Broken Toys

Prokofy creates an curious anomaly. Imagine a discussion is like a fire. It can be interesting, but if you’re not careful, it spreads out of control. You know those water bombers, those planes that fly over heavy forest fires, dumping water on them? Prokofy is like one of those water bombers. Only instead of dumping water, she dumps petrol. Every time she posts, the flames grow bigger and stronger, and the fire spreads even more out of control.

This thread is one of the worst cases of Prokofy Bombing I’ve ever seen.

After a lot of thought, I still can’t say that Prokofy is crazy, just.. misguided? Her texts seem to stem from the following faulty (and by faulty I mean “wrong”) assumptions:

A: That Richard Bartle only wants one kind of Virtual World to exist
B: That the desire to remove RMT from games is a matter of political idealism.

That really is it, from what I can make out.

She also seems to dislike summarizing, based on the concept that she’s already written so much that she shouldn’t have to write small encapsulations about the subject, but rather that people should read what she’s written.

This is bad mainly because the point of a summary is to trim any excess and condense an argument into the smallest, most concise manner possible, in order to avoid, amongst other things, confusion as to the nature of the argument and tangents irrelevant to the argument. Long essays tend to create a lot of confusion and tangents. I don’t think Prokofy is a nutjob, she’s just a very poor writer.

As was once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Finally..

“The way that I like to describe my conversational style is that I try to piss people off in amusing ways.” – Scott Jennings

I think it’s illustrated that Proken Toys would have a built-in audience of bloodthirsty, yet hilarious, hyenas.

Fascinating read. I’ve skipped pretty much all the Prokofy and other wall-of-text posts — there’s just not enough time in the day to read that sort of thing — but a number of the responses have been interesting.

Quick Note: repeated frothy wall-of-text posts (often several in immediate succession) in somebody’s blog comments are quite likely to be entirely ignored by people who read the blog because we’re interested in the blogger’s writing. If for some insane reason I wanted to read Prokofy’s rants, presumably I’d go find her blog or whatnot.

Full Disclosure: Brian is my real name, I am not a card-carrying member of the Secret Cabal of Communist/Socialist Game Design Bigwigs, and I sometimes waste time in online games and forums.

Man, fuck Second Life. Third-rate “game” full of furry perverts with delusions of grandeur, whose biggest contribution to online gaming will be when some catass sues them for ownership of their virtual property and wins and destroys the industry.

Prokofy: I can’t help but get the feeling that your assumption is that bloated walls of text with words and terminology consisting of excessive syllables is somehow an indication of intelligence. Anyone can regurgitate extravagant “ten-dollar words” (adjusted for inflation) in perpetuity, and have absolutely no context or substance behind them. It takes more intelligence to make succinct, logical points that are immediately understandable to anyone than it does to make bloated, convoluted diatribes which only make sense in a context the author understands.

If you could, please make your “Clif Notes” for us “ADD Children”, because if you are making any rational arguments with any substance, the message is getting lost in the static of your endless mudslinging and counter-productive cushion of irrelevance.

Moreover, if subscribe to the fallacy that *Belief* is *Fact* until disproven, I’m right.

Did it ever occur to some that globalization isn’t about free trade (Or capitalism), but rather conformity on a massive scale? I can’t help but think about this when I read this thread.

INCORRECT!!, and thank you for playing. This is exactly the attitude that leads to the kind of flaws mentioned above. An MMO is not a competition to become the most progressed, at least not primarily; it is a means to have fun. Most of the competition that does and should exist is between players who have already reached a level of progression that is acceptable to them personally; because the alternative is that progression is necessary to compete, and this implies that when your ‘opponent’ is wayyy far ahead of you then you cannot compete and you cannot have fun. Playing and doing the same thing over and over when it is not fun is the exact definition of a grind. [b]Mr Damion[/b]: do you want your games to be grinds?

You’ll just have to trust me on this one – I know whence I speak.

In gamer games, once the games go live, players obsess over the notion of fairness. Whether or not their class is competitive in PvP. Whether or not their class and race choices add value to groups and raids in PvE. Whether or not they can solo content fast enough. This is the primary motivator of player satisfaction, once you get players past the ‘is this game fun’ stage. Players want to feel like they bring value to their community.

Yes, fun is more important than fairness, but if the game is percieved as being unfair to some, it will cease to be considered fun by those who consider themselves aggrieved.

This phenomenon has nothing to do with grinding. The concept of basic fairness is just as important in games like Team Fortress 2, which has no grind, as it is in games like WoW. What RMT has to do with it is whether or not *players* consider it basically unfair. So far, players feel that RMT is, at its core, unfair. Most players are far more opposed to RMT than most developers I know of. These attitudes may well change, but that’s the lay of the land now.

I wonder also if instead of driving them out and building a wall it would’ve been better to give them a town. People who reside in that town can purchase Items of Uberness but can not be “rewarded” them. Others who reside elsewhere have a access to those as reward items. RMT flagging.

Thank you for allowing me to vet my noob armchair design ideas. (That’s a silly term, reserved for quarterbacks who make even Garriot look like a pauper).

Wow.. this is like one of those Gamepolitics threads about Jack Thompson where people show in the hundreds to show what kind of a radical idiot he is, and he just keeps coming back with the same old insults and stupid crap that makes exactly no sense and pissing everyone off in the meantime. I think Profoky has really taken a lesson about attention-whoring from Jack and probably knows what a troll-whore they’re being, but revel in all the attention they get. It’s kind of sad that people resort to this to feed their little egos, but unfortunately, such sad people do exist.

@Taemojitsu

I’m just naive. The internet is a very surreal place to be.

I think someone dun poked the beehive.

I read through the first 100 or so comments. This is some great stuff. Like taking a architect and having them try to design buildings in a 3D world that run smoothly. Very much out of their element.

To the rest of the virtual universe I can only say that Prok is a terrible representative of Second Life users, especially of SL users who are in businesses. Now, saying “the game belongs to capitalists and its their right to control what goes on there,” is a bit disengenuous. Medeival kings and queens were capitalists who set up the ‘game’ of life in their countries, yet I doubt anybody here would recognise their holy anointed right to control every aspect of the lives of their subjects.

Where Prok goes wrong is seeing leninist conspiracies everywhere, which is a natural consequence of her being a russian translator at the UN for many decades, she’s imbibed so much Soviet propaganda (which really should be regarded as a toxic substance) that she’s internalized an inner stalinist determined to rid the world of trotskyism/leninism. The woman is clearly mentally disabled due to job related stress. She does need help. (geeze the “I’m an Obama voter” did it for me, after she once claimed to me to be a libertarian)

However, that doesn’t make some of her points insane or non-relevant. We all dont suddenly surrender our natural rights when we log into a game or virtual world. We all have an inherent right to participatory consensus building in shaping whatever society we belong to, even if its online. Game gods are NOT legally all powerful over things we create and earn. The program is the law, and if the programming allows me to do something, then it should be legal for me to do it, or else they should program that capability out of the game. This is called ‘embedded law’.

Furthermore, saying a virtual world is private property of the capitalist who built it (assuming it is in fact a capitalist, the jury is out wrt Bartle given he is a british academic, they dont allow pro-capital folks into academia over there, and few schools allow them here in the US), is also legally falsifiable. If you can log into a virtual world on a free anonymous account, then that network is actually public, and the virtual world is a “public accomodation” under the law, like a restaurant or movie theater. Theres plenty of legal precedents stating people dont give up their rights when they enter a public accomodation even if privately owned.

You might also compare a virtual world to a ‘company town’. Thats fine, the US Supreme Court has also ruled on that topic as well: residents of company towns also do not surrender their rights in such a setting and have a right to organize and engage in participatory democratic institutions to legislate and organize their communities and the “company” owners of the town have no right to interfere in those institutions.

So when it comes down to it, the law really is on proks side in this, no matter how plumb crazy she sounds.

@IntLibber Brautigan

Those arguments only hold water if you first stipulate that an avatar in a VW has the same rights as a real person. They don’t. They’ve got right around… none. Other than the ones that the operators of the VW choose to give them.

When the “rights” of your avatar are restricted it in no way shape or form restricts YOUR rights under the law. Even if the owner of a VW locks up your avatar and prevents them from exercising as many constitutional rights as virtually possible then not a single one of your rights has been violated. You are still perfectly free. Free to not login to that VW again.

First!

TPRJones>If this were done in a new game when it first began, I bet the results would be quite different. Most players interested in RMT would start on one of those servers from the beginning.

You think so, huh?

RMT is an easy way of cheating. People who RMT come up with all manner of self-justifications, and some of them even believe them in their own way, but basically they know what they’re doing is wrong yet they still do it. The ones who genuinely don’t think it’s cheating may indeed play on RMT-enabled servers, but the majority won’t. They’ll play on regular servers and then go ahead and cheat anyway. They’ll come up with some justification, such as they like the people better or that their friends play on the non-RMT servers or that if they’d known when they’d started that it was going to be such a grind they’d have gone on the RMT server then they would have but they didn’t and it’s too late now. They’ll come up with all manner of reasons. At heart, though, they want to get in-world advantage and kudos by breaking the rules. That’s why most of them do it.

Oh, and in case anyone with a mental screw loose reads this and thinks what I’m saying applies to all virtual worlds, I’m talking only about those game worlds that don’t want RMT.

Richard
Guilty until proven innocent.

I really I really dislike RMT and what it does to a game but I will honestly say I have been tempted on WoW for one reason. My guild on a PvE server melted down, friends of mine who started WoW later than I were on a PvP server I joined them. Sadly that meant I had to leave the character I had been for the last 3yrs sitting on his old server because you can’t go from PvE to PvP as a transfer. SO that left him, the gold (5000 or so)the items and everything unused for the last 6 months or so. I log in every once in awhile just to see if he’s still where I left him and that’s about it.

As I said I was tempted to try and sell the gold on that character, to get it on to my new server, but I did not for the simple reason that I would be feeding the very thing I hate so much.Yes it sucks for me, but I won’t cheat at a game or break the rules that I agreed to when I logged in to the game the very first time. Instead I hold out hope that at some point Blizzard will allow a PvE to PvP transfer system.

As for Profky: I’m not even going to ask her to summarize but at least make an attempt to keep hyperbole and exaggeration to a minimum. It makes finding what you are trying to say that much more difficult. It’s like listening to someone babble complete nonsense for 5 hours hoping you hear them actually say something meaningful.

IntLibber Brautigan>The program is the law, and if the programming allows me to do something, then it should be legal for me to do it, or else they should program that capability out of the game. This is called ‘embedded law’.

The programming allows the developer to obliterate your character and turn all your gold to jelly beans. This is called being hoist by your own petard.

Richard

Where Prok goes wrong is seeing leninist conspiracies everywhere, which is a natural consequence of her being a russian translator at the UN for many decades, she’s imbibed so much Soviet propaganda (which really should be regarded as a toxic substance) that she’s internalized an inner stalinist determined to rid the world of trotskyism/leninism. The woman is clearly mentally disabled due to job related stress. She does need help. (geeze the “I’m an Obama voter” did it for me, after she once claimed to me to be a libertarian)

I’m afraid I have to deal with factually incorrect and *libelous* material here.

I am not a UN translator.

I am not required to describe my real life jobs to you.

I do work as a Russian translator as anyone can see by Googling me, but keep in mind that half of what people dredge up about me on the Internet isn’t *me* but somebody with the exact same, or a similar name.

I studied and worked in the Soviet Union for some years, but it’s merely a helpful experience to understand closed systems and totalitarian ideologies, that’s all : )

I do not see Leninist conspiracies everywhere.

When people pronounce others “mentally ill” on the Internet, they are merely engaged in a form of griefing and harassment. Real professionals don’t make diagnoses over the Internet. So when people talk like this, they are at best amateurs, but at worst people who think you can issue diagnoses as a form of warfare. I’ll refrain from discussing Intlibber’s personal life here.

I am an Obama voter. I never claimed to be a libertarian, which is an ideology I find rather distasteful (Intlibber *is* a formal real-life Libertarian and also a major proponent in Second Life of extropianism and anarcho-capitalism — he runs a continent called appropriately Ancapitstan.) I am a *liberal*. There’s a big difference between a liberal and a libertarian.

I agree with Richard that the off-shore RMT he’s talking about in the games he makes and loves where it is banned is cheating. It was cheating in the Sims Online to have bots run the pizza maker 24/7 and harvest simoleons mechanically out of the platform. That was widely perceived as wrong. I am certainly capable of grasping the moral dimensions of what he feels about this.

My point about it goes further, however. I say that if you posit these socialist paradises where you don’t want people to invent a better machine and figure out how to trick the game company’s engine, then…sell the currency. Remove the black market. Make the cash cash out. And — guess what! That’s what EA.com/Maxis is doing now with their re-engineered EA-Land. Of course, it’s going to have problems. Of course, there are those already making extra-game sales of simoleons. But at least now there is a place you can go to buy the currency without fraud or high cost.

What Richard doesn’t do, given his fury about the moral impropriety of RMT, is propose remedies that make sense. His remedy, as I said in my blog, is just to basically try shouting harder and shaming harder and making committees to say “Bad gold farmers!”. If he goes the route of real-life prosecution, there will be a certain lack of credibility for real-life authorities, who will have a hard time believing, quite possibly that they have to prosecute someone because…they were willing to work live making gold for very long hours to sell to those who don’t want to work long hours. See what I mean? If you can build a case against bots as fraud or software hacking or something, perhaps that might stick. In the SL context, the Lindens have refused to stop bots, and merely put out more land for them to eat up in the hopes of choking their owners on tier bills. The software company then becomes complicit in the ruination of the economy with land-glutting…

The other point I keep making about Richard’s rigid game universe is that he can get on his high moral horse about cheating and illegal RMT, but when it comes to griefing, he suddenly acquires situational ethics as capacious as, well, Eliot Spitzer. Suddenly, it’s ok to prosecute some stuff but do the stuff yourself. There’s no law.

Actually Richard didn’t write the Bartle tests so blaming him for the lack of depth in the questionnaire is pointless.

Additionally he fully acknowledges that the 4 types are only good for broad strokes and even then have severe limitations. Which is why he added an additional axis to the model which expands it to 8 archetypes including… Griefer.

And Innkeeper? That’s pretty clear even with the original 4 types, social with a bit of achiever thrown in for the economics.

Richard Bartle’s four player personalities are not ENOUGH. Anyone can see that![snip]
And that’s why I said “clueless git”. Because he has no way of explaining the bad behaver, the griefer, the hacker in his 4 types. It’s as if they don’t exist.

Context, Prokofy. Unless I’m mistaken, the Bartle personality types were made in the mid 90ies with primarily MUDs in mind. You could equally flame and insult Newton for his physic model which isn’t accounting for relativity.

Nothing, however, stops you from improving the model and the test. Unless you keep content with flaming and railing against the shortcomings of models thought up a decade ago.

If you played to compete in progression, the way Mr Damion was suggesting in his explanation of why RMT was ‘unfair’, you would not be able to ignore the grindy aspects of the game.

And your point is? Should doping in sports be legalized since it’s a matter of life just as illegal RMT is?

Quick points before I head back to work:

1.) Richard Bartle’s 4 players types game out during a time when the vast majority of online worlds were online role-playing games. Of course he wasn’t attempting to use them to describe the entire dyanmic of non-RPG online worlds. Getting angry because they no longer apply to online worlds to the same prolific extent as 15 or even 10 years ago is really just pointing out the obvious; we all know that the online scene has changed a lot in that period of time. Sure, even at the time his four player types didn’t universally cover the spectrum of behavior, but he wasn’t exactly building on years and years of inquiry into the study of online worlds. As ideas change, we take the things that are still applicable with us into the future, and the four players types still provide excellent insight into the development of online worlds from a historical perspective *shrug*

2.) RMT is going to happen to some extent in communities that don’t want it. In that sense, it’s like marijuana or prostitution; some communities see those things as evil, while others do not. The communities that marijuana or prostiution do so not because they think they can somehoweradicate it from their communities, but because they, as a community, have norms and standards that run contrary to the acceptance of those actions.

If a community’s leaders (in this case the online world’s designers/developers/publishers) have decided that certain actions are outlawed, the only people who have the right to ask those rules to be changed are the community members; those who break the rules do so knowing that there may be consequences.

In that sense, Prokofy’s stance is akin to me going to Saudi Arabia and demanding that homosexuals have the right to marry. If a community decides on a particular social norm, and the people of that community are largely in agreement, then no matter how much I feel I am in the right and they are in the wrong, it’s not my call. These issues need to be decided by the groups involved.

The good thing about living in a capitalist society is that if the inhabitants of online worlds really want company-sactioned RMT, then that is the way the industry will naturally go.

Damion, two points. Change Is Bad. Blizzard’s devs said this at a recent conference, WAR’s Mr Paul Barnett said it in a famous interview last year, maybe even Mr Bartle has had the intelligence to induct this principle too, I don’t know. If someone’s class is a bit underpowered, LET IT BE UNDERPOWERED!! Unless class balance substantially changed over the course of the leveling process, i.e. because you have terrible scaling, people accepted that their class would be weak in some areas to make up for being strong in others. You don’t need to change that.

All it does is leads to the incredible bickering that you get on the WoW forums these days. It doesn’t exactly destroy the community because most people don’t read the forums and just play the game, but it defnitely makes the community, and the focus the devs feel compelled to work, a lot worse than otherwise.

The only time (and this is point #2) you need to change classes is when the differences are gamebreaking. Either an exploit or, more frequently I suspect, because of bad planning and the whole competitive spirit thing that you think is so awesome: in order to progress, class viability in different paths must be relatively equal. Instead of worrying about fun, and doing the best they can within their class, players worry about Balance and Viability. All it does is lead to a lot of whining. It is much, much better to have a game where players DO NOT have to min/max to optimize 100% for effectiveness in a single role; instead, differences like that are ‘evened out’, it doesn’t matter so much if you don’t win, and you can just concentrate on having fun within your class.

tl;dr: “When players are not concerned with progression as competition, they do not worry so much about balance.” The attitudes you speak of are symptoms, not constraints. And yes, it has everything to do with grinding… I could explain again but I don’t see why you don’t see it already.

LET IT BE UNDERPOWERED!!

All that does (in any DIKU style game) is prevent anyone in the underpowered class from ever seeing any content that requires a group. People will min-max at some level. Whether internal to their class or in the makeup of their groups.

Additionally on a large scale a lack of class balance will quickly lead to completely identical group makeups (Holy Trinity gone wild) and the vast majority of the playerbase migrating to one of those classes. And at that point one has to question why you have the underpowered classes in the game to begin with.

“And your point is? Should doping in sports be legalized since it’s a matter of life just as illegal RMT is?”

What? :​P (I hate this problem) No, I am not and never was arguing that in games where RMT decreases the enjoyment of the average player, that RMT should be ‘legalized’.

/sigh

My point, for the 1000th time, is that good game designers will avoid the RMT problem by designing games where no one feels the need to use RMT; by focusing on the experience (‘the leveling game’) instead of where you end up (‘progression as competition’).

Most game designers do not, and will not actually do this, even the ones that dislike RMT, because they are simply too incompetent to understand the problem. But I can’t help that people are stupid, /shrug.

However, if or when someone does make a game like this (easy to do if you know how..), it will be very successful, because not only will it not have RMT, but it will avoid the problems that cause people to want to buy gold in the first place! Again, for the 2000th time: people buy gold, or powerleveling because they feell they cannot have fun if they do not. They way to fix this is to make the game fun without buying gold!!!

“Nope. If other people care about PvP then it has some meaning within the world. And if that’s the case then a massive chunk of players just said “PvP? I don’t like PvP and I don’t like that it can impact my gameplay. See Ya!””

Nope. PvP does not have meaning because it can change the world. It has meaning because other players care about its results. There is a huge difference; tho I suspect you don’t understand what the difference is.