Breaking the Unwritten Rule

I was goofing off on Dromund Kaas last night, figuring I'd go do a daily or two, when I got in line to take out a 2+ toon in the Temple.

Another toon in front of me asked me and the player behind me to join up as a group, and I figured why not. It saves on waiting around for additional spawns, and you can burn down the boss more quickly.

But. (You know this was coming, right?)

Once the boss dropped, another toon who'd just run into the room ninja-ed it first.

Ahead of about 5 people/groups.

"Did he just do that?"

"What a dick!"

"Fucker!"

"Come back here, asshole!"

I shook my head. I bit back my "Well, that's someone embracing the Sith Code for you" rejoinder, because I shouldn't have been surprised at all.

***

I've not seen much ninja-ing of stuff since the height of Cataclysm, but it does still exist.

There was the one time I was on my Trooper and I joined an ops group to take down the World Boss on Tatooine. We were waiting for the last couple of stragglers to join us at the location when a lone Imperial ran up and summoned the World Boss, blocking us from taking credit for it.*

Then there was the 1/2 hour I'd spent grinding my way through mobs in the Field of the Dead on Age of Conan, sneaking around and attempting to reach a boss at the far end of a long flight of steps, when a high level toon rode up and dispatched the boss just as I was fighting off the last mob or two.

And I'd really rather not talk about the times I'd been ganked or ninja-ed while leveling Q back in the day, particularly in the Arathi Highlands. At 3 AM server time.**

***

What drives someone to take someone else's hard work and capitalize on it for their personal gain?

It's not like MMOs have a lock on this sort of bad behavior. If you work at a company of any real size, you know of at least a few people who attempt to sabotage or (at least) take credit for other people's work on a regular basis. And some corporations seem to actively encourage this sort of behavior, too, given how they handle annual performance reviews.***

Is it the nature of the MMO reward system that encourages Machiavellian behavior, or is it the other way around?

I suspect that a lot of this is absorbed by people while growing up, believing that this is how they ought to act to get ahead in life. From my own experience, I had a grandmother who used to say things like "If you've got someone who looks like they might run you over to get ahead, go and get them first! Get them before they get you!" And this in spite of the fact that she always considered herself a proper God-fearing woman.

However, a certain percentage of people get their amusement out of the pain of others. These are the people who give YouTube comments a bad name, or those who dox people they don't like (or espouse views they don't like). When confronted, you often get a defensive "hey, lighten up!" or a "it's just goofing around", or even the occasional "hey, they deserve it for [insert whatever pissed them off here]!"

Whatever the reason, there's a subset of MMO players that enjoy ninja-ing, and while they tend to gravitate toward certain games, no MMO has a monopoly on this behavior. This leads me to think that the Machiavellian tendencies were always there in people, but the online and anonymous nature of MMOs encourage ninjaing. The reward system doesn't shape behavior to the extent that some could argue, because by and large ninja behavior is the outlier, If the reward system were causing the behavior, I'd expect it to be condoned in blogger press as an acceptable method of playing the game. (It isn't.)

***

After the 2+ boss was ninjaed, our group switched world instances and found one empty of any sort of line. We dispatched the boss quickly, and that was that.

Well, kinda.

One of the group members dropped, but the other player and I teamed up to finish the other Dromund Kaas Heroics in short order. We chatted throughout the short adventure, and ended up friending each other. In a bizarre sort of way, were it not for that ninja, I'd have not made another acquaintance in SWTOR.

I'd just rather not have a ninja as the catalyst for that.





*He died almost instantly, but it was such a dick move that he should be grateful that his PvP flag wasn't set to "on."

**Which you'd THINK would be the safest time of day to be out in a PvP world. But nooo.....

***The worst types are those that grade on a strict bell curve, with only the highest rated people getting the raises. That means getting that highest rating, whether by backstabbing or working 90 hours a week (and I've seen both in action), makes it open season on everybody who is a good employee. Other people deliberately move to bad teams so that they can be the top banana of a bad group without having to put much effort into it. And still others will lie and cheat and steal in order to get ahead.

Hey, You Got a PROBLEM wit' Dat?

With all of the snow and colder weather than usual, you'd think that I'd be able to play MMOs a bit more. Well, that's what I thought, anyway, but I was wrong.

Seems that I've spent even more time than in the Fall being the family taxi, which boils down to schlepping kids to and from activities/friends' houses, etc.  And when the day is over, I swear that their clothes must breed in the laundry bin like some bizarre ooze or something.*

And naturally the SWTOR Rakghoul event is starting just as my workload is going up, too.

***

For the first time in a long time, I've begun hanging around an area to protect my faction.

As I'd mentioned in the last post, I've begun hanging around Hellfire Peninsula to protect the Alliance from Horde PvPers.  While I'm technically on a PvE server, the wave of PvP gankers has been on the rise the past few months.  I figured that since I'm not doing much, just waiting around between BGs, the least I could do was flip the PvP switch and protect some fellow Alliance members.

And that first week, I'm glad I did.

Somehow, somewhere, the CRZ for Hellfire Peninsula now includes Area 52.

You know, the large server where Neve and Q can be found.  And the Horde:Alliance ratio is something like 10:1.

So.  That means there's a swarm of A-52 Hordies all over Hellfire, basically raising some hell for the Alliance toons there.  In my informal scans of the area, the Horde outnumbers the Alliance between 2:1 and 3:1. While some Horde toons play nice, others, well, don't.  I've seen L90 toons gank L60 toons, Tarren Mill style, and I've seen Ganklethorn Vale behavior of an L90 toon trailing along at a distance from an L60 toon, just waiting to step in when an Alliance L60 toon swoops in for some PvP action.

I don't go for ganking the low level toons, but I do believe in fairness. And if I see you picking on my faction, I'm going to retaliate. Want to slaughter NPCs at Expedition Point? Fine, Reaver's Fall doesn't need that many questgivers. Trying to torment that L61 Mage working on quests around the Path of Glory? A few judicious sappings will convince you otherwise.  Ganking that L60 DK trying to take the Stadium with your L90 Warlock?  You might want to look behind you, someone just might be there.





*Whenever I venture into the laundry room, I keep expecting to hear Brann Bronzebeard yell "Incoming!!" like he does in the last boss of Halls of Stone.

Messing with my Head

Just to remind me that an MMO isn't all sweetness and light, I encountered an Imperial L50 on Tatooine the other day.  Or rather, he sought me out.

You know the type:  the player that likes to mess with the lowbies.  In a PvP environment, they'd be the person decimating Tarren Mill or invading the Crossroads.  In PvE, however, if you don't attack them they can't do that to you at all, so they park themselves atop your toon, wiggling around, trying to freak you out in the hope that they cause you to mess up so they can gank you.*

I remember quite well one day, years ago now, when Quintalan was just reaching L20, and he was finishing up the pre-Cata Silverpine Forest.  This was back when I was on a West Coast PvP server, and I was quite aware of the free-for-all that awaited me when I crossed into Hillsbrad.**  Perhaps I wasn't thinking straight; it was 6 AM that day and I probably was waiting on my coffee.   I was at the gates to Shadowfang Keep, poking around and admiring the moon over the keep, when all hell broke loose.

I saw a flash of yellow bars and then the skull of a much-much higher level toon as he descended upon my young Paladin, jumping and swinging and yelling some nonsense in Common.

"Oh god," I thought, "I'm going to die.  I'm about to get creamed."

I quickly bubbled and then used my Hearthstone to get out, all the while praying that I wasn't going to get ganked in the middle of nowhere.

Once I'd Hearthed back to Silvermoon, I realized that I'd been had.  He wasn't going to attack me at all; I wasn't flagged for PvP, and I was in a Horde controlled area.  I felt incredibly foolish that I'd fallen for such a juvenile tactic, yet at the same time I itched to get back at him.

Fast forwarding to the present, I knew just how to respond to such idiocy when the Empire player tried messing with me.

I was in the middle of a quest that bordered on a Heroic area, so I was keeping an eye on my positioning.  The last thing I needed was having several elites decide to pay me and my Wookie a visit.  I was examining the next mob when my screen was filled with an Imperial on a speeder, bouncing and wiggling atop my Gunslinger.

"Oh great, just what I need," I grumbled.

My toon yawned and made a rude gesture.

"Hmmph."  I don't know what the guy expected, but he certainly didn't expect that.  The Imperial player stopped all movement for several heartbeats, then flew away on his speeder.

I sent a message out in Gen Chat about the guy, telling any fellow lowbies in the area to ignore him and he'll go away.  Because you never know if you've got a true newbie around, after all.




*Or, failing that, they attempt to kill the quest givers.

**Q was actually my second toon; a Blood Elf Priest named Gdaan was my first.  I manged to actually get him to around the mid-L20s before I finally decided on Q as my main.  (The reason for the strangeness of the name was simple:  I thought I could put in a ' in the name, and discovered that wasn't the case.  Since I didn't have a backup name to use, G'Daan became Gdaan, and that was that.)