Darkfall Psychoanalytics

Posted on February 27, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 203 Comments

Protip: if you are amused by the long dark nightmare that is the Darkfall community’s soul, it’s probably because you were a whiny baby in UO. (By the way, Syncaine, playing UO in the Good Old Days wasn’t exactly rocket science.)

Remember: Darkfall – STRICTLY FOR THE HARDCORE. To remind you of this, we leave you with some out of context quotes from Darkfall’s Community Manager, who, given the launch and the general nature of Darkfall’s community, is probably drinking heavily RIGHT NOW.

<@Brannoc> I’d be happy to tell you to go fuck yourselves! But a lot of people say that’s bad PR
<@Brannoc> so…I’m trying not to

Mudkipslolwu: Brannoc can i get you to comment on the nude photos that have recently surfaced including both you and tasos?
<@Brannoc> my penis is bigger, Mudkipslolwu

In other Darkfall news (Broken Toys: All Darkfall, All the time! Well, until someone else releases an MMO.), Keen of Keen & Graev has a non-schadenfreudy launch day recap.

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  • Jeremy Preacher

    Hyu, your arguments baffle me. I played organized sports starting when I was 5 – I’m quite fond of them. However, I loathe FFA PVP, and in fact the only PVP in an MMO I’ve enjoyed was WoW’s battlegrounds – because it felt like a sporting match. So I’m not following you at all.

  • Delurm

    Hyu says:

    “Would I enjoy soccer more if I were playing against soccer players of a relatively equal skill level to myself? I highly doubt it. In fact, I think it’d get boring very quickly, if I didn’t also have matches against teams both much better and much worse than mine. It takes the full range to be interesting.”

    Except soccer (once you hit high school and above) is setup exactly like that – against teams of typically similar skill levels.

    Again Hyu says:

    “Again, ‘normal’ isn’t World of Warcraft. ‘Normal’ is more like basketball, or football, or soccer. And the thought processes and values systems that those ‘normal’ games engender is much closer to what Darkfall entails than what WoW entails.”

    Except soccer, football, and basketball are setup more like WoW’s BG system than FFA PvP.

    FFA PvP is more like this:

    http://www.up.ligi.ubc.ca/DelegationReport.pdf

    And I quote:

    ““We have lost much in this war. The greater part of the population lives in confinement; it is like being imprisoned. The worst thing a person can live through is to wake up every morning to see the suffering of their children and be powerless to even be able to get them simple things like water, let alone food. Due to the security situation, it is impossible to [cultivate the land]. Some people have died. Then there is our culture, which is deteriorating. For some children, ‘peace’ means having a gun with which to shoot the enemy! Their play mimics the violence. They draw scenes of conflict. They have inherited violence as a culture, the complete opposite of what we want. Then there is education, which is very low. We have poverty levels of 67 percent, compared to the national average of 35 percent. The camps are breeding grounds for violence….We are disappearing in various ways: the gun, education, HIV/AIDs, our children…our most cherished in society, are recruited by the government and the rebels and then must confront each other, they must kill each other. Then there is the phenomenon of ‘night commuters’…what is the future of the Acholi? And think of it, the LRA abducts children to fight the government that failed to protect them in the first place. We need some sanity, as we are fighting the hostages! The government fails to protect them, we as parents fail to protect them, the international community fails to protect them. No more discussion, please, this is an SOS.””

    Yeah – that sounds like everything I love about playing a game… it describes Darkfall perfectly.

  • Hawken

    Actually it does sound lke a great game. If I wanted happy land games all the time id buy a fucking wii.

  • Vetarnias

    @Hyu
    Yes, I would say part of the problem is Aventurine’s marketing strategy (even though it was mostly based on word of mouth).

    Consider Shadowbane: “Play to Crush”. Clear enough. You don’t like that premise, stay away. I’m just surprised that Wolfpack decided to knowingly shoot itself in the foot by advertising it openly.

    Darkfall? “Completely Free.” This, unlike “play to crush”, involves no particular play style in itself, though we can guess what will result from it just based on experience. As someone else posted here, the consequence of everybody being free isn’t so much freedom as anarchy (or, if power ever stabilizes between a few large alliances, some sort of nihilistic world that isn’t exactly better).

    A sandbox game like Darkfall would be great, if it weren’t for the fact that not everybody gets to start the race at the same point, not to mention the immaturity of so many of its players (that community is downright awful).

    Maybe that’s why you have so much “old-school UO nostalgia” out there — things were new, guilds were created in the game, and the whole thing didn’t yet look like some kind of free-for-all Picasso auction at Sotheby’s, where most of the guys with barely five bucks in their pocket just sat back watching the big boys tear each other apart.

  • Hyu

    “”Hyu, your arguments baffle me. I played organized sports starting when I was 5 – I’m quite fond of them. However, I loathe FFA PVP, and in fact the only PVP in an MMO I’ve enjoyed was WoW’s battlegrounds – because it felt like a sporting match. So I’m not following you at all.”"

    Well, I tossed in the phrase ‘generally speaking’ about 50 million times, so hopefully people wouldn’t think I’ve set out to explain every single person ever.

    That said, it’s the principle of comparative advantage; if you want that sort of format — very restrictive rules on conduct, two sides of equal numbers meeting on a specified battlefield under specified conditions — you’d simply go and play real life sports, since they offer a kinetic physicality (as well as the practical benefits of healthy exercise, meeting people in the real world, etc.) that the virtual world can’t.

    The only things that virtual worlds offer over real worlds is that it becomes feasible to have a much more open, extensible competition where those boundaries are broken. You can’t run anything like an open-world PvP match in the real world, in a way that’s feasible and fun. (The closest thing would be a college campus game of Assassin, which is awesomely fun.)

    The behavior that WoW battleground-style sport PvP produces is done better by the real world (sports), and DIKU-style advancement is done better by the real world (life). FFA PvP is the only thing that the real world can’t do better.

    Hence, why someone would play sports in RL but spurn WoW battlegrounds. They scratch the same itch, but one way scratches it far better (obligatory exception for the severely physically handicapped). Nothing in RL scratches the FFA-PvP itch like a game like AC1 Darktide or Darkfall does.

  • Hyu

    Vetarnias: Check out this list.

    http://darkfallonline.com/features/

    Sure, there’s a bit on there about freedom, but looking at that, the “harsh existence” factor seems to be stressed pretty hard.

    Either way, I think the argument that Adventurine is somehow tricking people into choosing Darkfall over My Little Pony Online, even if there were some grain of truth to it, is tangential to the debates here at best.

  • Hyu

    “”The behavior that WoW battleground-style sport PvP produces is done better by the real world (sports), and DIKU-style advancement is done better by the real world (life). FFA PvP is the only thing that the real world can’t do better.”"

    I think this part of what I wrote perfectly answers the poster above who mentioned Uganda.

    In the real world, Northern Uganda is an awful place to live. (Which is why I’ve devoted my real-world life to improving places like Uganda.) But as a virtual world, it’s an incredibly appealing concept, provided it all goes away when you click the little ‘x’ at the top-right.

    The fact that an FFA-PvP environment, if translated into the real world, appears so awful, is *precisely* why a computer game has a comparative advantage at simulating it in a fun and interesting manner, rather than producing an experience that’s less fun than the RL alternative (i.e. World-PvP and DIKU-PvE).

  • http://crymore.de EpicSquirt

    So much theorycraft.

  • Delurm

    @ Hyu

    “The fact that an FFA-PvP environment, if translated into the real world, appears so awful, is *precisely* why a computer game has a comparative advantage at simulating it in a fun and interesting manner, rather than producing an experience that’s less fun than the RL alternative (i.e. World-PvP and DIKU-PvE).”

    I would agree and be willing to discuss that concept – the point is don’t try to compare FFA PvP with competitive sports. There is a reason in the real world people invented police, laws, and rules…

    They are not to enforce a power structure – but a natural way that people tend to expect the world to work – i.e. fairness.

    It is not a coincidence that an entire book of the old testament is dedicated to social law.

    While I don’t doubt that some people find the concept appealing – you are really living in a different world if you think most people look forward to that type of experience.

    @Hawken:

    “Actually it does sound lke a great game. If I wanted happy land games all the time id buy a fucking wii.”

    And it’s amazing how the wii is denounced as ‘carebear’ because it’s popular.

    Be antisocial if you want – just stop acting surprised when the rest of the gaming community looks at you and points it out.

  • Vetarnias

    @Hyu
    Oh, I agree there, no mistake about it. Even if I knew nothing of the company (how much do we know anyway?) or the game itself, any brief encounter with its community is enough to realize that it isn’t Hello Kitty.

    My objection to Aventurine is probably more on a point of ideology than anything else. Complete freedom, for everyone, is simply not possible; it’s just hypocritical to pretend otherwise, which is what Aventurine is doing. (Insert some rambling remark about libertarians here.)

    @EpicSquirt
    Theorycraft is fun. It’s like Plato, just more pointless.

  • Hyu

    Great, with these most recent replies I have the choice of veering the conversation toward Plato, libertarianism, or the Old Testament. Good times!

    @Vetarnias
    Whether the freedom is ‘complete’ or not, it’s pretty high, in that there are a number of appealing roles available to you even if you didn’t come in with any friends or prior ‘hardcoreness’ to draw upon, roles where you can come out a ‘winner’. The fact that not everybody can build a giant castle doesn’t mean that if you’re not in some giant uberguild, you’re an unwashed peon.

    Also: Marketing for a videogame plays upon incomplete logic, film at 11.

    Hell, even then: Marketing plays upon incomplete logic, film at 11.

    @Delurm
    This is exactly my point — engaging in FFA World-PvP isn’t antisocial at all, it’s simply taking a prudent philosophy of ‘everything in its proper place, which shuns both Sport-PvP and Diku-PvE as being done better and more interestingly by analogous systems in the real world. The inherent message of engaging in Sport-PvP and Diku-PvE in the *virtual* world, is that one prefers those essential activities (sport and life) in a lesser, virtual world that ultimately has no meaning, as opposed to in the Real World where it actually means something. If anything, that’s the more sociopathic and disturbing position — a person who logs into WoW battlegrounds when they could be playing real sports, or who grinds faction instead of spending that time building a better real-life for themselves.

    When I play FFA PvP, I can explain that I’m doing so because there’s no analogous experience in RL that would be better. Sport-PvPers and Diku-PvEers can’t claim that.

  • Hyu

    Oh, and to follow up with Vetarnias, I’d say that the way Darkfall is presented to the consumer population hews far closer to the reality of the game than, say, every other major MMO.

  • Akjosch

    Anticorium :
    Wait. You just said that basketball, football, and soccer are FFA PvP games? Really?

    Yes, they are. Some blokes come together, they form two teams (sometimes balanced, sometimes not), and they have some fun playing the games.

    Now, sport leagues are a different kettle of fish, but that I wasn’t talking about. I was talking about the games itself. When five kids meet six other kids in the backyard and play some ball.

  • Anticorium

    And it’s amazing how the wii is denounced as ‘carebear’ because it’s popular.

    I think the Wii is denounced as carebear because it’s social. Its multiplayer games are cartoony and approachable. Most of them have handicapping features that allow you to tailor the difficulty level down for less-skilled players. Many also have chance elements that can change the standings at a moment’s notice. (Mario Party is probably the best example. Here, have a star! Why? Because, uh, your name has five letters! it’s amusing to hand out stars for no reason!)

    The results are interesting. You win or lose based on skill, but also based on handicapping and dumb luck. Winning isn’t that important because sometimes you win because you were better but other times you just got handed a star. Losing isn’t that painful because if you’re losing too much, you can lower the difficulty to give yourself a fighting chance, and anyway you would’ve won if it hadn’t been for that star. Eventually you just stop caring about winning or losing, and start having fun for the sake of having fun and being with your friends.

    And what could be more carebear than friends? There was even a Friend Bear, or something. Maybe it was Friendship Bear. Who cares? It’s fun either way.

  • Anticorium

    Yes, they are.

    Again, if you really think that sports are FFA PvP, then start tackling your own quarterback on every play in your next football game. Your teammates will quickly educate you in how very wrong you are.

  • Hyu

    “”Again, if you really think that sports are FFA PvP, then start tackling your own quarterback on every play in your next football game. Your teammates will quickly educate you in how very wrong you are.”"

    Now we’re getting silly. When it’s a game with friends, I’ve been known to do that, and it’s oftentimes good fun. Sometimes we tackle people watching on the sidelines, too (with appropriate gentleness, of course). Just because you’re playing sports doesn’t mean you have to be boring and always play them properly.

  • Hyu

    “”And what could be more carebear than friends? There was even a Friend Bear, or something. Maybe it was Friendship Bear. Who cares? It’s fun either way.”"

    Cute, but it’s quite the opposite in the gaming world — Game-friendships made on FFA PvP servers tend to be much stronger than their PvE counterparts.

  • Hyu

    Oh, and just to clarify — I think the closest thing to an FFA PvP MMO in the real world is gang warfare.

    Now, assuming gang warfare in RL were consequence-free for all involved, wouldn’t it be fun to give it a shot?

    Of course it would!

    Grand Theft Auto games are popular for a reason.

    But since the real world has all these pesky consequences, we have fun playing Gang Warfare in MMO form instead.

    Anything that detracts heavily from that premise — such as DAoC/WoW/WAR’s artificially enforced sides — and moves things away from gang warfare, is unwelcome.

  • Anticorium

    When it’s a game with friends, I’ve been known to do that, and it’s oftentimes good fun.

    Really.

    Every single play.

    And everybody laughs, and nobody tells you to stop screwing around and start playing the game.

    That’s even better than the one about the Diku psychopaths.

  • Hyu

    “Really.
    Every single play.
    And everybody laughs, and nobody tells you to stop screwing around and start playing the game.
    That’s even better than the one about the Diku psychopaths.”

    Uh, not every single play, but plenty of them? Though it’s not just that, we find new and creative ways to fuck around on a fairly regular basis.

    And it’s ‘sociopaths’, not ‘psychopaths’.

    Would you care to explain how playing a DIKU-PvE game *isn’t* maladaptive behavior?

  • JuJutsu

    “Oh, and just to clarify — I think the closest thing to an FFA PvP MMO in the real world is gang warfare.”

    QFT

    Well, we’re making progress. No more bunk about soccer and basketball.

  • Anticorium

    Would you care to explain how playing a DIKU-PvE game *isn’t* maladaptive behavior?

    Right after I get done explaining how the sky isn’t green, two plus two isn’t five, South Carolina isn’t a former Soviet republic, bowling balls aren’t cubes, and cats aren’t lizards.

  • Pickly

    Right after I get done explaining how the sky isn’t green, two plus two isn’t five, South Carolina isn’t a former Soviet republic, bowling balls aren’t cubes, and cats aren’t lizards.

    That’s pretty darn funny. (Though you may have wanted to switch to saying “2+2 isn’t 4, sky isn’t blue, etc., depending on what you actually wanted to say, just to avoid a “See, DIKU’s suck” nitpicking response.) It is kind of funny the sorts of tricks used in these sorts of internet arguments.

    A few other things I notice from this thread:

    1. In my experience, most “normal” people (however normal is defined), don’t spend lots of time on the internet arguing that some hobby or activity that is somewhat similar to a hobby or activity they like is mostly done by inferiors.

    2. Than again, it is easy to make arguments about “most people”, “normal people”, etc. from small sample sizes, or just from guessing, on the internet where there is no way to back it up.

    3. Entertainment nerds in general (not just computer game players even, also movie watchers, literature people, etc.) seem to get overly emotionally invested in what they are doing.

    4. People arguing on the internet will go to great lengths of nitpicking, arguing definitions, looking for logical flaws, etc., while missing the larger points of someones argument or point of view.

    5. No one actually wins an argument over which game (movie, author, etc.) is better. Everyone involved will have forgotten about this thread within a few days. the people who seem to agree with the Scott Jennings point of view will “win”, however, in the sense that they’ll likely stick around at the blog longer while people who disagree are more likely to leave.

    (As for myself, in a lot of ways I am not considered a normal person, but also do not play either WoW or darkfall.)

  • Akjosch

    Anticorium :
    Again, if you really think that sports are FFA PvP, then start tackling your own quarterback on every play in your next football game. Your teammates will quickly educate you in how very wrong you are.

    When I’m playing a game where tackling my own quarterback is within the rules of the game (however silly this an action might be) – that is, we’re still talking about playing the game as opposed to cheating – my teammates can go and fuck themselves if they don’t like me to do it. Or switch to the other team and try to beat my (now smaller, but what the hell) team.

    That’s what FFA PvP is all about, after all. Within what’s allowed in the game, fight because you have fun fighting.

  • Anticorium

    Though you may have wanted to switch to saying “2+2 isn’t 4, sky isn’t blue, etc., depending on what you actually wanted to say, just to avoid a “See, DIKU’s suck” nitpicking response.

    Always leave a piece of low-hanging nitpicky fruit for your opponent, a piece of free-floating snark totally disconnected from your actual argument. When they try to score a point with the nitpick, you’ll know that the rest of your argument was a genuine winner and they have no response to it.

    It’s also why I suspect that half the typos on the internet are made on purpose. I’m still on the fence about whether “irregardless” falls into this category, though.

    most “normal” people (however normal is defined), don’t spend lots of time on the internet arguing that some hobby or activity that is somewhat similar to a hobby or activity they like is mostly done by inferiors

    Oh god if only. See also: any mention of popular, independent, alternative, adult-alternative, country, or hip-hop music, anywhere, by anyone.

  • Pickly

    Oh god if only. See also: any mention of popular, independent, alternative, adult-alternative, country, or hip-hop music, anywhere, by anyone.

    Really, all I can say for sure about this particular argument is that there is lots of noise about people liking different types of entertainment. I haven’t directly seen a lot of people doing these sort of comparisons personally, though it may be that I just hang around different sorts of people, or that they just don’t do it when I’m around.

    On darkfall itself, I won’t be playing it, but hope it’s good and successful. (If nothing else, to provide a bit more variation.) As for whether this type of PvP can work or not, I see the devil being in the details, as the expression goes.

  • Pickly

    Always leave a piece of low-hanging nitpicky fruit for your opponent, a piece of free-floating snark totally disconnected from your actual argument. When they try to score a point with the nitpick, you’ll know that the rest of your argument was a genuine winner and they have no response to it.

    This sort of stuff is why i really hate a lot of internet arguments and wish people would ignore them, or that in some other way they would go away. When looking for information, sorting through the junk of a bunch of nitpicks, argument tactics, and such gets quite annoying quite quickly.

  • Raad

    Ignoring the general shitfest that this has become,(and my hand in making it, lols) anyone else see a resemblance on this comment section and the others that Scott linked? Oh and a 4 star award to Hyu, tell me though, If darkfall is so awesome…why are you here?

  • gyrus

    Akjosch :
    …
    That’s what FFA PvP is all about, after all. Within what’s allowed in the game, fight because you have fun fighting.

    It’s interesting though presented with a FFA PvP ruleset – how do players behave?
    http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/64581/page/2
    …. what these players will do is wait for you to get jumped by more than one mob, then loot the tombstones (mobs become tombstones instead of corpses) while you’re fighting for your life. This is old school EverQuest ninja-looting brought back tenfold. I can’t count the amount of times this happened to me.

    I’ve heard the problem becomes far less prevalent when you get out of the starting areas, but as it stands now, the system really, really irritates me. If you’re too much of a pansy to attack me (especially while I’m in the middle of fighting something else), then you do NOT deserve any of my loot.

    The thing about 99% of the so-called “Hardcore” PvP players is that they are frauds.
    I think the best thing about Darkfall is (if the Devs can keep it going?) it will expose that fact.

  • Hyu

    “”Ignoring the general shitfest that this has become,(and my hand in making it, lols) anyone else see a resemblance on this comment section and the others that Scott linked? Oh and a 4 star award to Hyu, tell me though, If darkfall is so awesome…why are you here?”"

    …Did I say definitively say Darkfall is awesome?

    As for why I’m here:

    Regardless of whether or not I end up enjoying Darkfall when I get the chance to play (I don’t think they’re taking new accounts at the moment, and either way, my net connection in China at the moment is absolutely AWFUL), I’ll still enjoy debating things on the internet plenty, as well.

    Hell, at least I could draw some reasonable (though indirect) logic for how my posting here makes a positive difference; I want Darkfall to be a success, therefore if someone not involved in this argument were to read my posts and be swayed to give it a shot (as opposed to not, if they just read the unrelenting negativity) and enjoy it, that’s good for Darkfall, good for me, and good for that person. This is all pretty notional, but then again… why is ‘anyone’ here? Why are the people above me ranting about a game they don’t even *want* to play?

    See previous statement about “debating on the internet is fun”.

  • Hyu

    gyrus :

    Akjosch :
    …
    That’s what FFA PvP is all about, after all. Within what’s allowed in the game, fight because you have fun fighting.

    It’s interesting though presented with a FFA PvP ruleset – how do players behave?
    http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/64581/page/2
    …. what these players will do is wait for you to get jumped by more than one mob, then loot the tombstones (mobs become tombstones instead of corpses) while you’re fighting for your life. This is old school EverQuest ninja-looting brought back tenfold. I can’t count the amount of times this happened to me.
    I’ve heard the problem becomes far less prevalent when you get out of the starting areas, but as it stands now, the system really, really irritates me. If you’re too much of a pansy to attack me (especially while I’m in the middle of fighting something else), then you do NOT deserve any of my loot.
    The thing about 99% of the so-called “Hardcore” PvP players is that they are frauds.
    I think the best thing about Darkfall is (if the Devs can keep it going?) it will expose that fact.

    See, as a Jew, I find this hilarious. Because, believe it or not, the same whiny mindset of the TTH guy is what’s fed a lot of anti-Semitism over the years. Why have Jews been disproportionately so successful over the years?

    Because we figured out one single, central lesson early on:

    Cunning trumps strength.

    That’s it.

    It’s that simple.

    Cunning trumps strength.

    If I want to fight someone, in PvP or (hopefully not, but hypothetically) in real life, the cunning comes from when I’m stabbing them in the back, not stabbing them in the front.

    The challenge comes in setting it up so I *get* that proverbial stab in the back, breaking through whatever obstacles, defenses, and strategies the guy has going on.

    Guys like TTH actually hurt the game for me, because it’s almost like they’re unwilling to play the game — rather than adapt, rather than say “Hey, if doing A naturally results in B, if leaving myself vulnerable to you results in a backstab when I’m weak, I should stop doing that”, they simply keep doing the same thing expecting a different result.

    Seriously.

    This is like whining that I started playing more aggressively in Chess during the times when you left your King undefended.

    The lesson there is well, DON’T LEAVE YOUR KING UNDEFENDED.

    The lesson in Darkfall terms is that if hanging around the starter cities leaves you excessively vulnerable after PvE battles, DON’T ENGAGE IN PVE AROUND THE STARTER CITIES. Or prey on those who do. Or get a trusted friend to watch your back. Or get a *stranger*, but establish a bond based on reciprocity (“I kill one, you watch my back while I do, you kill one, I watch your back while you do”), and make friends and connections that way.

    These things require actual thought and basic foresight, though. Something too many people addled by the DIKU-PvE mindset can’t handle.

  • Hyu

    For anyone who thinks the above post is too long-winded, here’s the short version:

    If you’re calling someone a ‘pansy’ because they’re attacking you in the way that is most advantageous to *them*, not most advantageous to *you* (within the hard-coded rules of the game, i.e. not speedhacking), YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT ENTIRELY.

  • Hyu

    JuJutsu :
    “Oh, and just to clarify — I think the closest thing to an FFA PvP MMO in the real world is gang warfare.”
    QFT
    Well, we’re making progress. No more bunk about soccer and basketball.

    So you don’t find the idea of gang warfare compelling and exciting, assuming real people aren’t actually getting hurt in the real world?

    Never watched a Godfather movie, or The Warriors, or Mad Max, and wondered ‘Hmm, wouldn’t it be cool if…’?

  • gyrus

    I see… you are unhinged.

  • Hyu

    “”I see… you are unhinged.”"

    …As is everyone who’s ever enjoyed Fallout or Grand Theft Auto, apparently?

    Or, hell, Urban Dead? Or Left 4 Dead?

    Your idle fantasies sound pretty damn boring.

  • Vetarnias

    I don’t see how being a Jew (or anything else, for that matter) contributes to anything. And I don’t think I particularly want to be enlightened.

  • Raad

    @Vetarnias
    Those cunning Jews! Always a step ahead!

  • Vetarnias

    @Raad
    That’s why they run everything. Banks. Movie studios. Synagogues.

  • Freakazoid

    Haha, look at you guys, just getting to know hyu.

    For a while there, I almost wished he would be unbanned from corpnews, just to see if he mellowed out. I should have known better than to believe someone on the internet would ever mellow out on posting words words words for the sake of being right on the internet.

    Just once, I’d like to see someone banned from an MMO forum years ago grow up to be a decent person :(

  • Freakazoid

    Now that I think about it, D-One seems pretty decent. In fact I’d go as far to say he’s a cool guy!

  • Belsameth

    I haven’t read all comments so sorry if it’s already mentioned.
    Anyway, I keep seeing people defend the sociopaths that generally play full PvP mmo’s, saying it’s honest competition and comparing it to real world sports like soccer. (Hyu for instance)
    What the lot of you seems to be forgetting, however, is that FFA MMO’s are without any form of moral checks in place and people feel safe to be assholes because they’re anonymous. This generally brings out the worse in people (just look on any forum ;) ) Darkfall caters exactly to these people by basically making it FFA without any form of restrain or check. They might as well call it Griefall because you *know* that’s what’s going to happen. While in real competition there’s referee’s and ones own moral or, lacking that, the fact that people know it’s you.

  • http://crymore.de EpicSquirt

    Just once, I’d like to see someone banned from an MMO forum years ago grow up to be a decent person

    ?

    Most public MMO forums and most forum moderators are full of shit, so being banned on one of them doesn’t mean anything.

  • Raad

    @Freakazoid
    Wait, these guys are regular or something to you? Tell me more, my newbie self is intrigued.

  • Raad

    @EpicSquirt
    So by that definition, this place is shit too and since the place where he was banned from was shit and the place where he is posting is shit, it does mean something.

  • Viz

    I wonder if Hyu was on his high school debate team. He seems to have adopted the common debate team strategy of talking as much as possible, a strategy that convinces nobody of anything but scores points in competitions because you get credited for unanswered arguments, no matter how absurd.

  • http://bdadv.blogspot.com Bonedead

    I don’t agree with people, that makes them wrong!

  • Hyu

    Uh, Viz, who do I need to convince, exactly? You? The ruleset of Darkfall is already appealing to anyone who’d be interested in such a game. The media, correctly, still tends to portray World of Warcraft as a maladaptive activity (which I believe the evidence bears out). Something like Darkfall doesn’t even make their radar.

    Oh, and way to not respond to any of my points. Could that be because you’ve got nothing substantive to say?

    “”Just once, I’d like to see someone banned from an MMO forum years ago grow up to be a decent person”"

    Let’s see — I’m 22, I’ve finished my master’s already from the top school in my field, I’m on my 3rd language (hence, writing to you from Beijing), and all of the above is in service of the broader goal of making the world a better place, as opposed to mere personal enrichment. I have a good circle of friends, a good relationship with my family, and generally fit all the criteria for being a ‘good’ person.

    I also happen to enjoy different MMO mechanics than you.

    I’m an indecent person? Oh really? As compared to you? I’ll take that fucking Pepsi challenge, thanks.

  • Hyu

    Belsameth :
    I haven’t read all comments so sorry if it’s already mentioned.
    Anyway, I keep seeing people defend the sociopaths that generally play full PvP mmo’s, saying it’s honest competition and comparing it to real world sports like soccer. (Hyu for instance)
    What the lot of you seems to be forgetting, however, is that FFA MMO’s are without any form of moral checks in place and people feel safe to be assholes because they’re anonymous. This generally brings out the worse in people (just look on any forum ) Darkfall caters exactly to these people by basically making it FFA without any form of restrain or check. They might as well call it Griefall because you *know* that’s what’s going to happen. While in real competition there’s referee’s and ones own moral or, lacking that, the fact that people know it’s you.

    Your perceptions of what constitute moral or immoral activity in a MMO are deeply flawed.

    Everyone who signs up for Darkfall is signing up for the game’s ruleset. There’s nothing immoral about playing within that ruleset, no moreso than when I capture your king in Chess in some especially effective way.

    Getting attached to your video game character and its items, such that you feel somehow morally pained if they’re damaged or destroyed? Now THAT’S sociopathic behavior.

  • Raad

    @Hyu
    You forgot to add the part about your awesome body, model-hot girlfriend and your close circle of illuminati-esque Jewish friends who control the world.

  • Hyu

    Vetarnias :
    @Raad
    That’s why they run everything. Banks. Movie studios. Synagogues.

    Not exactly. But 23% of all Nobel prize winners (at 0.25% of the world population) and 37% of all US Nobel prize winners (at 37% of the world population) isn’t too shabby.

    A big reason for Jewish success in such endeavors is the ‘question everything’ ethos of our culture, which leads to the smashing of widely-held yet incorrect assumptions. Also, our cultural emphasis on the attainment of knowledge, and knowledge as a form of power beyond physical strength.

    In other words, cunning trumps strength.

    Put in Darkfall terms, just because it’s a widely-held assumption that a fight consists of two people punching each other in the front, that doesn’t mean that assumption should hold. A more effective strategy is to wait for your opponent to be distracted o vulnerable, and then punch him in the back.

    But the person getting punched in the back isn’t happy about this — because he’d spent all his time getting really good at punching you in the front. He’d valued strength over cunning.

    Just like the WASPs who used to be mad about how overrepresented Jews were in successful institutions, the spots they earned even if they didn’t go to the “right” schools and the “right” clubs and do things the “right” way.

    The dominant society’s description of the “right” way to do things is often “wrong”, and merely constitutes a way of privileging themselves.

    The guy from Ten Ton Hammer wants to privilege himself by declaring the way of fighting he’s most accustomed to to be the “right” way of fighting.

    Most games put artificial restrictions in place — such as battlegrounds, where you know the enemy’s got a force fielded against you in equal numbers, and you know where they’re coming from — to allow strength to artificially trump cunning.

    Darkfall lets things simply work themselves out.

    Darkfall lets cunning trump strength.

    I like that.

    (And if the Jewish example bothers you, there are plenty of others. For example, there were these revolutionaries once who stubbornly refused to fire at the British in a straight line, in the manner the British were accustomed to fighting in. The British found this entirely unfair and unsportsmanlike. You might have heard of them…)

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