Well Duh!

Posted by Stropp on July 8, 2009

The original title of this post was going to be “Professor Discovers That People Will Ostracise You For Bad Behavior“, but the title was a little too long. A more game oriented headline might have been, “Griefers aren’t terribly popular.” But I feel that both are more succinctly covered by, “Well Duh!”

From the article:

As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers’ rules — disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular.

The method Myers used was too use his teleport power to teleport a villain player directly in front of the hero base guards who would then insta-kill the villain. Apparently this wasn’t just used on people he was fighting, he would grab an unsuspecting player in the zone and teleport them to their doom.

His character, Twixt, is also pretty powerful by all accounts. It appears that when other players have banded together against him, he cleans the floor with them. I’m assuming he uses the teleport feature to assist here too.

Now to be clear, this is a PvP zone, so this is technically fair play. However, there appears to be a tacit agreement between players of both factions that PvP is consensual. That doesn’t really mean much though. Devs and GMs don’t tend to honor those sort of arrangements when players don’t behave.

I guess if that were all it was, there’d really be nothing to complain about. All games (with PvP) have griefers and gankers, and even some games without PvP have those types of players.

However, it’s the use of the teleport feature that has players riled up. The CoX devs have stated that it is not intended behaviour to use the teleport in the manner Myers is using it, but have stopped short of calling it an exploit.

So far, I’m wondering what all the fuss is about.

It just seems to be another case of a high level player camping lower level players and ganking them by using an ability in a way not really intended by the devs. That sort of thing happens all the time. It standard bully boy behavior.

What I find most interesting about all this is that the bully — who in this case has managed to get some publicity – is painting himself as the victim. The article says:

But Myers likened his journey as Twixt to a “bad high school experience,” especially the verbal abuse and rumor-mongering.

The professor was disturbed that game rules encouraging competition and varied tactics hardly mattered to gaming community members who wanted to preserve a deeply-rooted culture.

He said his experience demonstrated that modern-day social groups making use of modern-day technology can revert to “medieval and crude” methods in trying to manipulate and control others.

“If you aren’t a member of the tribe, you get whacked with a stick,” he said. “I look at social groups with dismay.”

I’m wondering what he really expected. Anti-social behavior in real life is likely to get you ostracised. You can’t just walk down the street and abuse random passers by without other bystanders avoiding you (or the cops detaining you.) Going into a bar and giving the patrons a good ol’ glove slap is not going to get you far. On the contrary, you might find yourself in an early grave depending on the calibre of the bar.

It’s pretty well known that through-out history, members of tribal cultures who behaved badly by violating the social rules were ostracised or even expelled from the tribe.  Humans by nature, for better or worse, are social creatures and behave as all social creatures do. If one member starts behaving in a manner that disrupts the group, he’ll find himself on the outer. By joining the community of CoX, Myers became a member of that tribe. Why would he be surprised when the community reacted against his anti-social behaviour?

I guess even the school bully can have a “bad high school experience” when the rest of the students band together and refuse to put up with his crap.

As for the research the professor was doing. Well, it appears the story here is that this is just another one of those so-called studies designed to research the bleeding obvious. It’s a good way to get funded to play a game.

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