Getting a lot of questions about the Twixt paper.
Well, actually, no.
Getting some questions, but mostly just reading what people WITH NO FRGN IDEA have to say.
Conclusions from that:
- the inertia of what we think we know and understand is a very powerful and scary thing
- deja vu
But, going back to the questions thing: Yes, I have a favorite Twixt insult.
It was the time that somebody posted that Twixt was this kid.
I wish Twixt were that kid. I love that kid.
I tried to use that kid as Twixt’s avatar on some forum somewhere some time, but I couldn’t for some reason. So disappointed.
July 7, 2009 at 12:32 pm
To preface this comment: My name is Ian Zeilstra, I am a programmer living and working in Shelby Township, Michigan, and I have been a CoH/V player for 39 months. I play mostly on Virtue; I never interacted with Twixt and rarely entered PVP zones at all, but I do have a basic understanding of how RV works, how droning works, etcetera.
I feel that what you did was wrong. I would like to unpack that statement, because I think it’s important to be precise: my instinctual, emotional reaction to what I understand you to have done was that it was something I would not do or wish to have done to me. Since I first heard about the Twixt paper, I’ve been carefully thinking through the situation and my reaction to it, and I’m trying to work out why you did what you did, and what the difference is between us such that I would not do it.
I don’t think it controversial to say that your actions angered a lot of people. It is also true that what you did is not against the rules of the game, because (with a few notable exceptions, on which we may disagree) what is possible within the game system is within the rules. Droning is an orthogonal strategy to standard PvP in that it is the only victory strategy that does not require the user to deal damage; this may make it a degenerate strategy (again, we may disagree).
One of the things I don’t understand is what you hoped would happen – what reaction you would have preferred to see. Did you want more people to adopt droning? This might have been more feasible after dual-builds, but before then it took a fairly particular build to drone with maximum effectiveness, and that build wasn’t particularly effective for PvE or non-zone PvP. When the choice was to adopt a strategy that required such contortions to use, or to choose by mutual agreement to not employ it, the choice of the community doesn’t seem as arbitrary or unfair to me.
Another question: once you knew that you were making people angry, why did you continue? Yes, droning is a legal strategy for RV zone control, but is that enough of a reason to keep doing it? For me, it would not be – it strikes me as an oversight in the rules, a possibility best ignored, especially in light of how much not doing so improves the play experience of those around me. What made you feel differently?
Lastly: from your actions here, and from your comments on this blog and elsewhere, it seems that you hold the position that social codes enforceable only by peer pressure are always evil and should always be resisted or ignored. Is this accurate, or a mischaracterization, and if the latter, when do you feel that social agreements are and are not appropriate?
Please take these questions not in a spirit of confrontation, because I do not have a personal grievance with you, but rather as the puzzled groping for answers from a person who simply does not understand where you are coming from, and who, in the same situation you found yourself in, would (and did) act very differently.
And I apologize if you have already covered this ground elsewhere; if you have, a link would be appreciated.
July 7, 2009 at 1:44 pm
1. “One of the things I don’t understand is what you hoped would happen”
I had no hopes really, only the expectation that others would, like I chose to do, compete in an attempt to kill vills/heroes, take pillboxes, and win the rv zone. I expected them to play the game.
Others definitely competed, but by very different means, for very different reasons, and for very different goals than I had expected.
2. Currently, I have no firm beliefs about the consequences of social groups codifying knowledge for group members. I only have my observations inside CoH: social group rules decrease exploration and innovation; they prioritize conformity to social group rules; they de-prioritize (ignore) game rules.
Games destroy social structures — and very much vice versa, it seems.
3. I addressed many of these same issues when I first revealed my paper to the CoH community — when there was (pretty much) exactly the same reaction we are observing now. On this blog, you can search for messages tagged with the “CoH/V” label — menu to the left. If you read those posts — along with all comments attached to them — you will find more pertinent info. I have deleted nothing.
July 7, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Hey! Read your article. Being a MMORPG player myself (EQ2) and having a minor in sociology, I was fascinated by your research; can’t say I was too suprised at your results. Thought you did a great job exploring the issues.
Don’t let the bastards get you down! They are just mad that in the end they were not “in the know” and their bad behavior was forced out into the public.
July 7, 2009 at 2:33 pm
“social group rules decrease exploration and innovation; they prioritize conformity to social group rules; they de-prioritize (ignore) game rules.
Games destroy social structures — and very much vice versa, it seems.”
I think now I see where I disagree. Where you consider droning an innovative tactic, I consider it a degenerate tactic – that is, adding droning as a tactic reduces rather than increases the space of valid tactics, because now every strategy and form of play that doesn’t specifically include droning or counter-droning becomes untenable.
There’s also your interpretation of the design intent for RV, which I don’t think was as clear-cut as you seem to. Certainly capturing the zone via pillbox control is one of the overarching goals in the zone, but there are several overlapping and sometimes conflicting reward structures at work in the zone. That the zone’s design was too murky to make a clear case for any one particular use may be a failure of the designers; that many people chose to manipulate the zone’s reward structure in a very different way than you did doesn’t necessarily make you right or them wrong.
(As an aside, I do have some longstanding issues with the design decisions made in the PvP zones. Including the alternate reward structures of badges, shivans, nukes, PvE enemies and missions, PvP merit earned by non-drone kills, and so on has left the definition of the “true use” of the PvP zones to the community, who have gone on to advance and argue about several mutually contradictory definitions to no one’s benefit.)
I guess my point is not so much that the social structure destroyed the game, as that the system provided several potential games, one variant of which was strongly selected over the others. Coming into that space, my inclination would be to follow the choices of those who came before me even if they were not codified into the ruleset. You chose differently, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, but can at least comprehend as a valid (if extreme minority, and arguably detrimental) interpretation of the rules as written.
Can you cite another example, besides droning, where the social structures in CoH discouraged innovation? I suppose the next obvious examples would be farming, market manipulation, and using powers inside Pocket D – all subjects of controversy, but not even close to the droning issue in terms of unanimous condemnation…
I’ve read the other CoH/V labeled posts. The reaction from my fellow players seems to range from dishearteningly abrasive to somewhat more coherently dismayed, the latter of which I have some sympathy with. The game you were playing seems to have been mutually exclusive with the game they wanted to play, and they wished you would stop introducing it as much as you wished they would stop denying it.
In setting game and community as mutually annihilatory, I wonder if a larger goal has not been lost. Certainly I doubt that anyone has come out happier. Somewhere in the interaction between designer, community, and innovator (to give your actions the most charitable label I can), a game stopped being fun. What upsets me about what you did was that, while what blame there is lies equally on all parties, you were the one who had the most freedom to change the situation – and instead you stuck to your guns until the situation became completely toxic, and consider yourself correct in doing so.
I still don’t know if that makes you right or wrong, but it does make me very uncomfortable. I don’t know if I’m able or willing to move beyond that.
July 7, 2009 at 2:37 pm
So the one thing I noticed that you didn’t address in your paper was the fact that droning actively disrupts the game’s system of rewarding player vs. player competition. If you drone somebody, you receive no reward for the kill, whether it be bounty or these days, something much more tangible in the form of actual loot drops. You are not only denying yourself this reward, you limit the ability of other players in your faction to fight your opponent and gain the reward as well, through opponent denial and opponent deterrence. As such, your socially taboo behavior was actively harmful to the game atmosphere by the standards of that community and as such, you should have expected a large negative response. If you had engaged in more benign unorthodox behavior, the negative response would have been much less severe, I would think.
July 7, 2009 at 3:04 pm
I’m actually a CoH player who PvPed both with and against Twixt (I am not any of the players named, and my verbal interactions with Twixt were quite limited). I’d like to clear up a few things that seem to be missing. Note that I am, in no way, discounting the seriousness of death threats, but maybe a little more understanding of what really took place will allow people to relate better to the frustration.
1) Twixt’s actions in PvP translated to an investment of time. By teleporting (the action described) villains into a row of firing squad computer-generated enemies, he would give the other character debt. This debt would impede the character’s ability to gain experience by cutting it in half for a certain period of time. Thus, anyone who suffered from what Twixt did would pay for it by having their progress cut in half the next time they got the opportunity to play. A full portion of debt could take upwards of 3 hours of nonstop play to be worked off.
Imagine you go play miniature golf. Directly in front of you is a group of 10 children who have no idea what they’re doing. You are unable to skip past them, and as is allowed, they refuse to let you pass. Due to this inconvenience, you only get to play 9 holes (or 4, if you’re only on a 9-hole course). Would you be frustrated? I sure would be. They didn’t break the rules, but they hurt the fun of my outing by specifically robbing me of the time that I had dedicated to accomplishing my goal. It’s not much different than traffic, bowling balls getting stuck in the lanes, people talking during a movie, or any other issue that would rob an individual of their free time. The individuals causing your frustration may not be breaking the rules, but they are affecting your enjoyment.
2) Twixt’s account of what took place in the PvP zones he visited just plain isn’t accurate.
People did chat because many of the players had played together prior to the release of City of Villains (CoH was released in May of 2004 while CoV in October of 2006). Most of us already knew each other. However, that didn’t result in a lack of fighting. Many times, Twixt would simply teleport people from battles already in place to his computer-generated death squads. He’s presenting the situation as if he was the only one using the zones correctly when, in actuality, he was just the only one manipulating loopholes to allow him to generally be mean to other players. That’s the biggest reason why he was despised.
3) Twixt commonly made fun of players he killed.
He did not simply say random hero-supporting things, he oftentimes bragged openly after using his computer-generated helpers to kill someone. Like any other competitive situation, bragging and talking trash will earn people talking back and becoming more upset. He worked to goad individuals into becoming angrier at what he did.
He mentions the forums as a place where people speculated about parts of his life, but he seems to have left out where he posted kill-logs from his time spent in PvP zones. He posted quite frequently on those boards, and he went out of his way to fuel the hate that developed for him. Professional athletes who do such a thing are widely derided by the media and fans. Twixt worked hard to generate hate, he was not simply an innocent victim.
4) Twixt died. A lot.
Twixt perfected his method of generating debt for other players by dying a whole lot along the way. Statements like, “But no one could stay alive long enough to defeat Twixt…” completely misrepresent what happened.
5) Twixt’s research plays a role by examining another realm of society, but his results are predictable.
It’s a shame that Twixt is the face of the CoH PvP and gaming community. He presents a very one-sided tale that some folks, such as the writer of this article, have apparently bought into entirely. A whole lot of good takes place in that community, but apparently, writing about that just wouldn’t sell a book.
July 7, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Note that I say in the paper that droning was the most *despised* Twixt behavior. It was, by far, not the most common.
Droning, however, is most particularly effective when you are one and they are many; although, admittedly, droning only really works against the really stupid opponents who come close enough to be droned — so big disadvantage when using droning as anything other than a last-ditch defensive strategy.
Also, if you just sit in base and drone, how can you win the zone? More importantly, how did Twixt win the zone so often if all Twixt did was sit in base and drone?
Kill vills, win zone.
From goals all strategies flow.
Note the placement of the pillboxes and how droning can protect alpha. Also, you do get that extra time to act after you drone someone — particularly mm’s. Enough time sometimes to go take that last pillbox somewhere.
From goals all strategies flow.
July 7, 2009 at 3:31 pm
It’s a Penguin Attack!
Hide ur pegin egs!
1. Kill vills, win zone.
2. I got the log. What u got? pengin talk, that wat u got.
3. Sometimes. Not during the early Twixt days, but definitely during the latter. Called u a Penguin Poobah mebbe.
4. Ok, Twixt died a lot. But he ROSE.
5. We are missing the theoretically significant part of all this, aren’t we? That is indeed unfortunate, but then whose fault is that? Twixt’s or the Poobah’s?
6. You only have five. I have SIX.
July 7, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I had a whole argument here, but it was both long and tiresome (as opposed to just tiresome), so I’ll just go with this: your conclusions are not even remotely supported by your “experiment”.
Ignoring all of the issues of scientific rigor and ethics (which have been addressed elsewhere), let’s hit a few points.
“social group rules decrease exploration and innovation”.
Your experiment only includes competitive play. Indeed, in your demand that others “play the game” (as defined by you; more later), you are ignoring the possible applications of a competitive space toward cooperative or semi-cooperative play. And even if we run with your argument that your way to play is the “right” way, you don’t consider that social rules may actually exist to encourage exploration and innovation by fixing gaps in the codified rules of the game — similar to “house rules” in board games, these rules exist to streamline or balance tiresome or unfair aspects of “hard-coded” game. Your entire conclusion stems from the assumption that the hard-coded rules are the “best” rules — when, in fact, this may not actually be true.
“they prioritize conformity to social group rules”
I have two issues with this statement. First, it’s a tautology: “Rules promote adherence to the rules”. Well, duh. A ruleset whose first rule is “Do not obey these rules” is not particularly useful, is it?
My second issue is — prioritizes over conformity over what? Within the context of your paper, you clearly mean over “winning the game”. Which hearkens back to by previous point, but also raises an interesting issue.
Prioritizing implies value — that is, Conformity is of greater value/more important that winning. The above statement (and, indeed, the entire paper, which constantly speaks in terms of value, priority, and importance) presumes that conformity and winning have value — but those are your personal appraisals, not a universal standard. In the objective sense, neither has particular value — actually, I would argue that in an MMO, social prestige actually has greater value than winning the game. After all, social status can extend beyond the confines of the game. However, winning has no value outside of the context of the game — except, of course, the good feelings that winning engenders in the winner. In a zero-sum game, though, the value of those feelings is offset by the negative feelings of the losers. Which, as the name implies, means that the net value of the game is zero. Social networking, on the other hand, is not a zero-sum proposition — and thus one could argue actually has more value than the game itself. So I have to ask — why is the competitive game necessarily the better one?
And to top it off, the most aggravating thing about your conclusions is that the two are not mutually exclusive. It is possible — indeed, it is actually easier — to win RV if the other side is not fighting you. So I have to ask — why would you attack non-combatants with an express disinterest in fighting? It would seem that this behavior would only invite retaliation — which is actually counter to your goal of winning the game. You could argue that you did it for the honor — except, of course, when you teleport the other player into a MOB, gaining nothing for yourself and incurring only inconvenience for your “opponent”.
Well, this is already too long. As previously stated, I find your “conclusions” to be completely unsupported by your data or, indeed, even common sense. Frankly, it’s the same tired excuses that griefers have used for years. Unfortunately, its tramped up in the guise of “science”, which is a disgrace to the names of both science and tramps.
July 7, 2009 at 4:39 pm
I dunno bout all that other stuff, but this — “it is actually easier — to win RV if the other side is not fighting you” — is actually a pretty good point.
Truer now than it used to be though.
During the Twixt heyday, it was common practice to farm the pillboxes and/or trade them back and forth, so, if you wanted to take the pillboxes for yourself and keep them on your side in order to win the zone, you pretty much had to fight the farmers/exploiters for them.
There were some strategies, though, that involved allowing the vills to do most of the work of taking the pillboxes and then steal those pillboxes from them at the last moment. This was almost always best and most safely accomplished, if the vills were killed first.
Collusion is the enemy of freedom.
July 7, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Do you have records of all the chatlogs from every session of play and every forum post? Your paper has a few anecdotes here and there, but it paints a woefully sparse picture. It would be interesting to read everyone’s reactions.
July 7, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I recently read your paper, “Play and Punishment: The Sad and Curious Case of Twixt,” as a result of the article Ramon Vargas wrote about your experiences with the CoH PvP community.
Were I faced with a player like Twixt, I would just opt to play in a different zone. Perhaps many or even most people adopted this strategy. There is no way to be sure. Your interventions and observations focus on, potentially, a very small group of people and are in no way generalizable. We do not even learn anything more about these people with whom you interacted through your work.
At times, you appear to work under the premise that players should behave like agents programmed to win according to one specific victory condition with only the constraints imposed by the game as guidance. While I think that is an unlikely hypothesis with which to start, I will accept you thought it would be worthwhile to test. Your methodology is downright terrible though. Much of your paper focuses on the details of specific social interactions which makes this premise look like a pretense.
Harassment is a well established human response to legal behaviors that violate societal norms. Social conformity is also a very well established dynamic of human interaction. It comes as no surprise to me that you could incite such behavior in some people by violating their social norms.
I fail to see what your paper contributes to any field of academic research. I saw you refer to this paper as journalism not research in a comment on your blog, but that runs contrary to the Vargas article and my initial interpretation of this paper. The Vargas article uses words like study and experiment repeatedly. This is where I primarily take exception with your paper. By producing a paper like this, which generates a commotion, but lacks any academic merit, you devalue actual peer-reviewed research, perhaps even your own research. I hope you will be more careful in the future with how you speak and write about your work.
July 7, 2009 at 11:12 pm
“Were I faced with a player like Twixt, I would just opt to play in a different zone.” My conclusion would be the same, actually. Your choice diminishes the systemic variability of play. Further, your choice is a (negative) *social* solution that ignores/deprioritizes game rules. The game suffers.
“Harassment is a well established human response to legal behaviors that violate societal norms.” Is something being conflated here? What is the difference between game and society? What is the difference between play and politics? I wish to retain a difference between these; I think that difference is very important. In the paper, I give my reasons why.
“that runs contrary to the Vargas article and my initial interpretation of this paper.” I suggest that the Vargas article and your interpretation — as well as any comments on slashdot or kotaku or massively — may not be the best summary of my position. I would suggest that what I write is the better summary of my position than what others write, including (just for instance) you.
July 7, 2009 at 11:17 pm
The paper has numerous “anecdotes,” which, I firmly believe, are a representative sample of a large amount of transcript data. I am uncertain what you mean by “few” and “sparse.”
Many things would be interesting. What would be most important, do you think?
July 7, 2009 at 11:24 pm
This shows a poor understanding of the most common context in which Twixt droned opponents. Droning is most effectively used in response to camping the hero/vill base. Under these conditions, one side will normally greatly outnumber the other. Droning thins the opponent force to the point where you can venture forth and actually get kills.
Another, similar context is when an opponent is buffed into an invulnerable state and droning is the only manner of affecting that opponent. The droning and subsequent delay of the opponent to return eats away at the period in which the invulnerability buffs are in effect and, again, increases the likelike hood of subsequent kills.
Your ignorance of strategies and contexts inside RV may lead you to false conclusions. I believe you may be labeling certain tactics (such as droning) unorthodox because you are not aware of the advantages or benefits those tactics can provide.
July 7, 2009 at 11:27 pm
“the game you were playing seems to have been mutually exclusive with the game they wanted to play” the difference is that I did not choose the rules so that I would have an advantage during play; the game design chose the rules of the game and I abided by that design; my opponents didnt just choose any rules randomly, they consciously choose rules in which their characteristics and powers could be used to their best advantage. This forced them, simultaneously, to ignore the game rules.
July 7, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Im sure they are not all bastards, even if they all say the same thing.
July 7, 2009 at 11:42 pm
More pertinently…
actually, as I understand it, you are not a CoH player, but just copying and pasting for one, but let me respond anyway
1. There is no reason for anyone to suffer debt in rv, and you know it. There are much easier/quicker ways to farm. And, even if farming, there are simple ways to avoid confrontation with Twixt, such as parking the hvys and hiding in base. You know this, yet you do not mention it. This is misleading and, I think, deceptive.
2. My account is accurate. In fact, I have left out much that would be even more embarrassing/incriminating to those involved. As a matter of courtesy, I was thinking. As an indication of this, note that my identity is fully revealed, my paper is on display, and my transcript logs are ready and waiting. Your only response to this so far is to copy and paste this misleading and deceptive post as many places as possible, under as many different names as possible.
3. At the beginning of the Twixt in rv period, I was silent for long stretches, weeks/months. As the paper clearly indicates, I became more talkative as I tried to understand the motives of those I fought. I dont know what you consider an “insult” — nor does anyone else. I suggest you clarify. I do plead guilty to saying “stfu” lots more than once. I made all this clear in posts on the CoH forums, btw, which you are well aware of. Again, I find your position misleading and deceptive, but, in fact, typical of the sort of response I describe in the paper.
4. I died a lot. I do not see your point here.
5. Perhaps you have better predictive powers than I. I would only say that I consider the response to my results much more predictable than my results.
July 8, 2009 at 12:50 am
An answer to the first sentence of my post would be most important.
The whole point of this exercise was to gather data in order to do an analysis of it, the paper explaining what conclusions you came to, is it not? It would be interesting and important if we were given access to the accumulated data so that we can interpret it ourselves and possibly draw our own conclusions from it. With our without context, it has its own tales to tell.
Also, by “few” I mean not a lot. By “sparse” I mean if if I was walking for 4 years and each of the quotes was a tree that I came across, then it wouldn’t be much of a forest. You should have thousands upon thousands of lines of chat from interactions given the duration of the study and your supposed level of infamy. Why not share it with us?
And yes, anecdote: A particular or detached incident or fact of an interesting nature; a biographical incident or fragment; a single passage of private life.
July 8, 2009 at 2:47 am
I see where I failed to effectively convey my ideas to you, so I will try again.
Many of your assertions seem logical and may indeed be representative. Though based on the data you present and how you present it, I find it difficult to accept any assertions at all.
I think your focus on harassment as your weakens your overall argument. You provide little accounting for players who did not engage in harassment. Your evidence is presented in an anecdotal manner and there is little accounting for the prevalence of any behavior.
I think the inclusion of the chat transcripts and the time you spend detailing the harassment adds little and overall acts as a distraction. Coming up with coding schemes for both play style and chat would have been a more effective way to present your data.
July 8, 2009 at 2:53 am
Minor editing error …
“I think your focus on harassment as your weakens your overall argument.”
should be
“I think your focus on harassment weakens your overall argument.”
July 8, 2009 at 6:45 am
Both of those situational uses of droning would be more readily serviced by an influx of more players on the outnumbered or outsupported faction. I have never witnessed an advantage shift propelled solely or even in large part by droning or NPC ganking alone and this is not from lack of PvP experience or familiarity with the zone in context. If there is any advantage given, it is that this strategy eventually goads the opposite faction into leaving the zone completely out of frustration and lack of substantial competition. Given that many PvP players play on both factions and oftentimes switch sides in order to facilitate a more interesting competitive experience, frustrating them to the point where they don’t want to continue with the game is counterproductive at best.
July 8, 2009 at 7:23 am
“goads the opposite faction into leaving the zone completely out of frustration and lack of substantial competition.” This really makes no sense. Why would a faction that has superior numbers and position leave the zone because, out of all the things they could do in the zone (like win it), they become disappointed with their unfortunate ability to avoid being droned? The only reasonable explanation is that they never wanted “substantial compeition” at all.
Again, I think if competition is the goal on both sides, this is extremely unlikely to be the result. There are many many ways to avoid droning other than picking up your ball and going home. That reaction — and its blind justification and defense — is the sort of reaction I found dismaying about social rules within CoH pvp: those rules tended to diminish and restrict competition rather than enhance and diversify it. The game suffers.
July 8, 2009 at 10:15 am
Will I give you my data? Hoho. No.
July 8, 2009 at 10:22 am
So then I’m guessing you don’t have it. You can’t actually support any single conclusion you came to in your paper. You fabricated each and every “quote” that paper contained, didn’t you?
July 8, 2009 at 10:22 am
i interpreted the harassment as an attempt to impose social rules on my play; those social rules were in conflict with game rules; thus my concentration on the harassment.
it is always possible to assume that a sample is non-representative; assumptions come cheap; note, however, that similar behavior occurred across several servers; but, even then, if my assurances do not allay your concerns, I suggest you (or some other) collect data under the same sort of circumstances and compare it to mine. that would be a very interesting thing to do, I think.
my own concerns are allayed by the degree to which I (or others) can recognize principles guiding behavior in the behavior I have described. In my mind, those principles were/are very clear.
July 8, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I have been playing CoH/V for over 4 years now, Before pvp was even in the game. Now I have not had the chance to fight along side or against Twixt, but I am what could be considered a major pvper.
When I started pvping, I was destroyed by the superior players. Then I got my character who had the ability to teleport anyone from over 100yds away. I was a droner, a trip miner, and was quite good at teleporting runners into a large group of heroes.
I did this until I learned effective ways to pvp with nothing but my own character’s abilities. (although they were never as good as my teleporting enemies used to be)
I will say this about Twixt’s results, just because you got some death threats does not mean that everyone in the game thinks the same way. On my server, I know many heroes, including myself, who would help you when being attacked by many villains. I know many heroes who would welcome droning in the situations you have discussed. I know many villains who don’t care about being droned. I am not saying all people don’t care, my own droning past has shown me much about the community. I used to drone, trip mine, and teleport villains into large groups of heroes. Even so, I have always been a welcome member in pvp due to my modest hero nature.
I am only 17 years old, and I am apparently much kinder than the many of my much older pvp brethren. As such, I cannot help but feel somewhat insulted at the concept that we are all being generalized in such a way.
July 8, 2009 at 7:03 pm
The simple answer is that they’re not seeking to win the zone objective but rather to engage and fight the other faction. So the goal of competition is not necessarily the one most served by the droning tactic and camping hero/vill bases gets old fast. Simply put, if there’s nobody else on the other side to fight, they get bored and leave.
July 14, 2009 at 7:38 am
Honest – no sarcasm included – seriously!
“dmyersloyola Says:
July 8, 2009 at 10:15 am
Will I give you my data? Hoho. No.”
Did There will be no data provided or made accessible for your paper.
I’m not knowledgeable about academic papers. Is hiding or concealing the data that is the basis for your findings the norm at the university level?
July 14, 2009 at 7:40 am
Correction:
“Did There will be no data provided or made accessible for your paper.”
To:
I take it the above quote to mean: There will be no data provided or made accessible for your paper.
July 14, 2009 at 6:24 pm
@ Kenneth
I regret being flippant or harsh or arrogant in any of my responses to comments and questions on this blog, but, in looking back on things, I see that, from time to time, I have been. I apologize.
It has been my policy throughout the recent surge of interest in all things Twixt to keep this blog totally open to all comments, critical or otherwise. This may not have been a wise choice, but it is a conscious and deliberate choice to expose, as I believe Twixt has exposed, what happens. I do not know fully whether circumstances will allow this policy to continue, but I hope so.
Unfortunately, however, when a blog is open like this one, and discusses matters of interest, like I believe this one has, there is a certain inevitable amount of trolling, disingenuity, and similar whatnot. Sometimes, in fact, I am sure of it; other times, I am not. Requests, comments, and questions I consider unreasonable are then sometimes met with other than an appropriate level of sincerity — not because they deserve it, but because of errors in my own judgement. I make mistakes; I try my best to correct them.
When I receive questions like yours, for instance, I am unsure of their motive or intent.
I have what is necessary to contextualize and validate the claims of my paper. I am able to access that information for various tasks and inquiries. I have no intention of releasing that information in any form that would not be of benefit to the public and, insofar as is prudent, protect the identities and interests of CoH/V players and the CoH/V enterprise. You may well be dubious of this claim given some of the unfortunate, unforeseen, and still being uncovered circumstances surrounding recent events. Rest assured, this claim is a serious one.