Any time I've been a jerk, Social Experiment!

[Zoei]

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009 ... or_be.html

For those who don't understand City of Heroes what he did was a horrible exploit of the game mechanic

[Ookalf]

Yeah, I heard about this, and frankly, this guy's an idiot.

[Dracos]

Twixt is my new hero. Clearly, it wasn't an abuse as the company did not ban him and, in fact, came to his aid. This kind of reminds me of house rules against 'spamming' in video games. The point of the game is to defeat your opponent, and if your strategy is legal then your opponents have no room to complain. You could say that the game is poorly designed if there is such an unbalanced legal strategy, but that is not the player's fault, and they would have to be foolish to not use it.

I might just buy his book, it sounds fascinating.

[Ookalf]

Hero? As I understand it, all this guy did was act like a total jerk, then act surprised when people were annoyed by this.

[Dracos]

How did he act like a total jerk? My point is that people shouldn't be surprised when someone uses a legitimate method to win, or when someone attacks people indiscriminately in a PVP area. Just because it's unbalanced and overpowered doesn't make the method illegitimate, and playing a game legitimately doesn't make someone a jerk. He's a 'hero' for doing a social experiment, which I find interesting, on a pet peeve of mine, which is people whining about others using the most effective method available to them to win in games. Admittedly, he should have seen the results coming, but the experiment is still interesting and his level of achievement was admirable.

[Ookalf]

Going around fragging people who didn't want to PvP is the act of a hero? Sounds to more to me like the act of a jackass.

He was going out of his way to piss everyone off, and expected people to like him. Like I said, he's an idiot.

[Dracos]

It's a PvP game. If you don't want to PvP, then why are they playing it? I've stayed away from games/servers like that because, unless you're retarded, it is understood that, in a PvP game, you will be attacked whether you want to be or not. In both Everquests, I played blue servers for this reason. If you play a PvP game without safe zones, you have to be ready to PvP at all times. Such is the nature of the beast.

So, yes. Fighting villains whenever possible is the act of a hero. If there are safe zones, that's where players who don't want to PvP should go. If there aren't, then they should be ready to PvP at all times. I find it incomprehensible that a game would exist with PvP areas where opposing sides would just sit around chatting.

[Ookalf]

Again, he knew this was annoying people. Everyone was asking him to stop. He wasn't, "fighting villains," he was harrassing people who'd done nothing to deserve it.

[Dracos]

If you relabel 'fighting people on the opposing side' as 'harassing people who'd done nothing to deserve it' then clearly that sound bad, but let's actually look at your statement. First, was he hunting down people to kill them repeatedly? If so, then that would be harassment, but it sounds like he was just attacking any opponents he saw, which is not harassment, but simply playing the game. As far as having 'done nothing to deserve it,' they're playing a PvP game. Merely by the fact they are there in a PvP area means they are literally asking to PvP. So, really, he was just playing a game with people as was intended by the designers. What a jerk!

[Ookalf]

You seem to be missing the part where people did not like what he was doing and asked him to stop, then he kept doing it anyway, for no reason other than, "to see what happens."

[Dracos]

Not at all. You don't ask people to stop fighting each other in a PvP game any more than you ask soldiers to stop shooting each other on a battlefield. That's why I find it so inconceivable that people would actually listen or expect others to listen. He continued doing it for multiple reasons; 1. The game was designed for that purpose, and he wanted to play the game as intended and; 2. After he realized that people were not playing the game as intended, his task became to see how they would react to someone playing it the way it was made to be played.

The bizarre thing here aren't his actions but the community where PvP is expected to occur only on a consensual basis despite it being an open PvP game. I'd love to see you go to any other PvP game and ask people not to kill you in PvP areas. That would be good for a laugh.

[Zoei]

Not at all. You don't ask people to stop fighting each other in a PvP game any more than you ask soldiers to stop shooting each other on a battlefield. That's why I find it so inconceivable that people would actually listen or expect others to listen. He continued doing it for multiple reasons; 1. The game was designed for that purpose, and he wanted to play the game as intended and; 2. After he realized that people were not playing the game as intended, his task became to see how they would react to someone playing it the way it was made to be played.

The bizarre thing here aren't his actions but the community where PvP is expected to occur only on a consensual basis despite it being an open PvP game. I'd love to see you go to any other PvP game and ask people not to kill you in PvP areas. That would be good for a laugh.

Here's the thing, he's a liar.

There werent' these elaborate peace talks people used PVP plenty. What he did was teleport people onto these mobs designed to keep players from campspawning by instantly killing whoever goes there.

The Reason why the PVP community of COH hated his actiosn was basically that the actions he did actively worked to make the game NOT FUN for bothsides as Villains were not having fun and THUS not showing up into the Zone.

Second and here's the fun thing the Devs actually DID get to fixing his exploit and he started a flame war about how stupid the game was.

The actual paper is basically "The Internet, Aspergers and me"

[Dracos]

Heh. Thank you for clearing that up. Then, I suppose he is a bit of a prick for whining after they fixed it. You win this round, villains!

[Zoei]

Heh. Thank you for clearing that up. Then, I suppose he is a bit of a prick for whining after they fixed it. You win this round, villains!

Kind of but you are still missing the point, basically think of it as if someone slashed the tires of another base ball team so they couldn't play and your team always won by forfeit. Basically he was ruining the game for heroes who wanted to actually play by making it so no one would go into teh zone.

[Dracos]

I understand fully and disagree that there's anything wrong with what he had done. Unless CoH GMs are alot different than the ones I have experience with, what he was doing was not considered an exploit as he was not stopped. As such, it was legitimate at the time he did it. In my eyes, the problem comes that, after they decide that shouldn't be possible, he whines about it. It was clearly unbalanced, and it's stupid to fault them for fixing it to make it more balanced.