your assumptions.
It looks more like the majority of SNers are of the opinion that it's a game, don't take it so seriously. If the mourners are _that_ upset that, by announcing an intention to have a large number of people in a contested area, on a PvP server, regardless of the purpose, at best you have a codependency situation with plenty of passive-aggression in addition to what you see as hurtful aggression.
Again, most of the excerpts you pulled say to me that the SNers are just playing the game. BGs are not what a PvP server is about, so if one side comes out and says "We're all going to get together in this special place with no guards, whatever you do, please, oh please Br'er Fox, please don't throw me in that briar patch... er, please don't come attack us, I mean. (wink wink, nudge nudge)," what do you really expect from the opposition? Solemn cooperation? That's a rather naive outlook, even if we assume everyone involved is a mature adult.
Really, to me, to cite the SNers for being mean, hateful, cruel, etc. is to fail to look at the whole picture, which includes the actions of the mourners, the environment on the server, the locale chosen by the organizers, etc.
Looks to me, those with the healthiest attitude are the SNers saying "It's a game, get over it."
I watched the video. I have to tell you, my first reaction was to laugh. My second reaction was to ask "where are the bouncers?" My third reaction was to think "what a bunch of fools" because the minute the first SNer showed up, there should have been an awful lot of red flags and preparation going up and on. Clearly, this funeral, while well-intentioned(there's a saying about intentions), was ill-conceived and poorly executed.
This is a game-space, and any time you try to bring out of context situations into it, you have to know things are not going to go according to plan. Things don't go according to plan in the real world, but when the game-space is specifically designed to encourage conflict...
Posted Apr 17, 2006 3:58:34 PM | link
Duckilama wrote: "Really, to me, to cite the SNers for being mean, hateful, cruel, etc. is to fail to look at the whole picture, which includes the actions of the mourners, the environment on the server, the locale chosen by the organizers, etc. Looks to me, those with the healthiest attitude are the SNers saying 'It's a game, get over it.'"
This is exactly what I mean about the inability to comprehend that we share common humanity with the other players.
Your definition of "the whole picture" is limited to the magic circle constructed by the rules of the PVP server. However, "the whole picture" also includes the broader world of human beings who interact with one another through their computers.
Blatantly denying those real-world connections is not just naive. It's dangerous.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 4:20:10 PM | link
>Your definition of "the whole picture" is limited to the magic circle constructed by the rules of the PVP server. However, "the whole picture" also includes the broader world of human beings who interact with one another through their computers.
Blatantly denying those real-world connections is not just naive. It's dangerous.
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We can take it even further. The mourners expected every one on the server to observe their personal pain by withdrawing from the magic circle, not just those that were attending the funeral.
We could ignore the entire debate about motives, environment, server-rules, etc. and I'd still feel that the mourners were out of line.
As you say, this is a shared space, a broader world of human beings interacting with and in a virtual space. To expect others to abide by your wishes and observe your personal out of context experience with the same attitude as yourself is, in my opinion, either arrogant, ignorant, or naive, all three of which are dangerous.
I would no sooner expect someone to pretend the magic circle was null and void while I tended to my crying toddler than I would expect NASCAR to stop a race because the noise scared my little guy.
In typing that out, what I've realized is, the mourners decided to call time-out(suspend the magic circle) and SN decided not to abide by it. We're debating ad-hoc playground rules, in essence, and what it boils down to, for me, is you can't always just call time-out.
I feel like one of the neighborhood kids is coming to tell on their playmates and half the parents are saying "don't be a tattle tail, and if you're going to play the game, you have to play by the rules" while the others are saying "but she wanted to make her own rules, and the rest of the kids should have let her".
Neither side will sway the other, but it's still a parental debate about playground rules.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 4:36:56 PM | link
On the humanity of it all:
What I find really disturbing about this incidient is that these folks knew what they were doing. In the quotes above, they repeatedly discount the humanity of folks meeting through WoW. Folks are told to "lead a real life." As if it isn't a real life to participate in a MMOG. It seems real enough to me. I have real emotions as the result of in-game activities.
Does Blizzard want people to lead a "real life"? No, they want them to lead a mediated life in WoW. There are real humans leading real lives through MMOGs. For WoW to make it to the next level, I think they are going to have to address this more thoroughly than they have.
On game design:
Blizzard continues to ignore the one thing they added to PvP - dishonorable kills. When a lowbie gets ganked, there are no consequences to the ganker. Blizzard protects its civilian NPCs more than it protects its griefed players. At least a lowbie should get the honor deducted from a highbie who ganks them in a dishonorable kill. While it may not be enough to dissuade ganking, it does, at least, compensate the gankee for the trouble. They should also get a free rez from the Spirit Healer without sickness or durability reductions. This would go a long way towards reducing the pain of mismatched PvP. I hate the corpse run after a ganking. I particularly hate the second corpse run. The person who bears the consequences of griefing should have those minimized as much as possible.
Andrew
Posted Apr 17, 2006 4:59:28 PM | link
Those are good ideas, Andrew, but what about someone that's just being stupid? The level 30 rogue that tries to sneak in to see the throne room? Should a Level 60 that "ganks" him receive a penalty? Should the rogue be compensated for his stupidity or brashness or chutzpa?
Yes, there are cases of "bad" ganking, but how do you determine whether it was a gank or whether the "ganked" was just being dumb? Then how do you translate that to code?
Posted Apr 17, 2006 5:06:18 PM | link
Frank Lantz says: Games are about conflict.
So, in your view World of Warcraft is a game? Much the same way that chess is a game, soccer is a game, Tetris is a game...? I'm sure that it would make MMOG companies like Blizzard's life easier if the societies their worlds inevitably create were posted neatly under the game heading, but can they?
It's all too easy to excuse any behaviour in a society , online or otherwise, by invoking the taken for granted existence of a supposed magic circle. But how far does viewing online worlds and their complex social structures as games take us down the road of a serious analysis of these phenomena?
Posted Apr 17, 2006 5:10:42 PM | link
When I was in elementary school, one of the most hideously frowned upon tactics during tag was calling time-out shortly before you were tagged, or even if you were about to be chased down. It became a social expectation that you wouldn't do that; otherwise, it became a game of ambush, rather than a game of chase.
I think, from this discussion, it's concludable that, as usual, everyone was in the wrong in one way or another. Stupid actions invite stupid retributions. Don't be naive, don't be ganked.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 6:24:55 PM | link
Quoted from duckilama:
"Those are good ideas, Andrew, but what about someone that's just being stupid? The level 30 rogue that tries to sneak in to see the throne room? Should a Level 60 that "ganks" him receive a penalty? Should the rogue be compensated for his stupidity or brashness or chutzpa?"
Actually, I think anytime an L60 ganks an L30 to death, he should be penalized. In particular, the throne room is an easy place to let the NPC guards take care of the pesky L30 problem. The L60 doesn't even have to get his hands dirty. The key is ganking to death.
From duckilama:
"Yes, there are cases of "bad" ganking, but how do you determine whether it was a gank or whether the "ganked" was just being dumb? Then how do you translate that to code?"
I think you are missing the point. There is no smart or dumb criteria - there is just relative imbalance. If this is a game, then keep it competitive. When it isn't competitive, let us reward the inconvenienced player. The dishonorable kill actually does this. My twist was to both turn it on for player characters and convert the ganker's dishonor into the gankee's honor. As well as making it easy for the gankee to escape corpse camping by free spirit healer rezzing. These are easy criteria to reduce to code. You just compare relative levels of characters. When a highbie initiates battle of a lowbie, say 4 levels below, then he gets dishonor for the action. In the opposite case, when a lowbie attacks a highbie of any level, there is no difference to today's PvP.
This is pretty straightforward now that Blizzard already has dishonorable kills implemented for civilian NPCs.
Andrew
Posted Apr 17, 2006 6:40:36 PM | link
Amusingly, in the Star Wars series, Rogue Squadron (the novels), #10 has the protagonist visit a place called Adumar, where the Cartann people are obsessed with killing each other to earn more honor. The New Republic ambassadors aren't too happy about this, whereas the Imps are all too happy too oblige them with demonstrations of superior skill via death count.
The Cartann had a system instituted, however, where it was dishonorable for a veteran to engage in combat with a newbie unless there were special circumstances. They didn't get very far into it, but I think people might consider paging through the novel (Rogue Squadron #10, I believe).
Posted Apr 17, 2006 7:40:57 PM | link
I realize that we may never see eye-to-eye on this. Still, I disagree with the suggestion that everyone was wrong in one way or another.
There was nothing wrong with the funeral organizers attempting to organize this event in memory of their guild-mate. Even on a PVP server, it was a perfectly reasonable, even laudable, response to the loss of a friend.
There was something very wrong with Serenity Now's deliberate attack on the funeral, and there is something very wrong with the flippant response that "LOL. It's just a game. Get over it."
Many of the analogies floated so far (e.g. calling time out in tag, "playground rules," or stopping a NASCAR race because your child is upset) don't apply to this situation.
As noted in the above excerpts from Serenity Now, many of the people participating in the attack deliberately did so because they thought it was "retarded" for people to be grieving on-line for someone who died. They viewed the deceased as a "cookie-cutter non-person."
The "LOL. Get over it response" strikes me as a deliberate attempt to deny any sort of human connection with people controlling other characters in the game.
I sincerely believe that many MMO players are afraid of acknowledging the humanity of other players who are connected to the network.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 8:43:53 PM | link
The "LOL. Get over it response" strikes me as a deliberate attempt to deny any sort of human connection with people controlling other characters in the game.
I sincerely believe that many MMO players are afraid of acknowledging the humanity of other players who are connected to the network.
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The problem I have with this is that it encourages a caricature of these sorts of groups that I think gets in the way of understanding what is *really* going on.
Harkening to a point made earlier - I side with the idea that there is a clash of view points about game and the roles of participants going on. One may not like SN's take -at least in the extreme- but were it more nuanced...
As for the earlier quotes - I think one could make the argument they are out of context: it was a pretty heated forum thread with quite a bit of mud-flinging on both sides. Not sure what they prove.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 9:35:42 PM | link
Andrew: "Actually, I think anytime an L60 ganks an L30 to death, he should be penalized."
Your solution does not work, and will result in a worse situation than before.
Adding dishonor for gray kills will only lead to level 60s having lowbies tag along with them for their protection. This removes the option for AOE attacks for the opposing party. If it's me, a lone 60, versus a lvl 60 and a lvl 1 character, I have to take extra pains to avoid hitting that lvl 1.
And if it's a level 47 character (gray to 60s), he can actually be doing some rather annoying things that can change the outcome of the fight, and I'll be powerless to take him out of the equation.
Dishonor for gray kills can also lead to multiple grays teaming up to kill a level 60, with no fear of reprisal. You can call it "Reverse-ganking" I guess.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 10:31:04 PM | link
So i play world of warcraft on a regular basis and also try to read terranova (I like the economic analysis) and think you guys do a great job! I saw the video in question and thought it was really really funny. Whatever moral ethical questions involved within that paticular situation aside, i think the ability to attack indiscriminately reinforces the anarchic relations involved between different factions within the game that leads to such a rich pvp dynamic. 10 / 10
Posted Apr 17, 2006 11:47:33 PM | link
The earlier quotes from Serenity Now were prefaced with a link to the forum in which they originally appeared. Citations don't get much more "in context" than that.
Regarding the tendency to caricature "these sorts of groups," my comments above were specifically directed at Serenity Now and other gamers (in PvE, RP and PvP servers) who forget that they are interacting with real human beings. This incident is hardly a test case for the merits of PvP.
Posted Apr 17, 2006 11:54:39 PM | link
Quote from Tim:
"Adding dishonor for gray kills will only lead to level 60s having lowbies tag along with them for their protection."
I disagree with your assessment and here is why. When I am an L30 being ganked by an L60 with or without an accompanying L1 'target dummy', I do not have time to think about whether I don't use AoE spells because of the L1. In fact, I might not even notice he is there. Furthermore, I am not even trying to fight the ganker but to get away. The target dummy protection from my counter-attack is non-existent because there is no counter attack. Lets remember that this isn't a fair fight but a ganking. The lowbie will lose if they stand their ground. They will try to escape.
The second reason your suggestion is unlikely is how much fun is it for the L1 to follow around an L60 and watch him have all of the 'ganking fun'. Your average l337 ganker will not waste his time being an L1 target dummy.
In the next two quotes from Tim, he appears to be thinking that lowbie always has protection from a highbie. As I said in an earlier post, this would not be the case. A lowbie who intiates an attack on a highbie will get what they deserve - no dishonor protection and a sound thrashing. Furthermore, I think he misses the point that this isn't really protection but rather compensation to the gankee for being inconvenienved by the ganker. This is a modest transfer of honor and a free rez at the spirit healer. Not something for a gankee to seek out.
Quote from Tim:
"And if it's a level 47 character (gray to 60s), he can actually be doing some rather annoying things that can change the outcome of the fight, and I'll be powerless to take him out of the equation."
And this is a problem how? The fact that the lowbie initiates an attack on you while you are in battle does not give them immunity from counter-attack. He will be attacked by the L60 as soon as he shows hostile intent. Furthermore, the loss to the L60 is modest. I cannot image any L60 caring that much. The win to this system is that it reduces the pain of being a gankee and provides a small disincentive for ganking.
Quote from Tim:
"Dishonor for gray kills can also lead to multiple grays teaming up to kill a level 60, with no fear of reprisal. You can call it "Reverse-ganking" I guess."
Isn't a couple of L47 lowbies ambushing L52 highbies what PvP is all about? It can happen now but I rarely see it. Reverse ganking is both unlikely and, if it occurs, is not necessarily a bad thing.
Andrew
Posted Apr 18, 2006 1:58:10 AM | link
On PvP servers in general - they add an extra level for creating stories.
A tauren shaman (lvl 31) and I (lvl 32) watched a human warlock (lvl 41) prancing around the interment camp in K/Hillsbrad on his flaming pony,
We chased him, He ran into the camp thinking he was protected by the alliance guards. We ignored the guards and killed him and then just managed to escape.
It was fun trying to slow him down, get a few damage shots into him all the while the warrior and mage NPCs where attacking us.
Its a story I can tell my son. He, as either an tauren hunter or human rogue, will spend many minutes patiently setting up an ambush of equivalent level opponents. Patience, discipline
On the funeral specifically ( and only for Terranova information). They could have held it at Everlock protected by Steamweedle bruisers (Neutral ground where the NPCs attack the attackers) or there is the Shrine to the Fallen Warrior above Crossroads in the Barrens (contested but close to many horde centres and appropriately named).
Posted Apr 18, 2006 2:04:04 AM | link
One should realize that it is possible to find the video and the event amusing, whether because one is not considering all the implications, or because one appreciates the clash of approaches ("mourners vs gamers"), etc.
And while one finds the funeral-crash amusing, one can also realize (quite non-hypocritically) that one would not do the same thing that Serenity Now did, because one doesn't feel that one needs to be a huge asshole in order to avoid being labelled a pushover.
Posted Apr 18, 2006 2:36:26 AM | link
Endie said:
>kathygnome said:
>People like this guild are why PVP tends to be very unpopular in MMPORPGs.
That was the received wisdom between Trammel and 15 months ago. Take a look at the balance between pvp ruleset servers (substantial majority) and non-pvp servers on WoW and it turns out that we were all wrong.
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We’re comparing apples and oranges here; UO was a far different game with a far different community culture.
That said: You have to make the distinction between consensual and non-consensual PvP. When anyone could be ganked (and generally was) simply by stepping outside the city guard boundary, UO’s player base grew stagnant and then started to churn out in a mere 12 months from launch. After that game system began to be altered starting in March of 1999 to make the ganking harder, along with some procedural and policy changes, the player base grew by over 50% in 9 months. With the introduction of the split worlds to clearly delineate consensual from non-consensual, the player base grew another 50% in a few months.
So, in effect, UO’s player base, stuck below 120,000 and slowly declining, doubled in 12-15 months to about 235,000, in no small part by making the boundaries between consensual and non-consensual PvP clear and meaningful. Players could make a choice, and they did, much to the good of EA’s coffers.
What Blizzard has done with WoW is the same concept, on a broader scale. In a sense, they’ve taken Mythic’s Realm vs. Realm concept for DAoC and moved it to the next level. I don’t see this as anything particularly new, just a quite well-done rendition of an already-established concept: Players will indulge in PvP under some circumstances, especially if they get to make the choice of when to indulge.
As for “all PvPers are griefers”: I don’t think anyone said that. It is well-known to anyone who has ever had to run a customer service group for an MMO, however, that there is a small subset of the PvP aficionados that PvPs simply to grief. Some people just have a need to be a complete and total asshole, especially when there are no real-world penalties. They sit at their monitors, pulling the wings off flies and giggling hysterically, while planning and executing their next griefing session. Those are the people that give PvP a bad public image, because they A) cause a significant portion of CS calls and B) cause other players to leave your game.
It doesn’t take many to do it, either. One griefer can easily drive out 5 to 10 other players in one two-hour session. Even if he just drives out on per session or two, it adds up fast. For a commercial game, that is a disaster.
Posted Apr 18, 2006 3:33:04 AM | link
Jessica said:
We’re comparing apples and oranges here; UO was a far different game with a far different community culture.
We are comparing the differing implementations of PvP. Both are MMOs with some degree of PvP. One may be an apple and the other an orange, but both are fruits.
In any case, that was a non-sequitor, and I'm not entirely sure that you were really talking about anything in my post. As far as comparisons go, I stick by what I said: that it is meaningful to say that the later of the two disproved generalisations about PvP that people had built up following the Trammel incident.
As for “all PvPers are griefers”: I don’t think anyone said that.
I agree. Not sure about the use of quote marks. I certainly didn't. Again, was thus a reference to another post?
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As regards Aaron and duckilama, this is just a description about the ability to empathise. I can't help agree with Aaron, to a large extent. Whatever my doubts about the bona fides of the original story (did someone really die?) the fact is that, as Aaron's (pretty representative, having followed this one for a wek or so) quotes showed, SN acted on the basis that it was, and that they thought people mourning for a friend that they never met in person was sad, geeky dorky or something similar.
Maturity comes with being able to say "that's kinda lame, but hey, they might think bits of my life that matter to me are lame, so I'll not be a complete d!ck". Nobody, I think, is accusing SN of maturity. Saying that their behaviour was "nuanced" is a laugh, though. Nice one, Nate. I actually fell for it for a bit. You should have rolled with that one a bit and said that you valorise them for their attitude towards received behavioural norms, and that you view criticisms of them on "moral" grounds as based on problematic binary oppositions. And remember to finish with some sort of terribly clever question that is also a link...
Posted Apr 18, 2006 4:43:36 AM | link
There was nothing wrong with the funeral organizers attempting to organize this event in memory of their guild-mate. Even on a PVP server, it was a perfectly reasonable, even laudable, response to the loss of a friend.
Indeed, it was. They should have posted guards; people who weren't close enough to the deceased to care about attending, but close enough to the guild to care about defending it.
Try holding a public funeral in Iraq right now. The first thing that will happen is, if you're not prevented from entering, or bundled out upon success, is there will be a line of military personnel guarding the site from incursions.
The point is that the funeral organizers were either stupid, naive, or arrogant, as an above poster said, and that cost them. This isn't to say what Serenity Now did was sanctionable -- people blowing cars up isn't sanctionable, by us -- but it's utter foolishness to expect that they won't just because you're being noble.
Posted Apr 18, 2006 4:49:07 AM | link
Endie>
Saying that their behaviour was "nuanced" is a laugh, though. Nice one, Nate. I actually fell for it for a bit. You should have rolled with that one a bit and said that you valorise them for their attitude towards received behavioural norms, and that you view criticisms of them on "moral" grounds as based on problematic binary oppositions. And remember to finish with some sort of terribly clever question that is also a link...
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heh, Endie - you said it so well... Actually, however, I wasn't suggesting SN's behavior was 'nuanced'. Quite the contrary.
Posted Apr 18, 2006 7:00:31 AM | link