07.06
David Myers, who is a professor and a video game scholar, tried a little experiment involving the game City of Heroes. Apparently, in this game, the heroes and villains don’t actually fight each other. Instead, they all go to the PVP areas to talk and fight the NPCs. He decided that instead of following the social norm of having Batman and Joker walking around picking daises, he was going to kick some ass. I see no problem here, if I were to start to play the game, that’s what I would do. The other players didn’t really like this…
“A roleplayer in an online game, he aimed the pointer at his opponent, the virtual comic book villain “Syphris.” Myers, 55, flicked the buttons on his mouse and magically transported his opponent to the front of a cartoon robot execution squad. In an instant, the squad pulverized the player.
Syphris fired an instant message at Myers moments later.
“If you kill me one more time I will come and kill you for real and I am not kidding.”
The chilling text shook Myers two years ago. It served as a telling detail for his ongoing study of social customs in Internet gaming communities.” Via Nola.com
While I can agree that teleporting to an instant kill a area is pretty much a dick move, but still nothing that I would get worked up about unless the guy just followed me around and did it everytime I respawned, which it doesn’t sound like he actually did from the article.
In fact, from reading the article, it sounds like he did just what you would expect on a PVP server. He fought other players. It’s what I find on WOW when I’m in a PVP area. It’s what I would expect to find in any PVP area of an MMORPG.
“Myers sensed a research opening. He created “Twixt,” a scrappy, high-leaping hero decked out in different-colored spandex suits and rocket boots. He took his character to the virtual war zone and set out to simply battle villains.
Twixt proved difficult to beat. From a distance, he could transport villains anywhere he wished. He always took them to a cartoon robot firing line that instantly defeated whomever he zoomed before it.
During the first few sessions, other players gently informed Twixt that his method of play was unwelcome. But Twixt kept on vanquishing villains.
Mobs of villains then ambushed Twixt, hoping to defeat him so often that he would quit. Meanwhile, Twixt’s fellow heroes watched without joining the fray.”
The best part is how they make it sound like he is invincible. Either because the other players just sucked so much at PVP, or because he had reached Jenkins like levels of power in the game. Even if they all ganged up on him, he would kill them all.
| Computer Game Threat |
There's two key issues here that they conveniently fail to mention.
1)It sounds like this guy is on a dedicated RP server. I don't understand the attraction, but the RP is full of people who don't actually want play the game, just role play their characters. The RPers generally police their own on that server without too much trouble.
2) (and this is the one that matters) What he was doing was decidedly not PVP. By the hero entrance are police bots that auto-teleport villians back to their start position, which prevents them from going through the hero enternce. The hero side (or your team in the free for all zone) don't get points for the kill, and the only way to normally get to them would be to walk past a bunch of yellow and black caution tape. Every player knows about this, and there's no advantage for the opposing team to go back there. When I left, the current status was that yes, it's a dumb set up, but it was rare enough to handle by the in game GM's giving a warning then booting the player from PVP for a while.
1) He said that it was a PVP server and he was in the PVP areas, that's all I got to go by. And anyways, what kind of role player are you if you are a hero that just hangs out with the villains? If they wanted to just hangout and talk, they should have installed second life instead…
2) Like I said, dick move.
This is no PVP server in COH. There are PVP areas on every server. There is a training server that serves as PVP, since you can respec a character there as much as you want, but the arena is the only place anyone goes.
As an old COH friend of mine said "This article makes so little sense my head almost exploded"