Guild Wars 2 and making a better community

[Chthon]

Originally Posted by Man W/ Club

I am humble enough to admit when I am wrong

I could be mistaken, but that post didn't much look like admitting you were wrong.

Martin's point should be well taken:

People like you and Amy Awien are not the problem. By all indications, you're already perfectly nice to people in-game. You don't need obnoxious preachy pseudo-Buddhist guru threads to convince you to do it because you're already doing it.

The problem is people who are not like you. You aren't going to convince them to change their behavior with obnoxious preachy pseudo-Buddhist guru threads. And, Martin is correct, the only effective way of changing their behavior is compulsion. A-net has plenty of leverage to compel, but no incentive to exercise it. Players have very little leverage to compel -- basically social compulsion, "behave or be ostracized."

(Or, since we are talking about GW2, a-net still has time to rig the structure of the world to remove incentives and add costs to jerk-like actions. See my prior post.)

[MithranArkanere]

Sometimes, when playing GW, I randomly help people, and sometimes they want to thank me by paying old or giving me things.

Since I never had any use for gold, and I like to get everything by myself, I just told them to help others in turn instead.

In many cases, they just used me like they use everyone, to leech and get things done while they don't even think about what they are doing and c-space around, but in some cases they do bright up and try to "act cool" themselves and help others without asking anything in exchange.

It's just a game, so all you can do is stay true to yourself, and stay away from those that will cause you trouble...
...and report when they won't stay away from you.

[Martin Alvito]

Originally Posted by fireflyry

Do you think those same people walk up to complete strangers in the street and scream obscenities like they do in MMO.

Not a chance.

Anonymity and one-off interactions are the enemies of civility. MMOs are full of both. It's much like driving, which is another activity where you'll see the worst in human nature.

Originally Posted by Chthon

(Or, since we are talking about GW2, a-net still has time to rig the structure of the world to remove incentives and add costs to jerk-like actions. See my prior post.)

I'm cynical about this because the reality is that ANet wants to sell games to the jerks, too. Marketing to them implies providing opportunities to behave in that manner for fun and profit. And let's face it, the game's likely largest demographic (adolescent males) just so happens to be the demographic most likely to engage in this sort of behavior.

While I'm not a fan of the subscription model, it does give the developer a much larger incentive to deal with social irritants and ensure that the game experience remains pleasant. I think that fireflyry is spot on there.

Originally Posted by Man W/ Club

Martin Alvido, are you a Vogon? Do you pass on problems to others, do you have the ability to think for yourself or do you just want to feed this massive ego that must always be official and following the regulations?

Originally Posted by Man W/ Club

instead of hating show some respect and respect will follow.

I have to admit, the irony makes me laugh.

[Amy Awien]

Originally Posted by Martin Alvito

No, it's a sufficiently elementary proof that I didn't see the need to spell it out. But, given that:

- We have a population. In that population, for each individual "being nice" either has c > 0, c < 0, or c = 0
- We agree that being nice has social benefits for oneself
- We observe people not being nice

It follows that for at least some people in that population, c > 0. If c < 0 or c = 0 and being nice confers social benefits, we would always observe people being nice. We don't, so for some people it must be costly.

That's not a circular argument. It simply infers something that must be true about preferences given behavior.

It is a circular argument, you postulate cost/benefit as (only) factor, juggle some pseudo maths with them, ignoring anything else, and arrive at the conclusion that it's all about cost and benefit. That is circular reasoning.

[Martin Alvito]

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

It is a circular argument, you postulate cost/benefit as (only) factor, juggle some pseudo maths with them, ignoring anything else, and arrive at the conclusion that it's all about cost and benefit. That is circular reasoning.

The argument doesn't conclude that cost/benefit is the only factor. It assumes that the decision is driven by cost/benefit and arrives at other conclusions about the shape of preferences, given utility maximization.

If you disagree with the assumptions of expected utility analysis, it's on you to demonstrate a set of assumptions with greater explanatory power. You also need to provide a logically consistent and distinct explanation for the undesirable behavior, which you haven't yet done.

[Amy Awien]

Originally Posted by Martin Alvito

As far as the second claim (being nice to jerks is costly) is concerned, I'm willing to bet that if I hit you in the face, your initial impulse will be to hit back. Suppressing that urge is costly; you have to exert mental effort to do it. The amount of negative stimulus necessary to provoke a fight/flight response may differ across people, but scratch any of us hard enough and there's a barbarian lurking.

Pretty extreme and given the involvement of a physical threat and injury, not applicable.

I'd see a more common situation, like someone not paying attention in traffic, making you stop or something. You can go in a rage about it, or let it pass and wave them by. The latter costs nothing.

It might be different if you'd have the impression they were deliberate, or trying to take advantage. But then the motivation for a, possibly, not so friendly reaction would still not be cost/benefit based, but rather from a sense of self-preservation, or territorial.

He's arguing that making a better community is up to each individual player. It isn't. Since we can infer from the proof above that anyone that prefers to be nice already is, he's preaching to those where c > 0.

People may respond differently to similar events one day then another, due to other factors (mood, fatigue, stress) and recent events. A nice response may positively influence others and likewise shift them towards a tendency to respond nice during future events.

You may not be able to 'carry' the world but you certainly do influence the world directly around you.

And without cost.

[Martin Alvito]

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Pretty extreme and given the involvement of a physical threat and injury, not applicable.

Social threat is also very real, and can provoke even stronger responses on an imaging scan. There's some good psychological research on the subject out there.

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

People may respond differently to similar events one day then another, due to other factors (mood, fatigue, stress) and recent events. A nice response may positively influence others and likewise shift them towards a tendency to respond nice during future events.

I won't disagree with your contention that preferences vary in time as a result of other factors. It does not follow that you can move the community by being nice yourself. At best you can alter your own preferences in time, although that's going to lead to dragging beliefs about nature/nurture into the discussion. Since that's still an unsettled question, any disagreement there will lead to impasse.

[Amy Awien]

Originally Posted by Martin Alvito

The argument doesn't conclude that cost/benefit is the only factor. It assumes that the decision is driven by cost/benefit and arrives at other conclusions about the shape of preferences, given utility maximization.

Like?

If you disagree with the assumptions of expected utility analysis, it's on you to demonstrate a set of assumptions with greater explanatory power. You also need to provide a logically consistent and distinct explanation for the undesirable behavior, which you haven't yet done.

On me alone? Where's your proof? I was working on that by the way, but long posts tend to take long and eventually get trashed by the call of real life.

Cost/benefit does not carry sufficient explanatory power. It does not explain why people would respond differently to similar situations, at different times.

[Martin Alvito]

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Cost/benefit does not carry sufficient explanatory power. It does not explain why people would respond differently to similar situations, at different times.

Sure it does. The assumption that preferences are static at the moment of the decision in no way requires the assumption that preferences are static in time.

Zaller's widely accepted theory on political behavior suggests that people's inconsistent political attitudes can be explained by variations in recent, salient stimuli. But for you to be able to affect the community by being nice, your niceness would have to comprise a sufficiently large share of stimuli that others are being exposed to. That's not going to happen in the broader community, which is why you can't move the community alone. This just provides an even stronger argument for creating smaller communities: not only can you acquire the deterrent effects from the threat of being ostracized, but you can comprise a larger share of the stimuli that others in the community are being exposed to.

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Like?

That people who are being nice experience a lower cost for doing so than those who are not being nice? That's distinct from the assumptions, which specified nothing about the shape of individuals' preferences.

Would you disagree with the contention that politeness in our society generally involves the expenditure of more time than telling people to shove it? If not, then you have arrived at an ironclad argument that being nice is costly. Your time has value greater than zero, because it's finite and non-renewable.

[Amy Awien]

Originally Posted by Martin Alvito

Social threat is also very real, and can provoke even stronger responses on an imaging scan. There's some good psychological research on the subject out there.

Absolutely - and even more so. You need no MRI scans for that.

I won't disagree with your contention that preferences vary in time as a result of other factors. It does not follow that you can move the community by being nice yourself. At best you can alter your own preferences in time, although that's going to lead to dragging beliefs about nature/nurture into the discussion. Since that's still an unsettled question, any disagreement there will lead to impasse.

Not so much preferences, as those sound generally more stable then just influences from recent events. I just think cost/benefit, is not quite sufficient to explain behaviour, though it certainly doesn't hurt to explore that path.

As to the nurture/nature debate (which is relevant to the discussion), we didn't get the impressive machinery between to serve as massive counterweight, the least it does is provide a way to adapt swiftly to changing conditions, where genetic evolution takes too long. That's +1 for nurture. On the other hand, if past evolution didn't have some influence over our decisions and actions we would have perished long ago (like who'd want to have sex and make babies?). That's +1 for nature.

Looks like a draw to me

[Martin Alvito]

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Looks like a draw to me

On the question of affecting your own preferences in time, sure. That question is relevant to the argument, but I don't see a way to settle it.

That still leaves the question of affecting others' preferences on the table.

[Amy Awien]

That debate will not soon be 'settled', I think, it is a complex mix of nurture/nature at work in us.

The suggestion of smaller communities is interesting, especially for a MMO, individual actions could have more influence, but it also carries a greater risk of abuse and communities going astray themselves. And how would you create small but viable communities in an online game?

[Martin Alvito]

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

That debate will not soon be 'settled', I think, it is a complex mix of nurture/nature at work in us.

Right. Settling that debate would require a theory capable of explaining the conditions when nature trumps nurture and vice versa. Then we could just apply that theory to the case and have done with it.

Unfortunately, that theory seems to be a long way off.

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

The suggestion of smaller communities is interesting, especially for a MMO, individual actions could have more influence, but it also carries a greater risk of abuse and communities going astray themselves. And how would you create small but viable communities in an online game?

As Swingline correctly pointed out, we already have a weak form of those communities in guilds and alliances. The physical constraints of server capacity offers a natural focal point for community activity, although leveraging that limit would be inefficient and therefore costly from the developer's point of view.

If I were the one responsible for the design, I'd want to create revocable licenses for being a guild leader which come with certain conduct expectations, give the guild leaders more power by making at least some desirable content accessible only to a guild group, and monitor the guild leaders via an anonymous reporting mechanism that can trigger investigation. That way, you get the prospective benefits of everyone watching everyone else.

If the guild leader does something sufficiently stupid to get the license revoked, the community dissolves. Community members don't want that, so they'll be incentivized to remind the guild leader to stay on the reservation. The guild leader has the power to set expectations and give people the heave ho if they don't live up to them, but abuse of that power will eventually result in removal. Members/ex-members can always burn the guild leader in retaliation for abuses. Finally, the community gets held responsible for the actions of its members outside the community.

As for the question, "why would you agree to be a guild leader", I'd say that the answer is "bribe them". Give them a small fraction of every trade made by a member, or a glowing aura and a name under their avatar five times as large as anyone else's, or access to exclusive content, or whatever it takes to get people to sign on the line which is dotted and do a good job.

That's not a perfect system, but it's a start. If you couldn't, say, trade with other players without being a member of a guild, and you'd get kicked out of a guild for regularly being a jerk to members or non-members, I'm betting people would be a lot nicer to one another.

I also bet that a lot of issues could be worked out via negotiations with guild leaders rather than using the reporting system, which would make Support's life a lot easier. If using /report resulted in some mild hassles such as not being able to log in if you receive a Support's e-mail until after you answer it, the developer would only have to sift through the more serious complaints. Between that and punishing spurious /report usage, you could probably sort out a sizable fraction of the behavioral issues we have now and cut the developer's workload.

[HigherMinion]

Everyone likes a good vent every now and then, though. That's usually why people play vidya. Blow off RL steam. And this is why we have trolls. There is no perfect social system, unless you want to be so protected you will one day become infected with trollivitis because you weren't exposed to enough of it at a young age.

[Swingline]

There is one thing the OP is overlooking and that is WvWvW's power to bring a community together. The whole point of WvWvW is not just large scale combat, its other intended goal is to give servers incentive to become a more tightly nit community. This wont solve the problem of people being jerks but it should help direct some of it towards others on the server your fighting. The same theory has been shown in many works of science fiction such as Star Trek. There are still a few bad apples but the earth as a whole has become united because they are not alone in the universe. Same thing can happen in reality once that day comes.

Instead of trying to stop the problem outright Anet chose to redirect a lot of it through WvWvW.

GW1 became a shitfest because everyone inside the game is conglomerated through free and unlimited server switching. I sincerely hope this isnt the case with GW2 otherwise it would defeat the entire purpose.

[Man W/ Club]

Originally Posted by Chthon

I could be mistaken, but that post didn't much look like admitting you were wrong.

Martin's point should be well taken:

People like you and Amy Awien are not the problem. By all indications, you're already perfectly nice to people in-game. You don't need obnoxious preachy pseudo-Buddhist guru threads to convince you to do it because you're already doing it.

The problem is people who are not like you. You aren't going to convince them to change their behavior with obnoxious preachy pseudo-Buddhist guru threads. And, Martin is correct, the only effective way of changing their behavior is compulsion. A-net has plenty of leverage to compel, but no incentive to exercise it. Players have very little leverage to compel -- basically social compulsion, "behave or be ostracized."

(Or, since we are talking about GW2, a-net still has time to rig the structure of the world to remove incentives and add costs to jerk-like actions. See my prior post.)

Let me explain something to you. I was an assshole most of my life untill i started reading buddhism then i understood the meaning of compassion.

Zen Buddhism is the reason, not the action to take. The action to take is to be a role model.

Be the guy who can go to a bar, chug 5 beers in front of 5 sexy btiches, and say, 'which one of you wants to fcuk me'. This is called confidence, and people love it.

Since we are all intellectuals and can think for ourselves, let me pitch this out there. Can you act for yourself based upon your beliefs or are you too weak and afraid to make the world a better place by being a better person and being a role model and a leader.

[Swingline]

Originally Posted by Man W/ Club

Let me explain something to you. I was an assshole most of my life untill i started reading buddhism then i understood the meaning of compassion.

Zen Buddhism is the reason, not the action to take. The action to take is to be a role model.

Be the guy who can go to a bar, chug 5 beers in front of 5 sexy btiches, and say, 'which one of you wants to fcuk me'. This is called confidence, and people love it.

Since we are all intellectuals and can think for ourselves, let me pitch this out there. Can you act for yourself based upon your beliefs or are you too weak and afraid to make the world a better place by being a better person and being a role model and a leader.

No one is stopping you from being a role model but you shouldn't try to force or insult people into your way of thinking. They have the basic human right to think for themselves. People can be inspired through the actions of others though and that's why being a role model is the best choice. Its what Jesus and Buddha did, they didn't insult people to try to and harness their fears into their way of thinking. They have to make the choice themselves to be a better person, that's what being a human being is all about.

[Kada]

I admire your efforts to try, but ultimately what Martin said rings true - as many of us try and play this way, without the ability to police it it will fail. Part of why it will fail is because the game is not an R-18 rating, so we have to realise sometimes that we are actually dealing with children (well, teenagers) and they don't have the life experience and maturity through past learnings that we do. A 14 year old doesn't have the tact and reasoning to approach things calmly and rationally the way a 40 year old should be able to.

In the end, all we can do is police our own turf via selective guild recruitment. We can't force everyone to try and be good to each other and not be "dickish" or trolls, but we can make sure that kind of behaviour doesn't happen in our own little pieces of the game world.

[enter_the_zone]

Originally Posted by Kada

I admire your efforts to try, but ultimately what Martin said rings true - as many of us try and play this way, without the ability to police it it will fail. Part of why it will fail is because the game is not an R-18 rating, so we have to realise sometimes that we are actually dealing with children (well, teenagers) and they don't have the life experience and maturity through past learnings that we do. A 14 year old doesn't have the tact and reasoning to approach things calmly and rationally the way a 40 year old should be able to.

In the end, all we can do is police our own turf via selective guild recruitment. We can't force everyone to try and be good to each other and not be "dickish" or trolls, but we can make sure that kind of behaviour doesn't happen in our own little pieces of the game world.

And sometime those of us a bit (ok, a lot) older just like to be a*seholes. And let's face it, when people screw up, get called on it and are showed how to do better, only to continue to screw up because they either don't care or are deliberately being stupid, there is only so much one can reasonably be expected to take before being a total dick towards them.

[Chthon]

Originally Posted by Swingline

There is one thing the OP is overlooking and that is WvWvW's power to bring a community together. The whole point of WvWvW is not just large scale combat, its other intended goal is to give servers incentive to become a more tightly nit community. This wont solve the problem of people being jerks but it should help direct some of it towards others on the server your fighting. The same theory has been shown in many works of science fiction such as Star Trek. There are still a few bad apples but the earth as a whole has become united because they are not alone in the universe. Same thing can happen in reality once that day comes.

Instead of trying to stop the problem outright Anet chose to redirect a lot of it through WvWvW.

GW1 became a shitfest because everyone inside the game is conglomerated through free and unlimited server switching. I sincerely hope this isnt the case with GW2 otherwise it would defeat the entire purpose.

Isn't that exactly what I was talking about?

Originally Posted by Man W/ Club

Let me explain something to you. I was an assshole most of my life untill i started reading buddhism then i understood the meaning of compassion.

Er... I think you still might have some work to do in that respect...

Hint: Referring to women as "sexy btiches" and propositioning them for sex en mass upon your first meeting is not exactly "compassionate" -- or appropriate -- behavior.

Hint: Insulting people who do not agree with you is not "compassionate" behavior either.

Zen Buddhism is the reason, not the action to take. The action to take is to be a role model.

Uh... yeah.... Thanks for pointing out a trivial distinction on an issue that no one else has mentioned or seems to care about.

Be the guy who can go to a bar, chug 5 beers in front of 5 sexy btiches, and say, 'which one of you wants to fcuk me'. This is called confidence, and people love it.

I'd rather not. You shouldn't. People who love when you do that are either (a) selling beer, or (b) moronic.

Since we are all intellectuals and can think for ourselves, let me pitch this out there. Can you act for yourself based upon your beliefs or are you too weak and afraid to make the world a better place by being a better person and being a role model and a leader.

1. Who said we are all intellectuals? More to the point, who said you are an intellectual? I seem to recall something about beer and bitches....

2. Your insulting accusation makes no sense: Because I refuse to do what you tell me to, I am not thinking for myself?

3. I'm not failing to act upon my beliefs; I'm failing to act upon your beliefs. Which is OK, since (1) they're not my beliefs, and (2) they're stupid beliefs not worth acting upon.

4. It's not a matter of being weak and afraid. It's a matter of recognizing the impossible and not being so dumb as to try it anyway.

5. Well, since you insist that I should be a "role model and a leader," I hereby nominate myself to lead those who wish to mock you and your stupid beliefs. Membership is open to all.

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Seriously, are you trolling? Combining "i started reading buddhism then i understood the meaning of compassion" in the same breath with "chug 5 beers in front of 5 sexy btiches, and say, 'which one of you wants to fcuk me'" is a pretty epic troll.

I don't even want to think about the possibility that you're not trolling...

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Note to mods: Even though everything OP says seems destined to become flame-bait (and I am certainly obliging him), Martin and Amy are having a civil, rational, intelligent, informative discussion that might warrant keeping an otherwise worthless thread open.