That Game I Was Playing

Friday’s post got more of a response than I expected.  It was just something I wrote on a whim.

I am declaring this the stopping point for the poll.  I won’t delete the poll itself, but I am doing my count now.

The results as of this post are:

There were varied attempts at logic in answering this question.  One of my favorites was the claim that if my response from the company arrived in “many hours” it couldn’t have been EQII as that would have required several days.

Somebody else decided that, since I was currently only playing EVE and WoW, it had to be one of those games.  But I did not say the event happened recently.  In fact, it happened a while back.  Still, with that logic did their answer did end up in the “right action/wrong reason” quadrant of the decision matrix.

But most people took the bait and chose EVE Online.  It is, after all, that bad game where your ship can get blown up and you can get scammed by other players.

Which, as some people rightly suspected, was probably related to some point I was trying to make.

The correct answer, which came in second place, was World of Warcraft.  In fact, the event in question was something I mentioned in a post a few months back. (Minor congrats to Spinks for mentioning the right zone!)

The summary is that while doing the Defias Traitor escort quest in Westfall a group of high level horde players were standing along the route, just meters before the end point, and killing the traitor before the quest could be completed.   Once the traitor is killed, the quest cannot be completed and must be abandoned.

Annoyed by this, I submitted a ticket.  The response came back that the Defias Traitor is flagged PvP so the horde players can kill him all they want, thank you for playing WoW, please let me know if there is anything else with which they can assist.

In a way this amuses me.

People complain about the harsh reality of EVE, but I face player griefing a lot more frequently in WoW, especially in low level zones.  There are reasons for this, of course.

First, the way the Azeroth is laid out relative to the population, you spend a lot more time in close proximity to other players.  It is a rare location in WoW where you don’t have somebody else close by. (The exception being the Outlands, which are rather dead of late.  All the better for my harvesting activities though!)

While in EVE, out where I am generally based, I might only see one or two other players over a couple hours of time.  And even when in a trading hub, only a dozen or so might be visible, in their ships.  And even then, ships passing are like… well… ships passing.  You tend not to wave or make small talk unless you see somebody you know.

Second, my tolerance for being griefed, and even my definition of what constitutes being griefed, is wildly different in the two games.

WoW is a shiny, happy, amusement park and when a bunch of surly teens start wrecking the fun for other people, it gets on my nerves pretty quickly.  I expect Blizzard to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.  But this happy, amusement park-like feeling also seems to let some people’s sense of responsibility off the hook.  They can bounce off the walls, get in your face, and generally make things unpleasant and there isn’t much you can do about it without going to Blizzard.

EVE is a rather more harsh virtual reality, being a PvP based game.  So somebody coming into a mission I am running in a low sec system and blowing up my ship… or somebody just blowing me up on general principles in a low sec system… is just part of the game.  CCP isn’t there to shepherd your enjoyment or make sure nobody takes advantage of you.  Ignorance gets punished pretty harshly, so you ignore the tutorials for things like contracts at your peril.

Does that mean I am happy when I lose a ship, get a jet can flipped, or have somebody try to con me? (And I am told you aren’t anybody until you’ve been hit up for the Goonswarm initiation fee scam.)  No, I am not happy.  But I can accept that this is part of the game.  Doing something wrong just has a more tangible price in EVE.

So what is the point of all of this?

Well, really, there was none.  I just wanted to see how many people would vote for EVE.

But, since I have gotten this far, I feel compelled to get this all summed up in a handy package you can take home with you.  And what more could be more appropriate way to do that than another poll?

Call it “Choose your own moral to the story!”

Tell me how it turns out or add your own summary to the comments.