SoWplz said: ... But the people that train you, kill steal just to run by your group, to the name you have been hunting for the past 3 hours. These people have a bad rep from you, but they always seems to be surrounded by other like minded players. Anyone run into similar situations?
Yes, for several years on EQ1 TLP servers. Agnarr & Phinny at least.
The issue is, as you've pointed out, these guilds/groups exist in tremendous numbers, and they don't need to "play nice" or have a good reputation. There are 150+ of them at least, willing to do exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons, and nothing will stop them.
The best part? They're not breaking the TOS/EULA. So there's nothing the company providing the service can do. Nor do they want to, because that guild represents 2250 to 4500 USD in revenue per month.
On Phinigel, 3 of the top 5 guilds were as you described. They would simply train everyone in the zone, and then farm it for days at a time, if they were inclined. If you didn't want to give up a camp, they would bring in as many monks as required to train that camp until you leave, then they farm that single camp until they get what they want.
In a large part, on EQ1 TLP this behavior is driven by RMT/Money Laundering activities from Krono being tradeable. But the behavior exists in other games without these features, so it's not exclusive.
It's also worth noting that Pantheon, as demonstrated, will permit, facilitate, and enable this exact same socially toxic behavior, if the monks training groups videos are any indication. Yes, I'm aware they're meant to be satirical or humerous. Unfortunately, that's not how these things are interpreted by everyone. Fixing FD would stop it, but there's no public indication this is a design goal, currently.
tl;dr it's not 1999 any more. People aren't impressed by the existence of EQ1 any more. First/Third person 3D online gaming with 5, 12, 24, or 100 other players, concurrently, isn't "magical". It's just expected.
Yes, I can tell you right now, in EQ I was in a top rated guild, with max everything, i had full AA's and max level on a few characters, my favorite at that time was my rogue. I was never intentionally a jerk, in fact, i was one of those guys that would retrieve nearly impossible to get corpses lol. I have had run ins with those people, and a few of them were fellow guildies, obviously they got removed, because I hate it when people tarnish my guilds name, it was me or them, and i was too good for my guild to remove me, eventually I became an officer and started clearing out the trash myself, EQ was busy enough then we could keep our ranks full with people that didn't want to make us look like dirt bags, and all of that nonsense. The problem is when dealing with those situations, who do you believe? The random guy claiming your guy is a dirt bag, or the guildie claiming he was just defending his territory. I saw it happen both ways, and it's tough to make those decisions. Now, I hope VR makes this game impossible to be a dirtbag, or very complicated, but there is only few ways of doing that.
So, hopefully you run into more people like me, and less dirtbags here lol.
The OP brings up an interesting point, especially in a game like Pantheon and what we are all hoping it becomes. I think the answer to the question, "Does repuation really matter?" isn't really yes, or no. It's more of a ...Kinda.
A big part of the problem is that behavior is largely subjective. What constitutes a jerk move to me, may not to you. What you find disruptive and rude, I may find downright mundane. Even those things that many of us might feel are black and white, just by reading these forums it's fairly easy to tell that many of us feel very different about varied topics.
You might say that Ninja Looting isn't subjective. It's a black and white thing - and yet, read the topics on Looting (the dozens of them here) and you'll see many of us have different ideas of what is fair looting practices, and what isn't. And what's more, most people subconsciously try to give others the benefit of the doubt - especially when that other person could be of potential use to you. Rogue X who was accused of Ninja Looting the FBSS might be shunned by you one day, but when you need a corpse drag and he's offered to help? Well, suddenly many of us will think, "maybe I just don't know the whole story".
And maybe you don't.
Like the OP, I tend to run in family type guilds as well. The environment in these guilds have been very rated PG. In contrast to my guild chat, almost any other conversation I had with other people would've been unwelcome among my guildmates. Compared to them, damn near everyone I met was a jerk, and many of my friends outside of the guild would be kept at arms length from my guildmates for exactly that reason. Did I think they were jerks? Nah, just uncouth and a little too overzealous in how they played. Would you have thought they were jerks? Maybe.
I think what it comes down to isn't that "reputation matters", in the context of the entire server. What it comes down to is, reputation matters in the context of your own social group within the server. Someone has to do a whole hell of a lot of ninja looting, intentional training, and general douche-baggery to be shunned from the entire server. A LOT. But that's always been the case, even in EQ. Those bad seeds always still found groups, they always still found raids and guilds and people who would take them in in spite of their transgressions. They always have and they always will.
But you and I will still remember their name, and so will our friends and the people we group with. We will know who to stay away from and who to watch out for, and that's always how it was in games like EQ, and will be in Pantheon. So, yes, reputation DOES matter - it just has never had the far reaching effects we've all hoped it would. And frankly, I'm glad. As I said at the beginning, much of it is too subjective, and the punishment of being shunned by the whole server for being what you and I consider a jerk MIGHT just be a little ...much. Because you and I just might be wrong.
For now on... no one know. Some games where player had power over other failed due to that, but they were on full pvp and zone possession edges, where people had direct interest to engage against players.
Kronos-like currencies are adding to break the line between what you get in the game, and what you get in real life. By making people save money when using kronos (while other people are simply paying more and the game distributor get more money per sub), you just make them overcompetitive jerks because they don't want to spend any real money.
SoWplz said: Not to derail my own post, but Iksar brings up the point I was trying to get at. I have heard at least 100 times people say " this has been a problem in game, how will Pantheon look at this problem" and most say you will get a bad rep. That does not mean anything. Haha. A gamr made to where players make the rules and regulate themselves might have problems. Yes, the EQ TLP servers are the best example of how a group of players can really ruin a game for the rest of the players.
But reputation doesn't matter simply because of community policing; the game systems are a huge factor. For leveling, reputation definitely mattered way more when I was playing FFXI than when I was playing WoW. That wasn't because community policing was better in FFXI than WoW. It was because of how leveling was designed in FFXI (group based, skill and game knowledge made a difference, camp competition) vs how it was designed in WoW (solo themepark).
I do think it is definitely more difficult to combat this at max level. In my experience, those with bad reputations do not seem to have any issue once they get close to max level because they usually can find other like-minded people that will not only allow their "bad" behavior but enable and contribute to that behavior. However, there are definitely ways to discourage "bad" behaviors at endgame just as there are while leveling. Discovering and realizing these methods are definitely easier said than done. I also imagine some bad behavior is probably good as well since it can work to empower opposing good behaviors and communities.
vjek said:Yes, for several years on EQ1 TLP servers. Agnarr & Phinny at least.
On Phinigel, 3 of the top 5 guilds were as you described. They would simply train everyone in the zone, and then farm it for days at a time, if they were inclined. If you didn't want to give up a camp, they would bring in as many monks as required to train that camp until you leave, then they farm that single camp until they get what they want.
To give you a perspective from the "otherside".
It's funny you bring this up. Because I was actually an officer in what we will say was the #2 guild on the server. AMD we regularly would deal with people trying to push us out of camps because they "didnt like us".
I used to constantly deal with gripes about members that just turned out to be disagreements on how the game was played. When provided with proof of what happened. We would absolutely punish and if warranted remove people from the guild for it. We did not condone training nor came stealing. And to give you an example...
I used to (as a necromancer) regularly solo the entire AM/Lord camp via charming undead frogs. Groups would constantly come in and try to push me out claiming I was not killing fast enough, or just purely try to dps race me, dispelling my charm as so on. All because of my guild tag.
The playstyle in 2017 is different than the playstyle in 2005. There is no GM presence to handle these disputes. Everquest had a play nice policy that GMs would enforce. Before I knew what camps were, and how that worked, I vividly remember being told to share the mobs that I was camping with another player.
It depends on how much the company and customer service will be involved in the game. You will always have people that find other like minded people to play with. And that includes, for lack of a better word , people that are scumbags.
I dont think you will see this issue as much with this game as you would with eq1. Eq1 was easily hacked which is why it was so easy to participate in RMT. That shouldn't be the case with pantheon.
I think many of you are misremembering the old days - or viewing it from the angle of today's lens. Frankly, the only difference I see is that MMO's are more mainstream. There are more people, and therefore, more chances to see jerk-y behavior. That doesn't make reputation matter any less or more, it just makes rudeness more prevalent. It makes it HARDER for reputation to matter, but that doesn't necessarily mean people (or gamers) have changed.
On other addition is how EQ is known from scratch by any player taking part in progression server. Just like P99 where future nerfed items were farmed as soon and as long as possible because players knew they would have an edge by doing so, since most items would not be affected by the nerf but rather only the new drops would be changed.
It's hard to have any point of comparison, because even old and social games were moved into easy to maintain fast food games, and relaunch/progression (P99 or official servers) are roamed by players that already done everything on non progression servers or on another and came for a fresh reboot to start all over.
Tralyan said:I think many of you are misremembering the old days - or viewing it from the angle of today's lens. Frankly, the only difference I see is that MMO's are more mainstream. There are more people, and therefore, more chances to see jerk-y behavior. That doesn't make reputation matter any less or more, it just makes rudeness more prevalent. It makes it HARDER for reputation to matter, but that doesn't necessarily mean people (or gamers) have changed.
I'm having trouble figuring out how the only difference you see between early MMOs like FFXI, EQ, and even Vanilla WoW and current MMOs is their popularity. You basically could not progress in FFXI without 5 other players. Just this one aspect of progression is incredibly different from current MMOs. And it DID put more emphasis on reputation. I was often setting up parties where I would ignore some people looking to group due to past personal experiences or general server reputation. That's not to say people with "bad" reputations weren't able to progress, but it discouraged "bad" behavior and encouraged good behaviors like giving notice before you had to leave and having sufficient game knowledge.
Knot said:Tralyan said:I think many of you are misremembering the old days - or viewing it from the angle of today's lens. Frankly, the only difference I see is that MMO's are more mainstream. There are more people, and therefore, more chances to see jerk-y behavior. That doesn't make reputation matter any less or more, it just makes rudeness more prevalent. It makes it HARDER for reputation to matter, but that doesn't necessarily mean people (or gamers) have changed.
I'm having trouble figuring out how the only difference you see between early MMOs like FFXI, EQ, and even Vanilla WoW and current MMOs is their popularity. You basically could not progress in FFXI without 5 other players. Just this one aspect of progression is incredibly different from current MMOs. And it DID put more emphasis on reputation. I was often setting up parties where I would ignore some people looking to group due to past personal experiences or general server reputation. That's not to say people with "bad" reputations weren't able to progress, but it discouraged "bad" behavior and encouraged good behaviors like giving notice before you had to leave and having sufficient game knowledge.
My point wasn't necessarily that MMO's are the same - but that people are the same. Gamers haven't changed, reputation doesn't matter more, or less than it did. There's simply MORE gamers now in different MMO settings than what we were used to in EQ and even FFXI (never played FF, however).
The idea that suddenly reputation means less is, I think, missing the point. There are just more opportunities for jerkish behavior to be seen now than there was in the days of Everquest, and more opportunities for "casual jerkiness", i.e. cross server dungeon finders. I think what we're seeing right now is more projection than an actual, observable, change of behavior within the gamer community.
This topic has been hashed out often on these forums, but for me, it's simple. Reputation only matters if you have to (*gasp* are forced to) rely on other players. If solo progression is a viable alternative to grouping, then reputation won't matter at all.
Here's a list of links that OneADSeven compiled in his stickied FAQ post related to the subject:
15) Will there be a reputation system in Pantheon?
Quote from Kilsin (06/04/2017) https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3210/character-reputation/view/page/3
"We will not have a rating, reputation or ranking system, we have made this very clear."
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3134/in-game-reputation-system
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/7198/any-ideas-for-an-internet-troll-tracker
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3520/i-hate-to-ask-but-can-we-expect-serious-player-moderation
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2369/group-finding-utility/view/page/1
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5954/creating-social-accountability
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3210/character-reputation
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/4031/mechanisms-that-create-social-accountability/view/post_id/64458
Tralyan said:Knot said:Tralyan said:I think many of you are misremembering the old days - or viewing it from the angle of today's lens. Frankly, the only difference I see is that MMO's are more mainstream. There are more people, and therefore, more chances to see jerk-y behavior. That doesn't make reputation matter any less or more, it just makes rudeness more prevalent. It makes it HARDER for reputation to matter, but that doesn't necessarily mean people (or gamers) have changed.
I'm having trouble figuring out how the only difference you see between early MMOs like FFXI, EQ, and even Vanilla WoW and current MMOs is their popularity. You basically could not progress in FFXI without 5 other players. Just this one aspect of progression is incredibly different from current MMOs. And it DID put more emphasis on reputation. I was often setting up parties where I would ignore some people looking to group due to past personal experiences or general server reputation. That's not to say people with "bad" reputations weren't able to progress, but it discouraged "bad" behavior and encouraged good behaviors like giving notice before you had to leave and having sufficient game knowledge.
My point wasn't necessarily that MMO's are the same - but that people are the same. Gamers haven't changed, reputation doesn't matter more, or less than it did. There's simply MORE gamers now in different MMO settings than what we were used to in EQ and even FFXI (never played FF, however).
The idea that suddenly reputation means less is, I think, missing the point. There are just more opportunities for jerkish behavior to be seen now than there was in the days of Everquest, and more opportunities for "casual jerkiness", i.e. cross server dungeon finders. I think what we're seeing right now is more projection than an actual, observable, change of behavior within the gamer community.
Sure... there were jerks, there are jerks, and there will always be jerks. And the more popular MMOs become, the more jerks (and non-jerks) will join. But the degree to which reputation matters absolutely can, and does, change based on how the various systems of an MMO are designed.
SoWplz said: Not to derail my own post, but Iksar brings up the point I was trying to get at. I have heard at least 100 times people say " this has been a problem in game, how will Pantheon look at this problem" and most say you will get a bad rep. That does not mean anything. Haha. A gamr made to where players make the rules and regulate themselves might have problems. Yes, the EQ TLP servers are the best example of how a group of players can really ruin a game for the rest of the players.
It's a solved problem, it's just that Visionary Realms won't be availing themselves of the solution. What do I mean by that?
Here's the solution for say.. 75% of the bad behavior demonstrated in EQ1 TLP & Pantheon. (Malicious FD Training)
- Change Feign Death so it's not possible to maliciously train another group or raid with it.
- Put reasonable leash lengths on mobs.
Now, I have no expectation Daybreak will ever change FD at this point. It's been too long.
But Visionary Realms could change it in Pantheon. There's a whole big bucketload of ideas in the Monk sub-forum about how that could be done.
Same goes for leash lengths. Do leash lengths need to be infinite? They're not, in EQ1, any more. Yet, it's a design goal, so far, with Pantheon, that they will be. Mobs will chase you forever, until the zone line, no matter how far. (apparently)
So, it's not that it can't be done, it's that Visionary Realms is choosing, eyes wide open, seeing how this ability/mechanic has been used in EQ1 for almost 20 years, NOT to change it.
As far as we know, at least.
I mean, they could change it tomorrow, hell, they might have changed it since the last stream. Who knows. But so far, their public design goal for Feign Death is: It can be used for malicious training. They have several vidoes humorously showing how it can be used that way.
Once that public design goal changes, progress can be made. Until then, this follows the same principle that has been true in MMO's since Meridian 59: "If players CAN do it, players WILL do it, 24x7 until removed."
It's why EQ1 TLP is the way it is. Players CAN maliciously train, so players DO mailiciously train. And have been for almost 20 years.
Idea: Don't put something socially toxic in the game when you KNOW it will be used that way. Pretty simple.
But you'll never get agreement that even sane leash lengths (huzzah for server load and A* pathing!) have merit, on these forums. Because people WANT the bad old days of Malicious FD Training, evidently.
