Horde cheating in pvp

PVP Battlegrounds
41

Really? Explanation is not justification. It is unfortunate that said person was changed into a violent killer due to a brain tumor, but they are still responsible for their actions. How they are to be held responsible is not something that I’m defining in this case, and perhaps more challenging to identify, but they are responsible nonetheless.

How you conduct yourself is a choice. In a moment, you may react in a way that you don’t have control of, but life is made up of not a single moment, but many. What you choose to do with those subsequent moments is up to you.

Still, you are using an extremely narrow circumstance to justify, and excuse, a wider behaviour. Do people sometimes do things they regret out of anger, spite, or other reasons? Sure. Are those cases difficult to process and identify effective solutions to? Absolutely. Is this what leads people in WoW BGs to hurl insults at one another or to give up on a BG and not play, to the detriment of the rest of their team? Unlikely.

These behaviours persist because they are allowed to. Folks treat each other like dirt in this game and there are no consequences, so there’s no reason to change. Sure, there’s probably a person or two out there who just can’t help themselves, but again, those aren’t the folks we’re talking about. Trolling, insults, and nonparticipation are par for the course in BGs, not an exception. We see the same behaviours here, on the forums. People treat each other like garbage here. Discussions like the one we’re having right now are rare.

Consider FF14. They take a much more strict stance on such behaviours and, as a result, people treat each other much, much better in that game. You probably think to yourself, “Nah, it’s not like that.” Yea, it is… I didn’t think so either, but yep, it’s a much more noticeable, and pleasant, experience.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I’m perfect. That I’ll never make a mistake, get angry, or do something I regret. I’m human, after all, and while most of us have the free will, support, and tools to make better choices, our individual make up makes that difficult sometimes. But even where I to do that, I know that I am responsible for what happens and accept the consequences of my actions. I know I have a responsibility to make right what I did wrong, and have worked to do exactly that on those occasions where I have made those mistakes.

These are the expectations placed upon us as members of a society. They are ones that are reasonable to achieve for most of us. For those few who absolutely can’t, it’s up to us to find appropriate was to handle it, but for those who simply won’t… they need to be held accountable for their actions.

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42

well…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting#Charles_Whitman

say that story was different, and instead of killing himself we were able to remove his tumor and allow him to lead a healthy normal life. should he be punished for actions made while a brain tumor was disrupting his ability to think rationally?

we lock up serial killers because they are a danger to society, at this time we do not have the technology or science to repair them. the best we can do is lock them in a cage so they dont hurt us.

if we take a killer that had a brain tumor, and then fix them so they are a normal person, why do they deserve punishment?

absolutely, you may yell at someone out of frustration, but you then have a choice to apologize later or not.

one of our biggest issues with modern society is that we take snapshots of people from moments and judge them based on that as if it is their whole character. cancel culture or ghosting, whatever you call it, its not how people used to or should act.

i think these two go together, ADHD and autism both result in people who are generally not socially capable, resulting in both disorders being very prevalent in the stay at home in mom’s basement all day kid, aka, gamers. add in the reward based system of video games and social media and online games attract ADHDers like a lighthouse for moths.

i would wager that the rate of ADHD and ASDs is substantially higher in wow’s population than the norm, if not close to a majority.

ADHD in particular has issues with emotional regulation because in an ADHD brain the self control regulator basically has a delay and doesn’t kick in until after the emotional impulsive side has had its say.

there is silences/bans in the game an on forums. however, i will say there isn’t equality when it comes to forum moderation. players can be much worse to each other than towards the devs. things you can say towards players and get away with it but say the same about devs and you get a vaca.

one of the problems with the current forum design is the nanny system, if you can’t directly yell an insult at someone, you have to get creative, this results in things said that are a lot nastier than simple vulgarities. poison laced words that sow doubt and distrust are far more toxic and bad for mental health than an F-bomb.

i wouldn’t expect you to, anyone who claims to live up to an ideal is a liar.

this is the thing, we dont know where our decisions come from, you can weigh pros and cons, spend weeks deliberating, but at the end of the day just go with what comes on impulse of the moment to choose. where does the specific choice of that impulse come from? we don’t know. if you are religious, you could say your soul, if you are an atheist, you could say maybe aliens or the programming of the simulation, or physics.

but you didn’t make the choice, it just came to you.

part of the problem IMO is that some members of society are offloading responsibility of choices on others. an ADHDer doesn’t choose to flip out when upset, but society does judge them for it. that is wrong. that is society telling the ADHDer she is responsible for something outside of her control.

this lashing out at the ADHDer is artificial consequences created by people out of their own emotions. so from the point of view of the ADHDer, they are being attacked for having an emotional reaction by society which is wielding its own emotional reaction as a weapon.

this is why i posted the quote from dune, “once the fear is gone, only i will remain” meaning the emotion isn’t the person, wait for the emotion to pass and the person is still there. society is too busy judging by the assumption of the emotion is the person.

43

I do not understand why anyone would join as a merc to throw a match, so I am hoping people are just upset about things. It makes ZERO sense to do so. If I want Alliance to lose upon the battlefield I que Horde?

Others have stated - you que merc for the Alliance- you gain more honor. Know why? Because there’s not enough Alliance queing. Let’s address THAT instead of speculation that people are queing with the intent on ruining the team they join.

Being disrespectful and mean to one another here doesn’t address the shortage of Alliance players queing nor does it even truly address the accusation at hand. It is just being mean to one another.

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People claiming horde mercs intentionally throw games rely on it to handwave away their losses.

EDIT: For clarity I’m referring to the folks who claim mercs throw games.

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For MY server I wholeheartedly agree the Alliance have the short end of the stick my friend. I have great sympathy for their plight. My message misunderstood- it is not about selfishly wanting shorter que times- it is about the big picture. The longer the que times, the less participate, the less pvp occurs, the more give up on pvp in both factions. Not good for any enjoying it.

Not enough Alliance queing is exactly why you have mercs coming to your side. The reason people merc is because we get a bonus to do so. Understand the plight of the Alliance- so few about that Blizzard basically handed any Alliance huge ilvl benefits Horde do not gain. Even with that incentive the imbalance was still in place, so the merc system was applied.

The genesis of any issues with the merc system is a direct result of the shortage of Alliance players pvping. Your attitude of not caring how long a Horde que is means you don’t follow the ramifications of that- and that is even LESS joining it.

EDIT: I will not discredit the notion of someone mercing to boot the best Alliance on that team as insane as that sounds… because some are insane enoug to do so- but I am confident the vast majority of Horde mercing do so for the bonus, the shorter que times, and quite frankly, they wish to PVP and are tired of the extensive wait between matches.

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Put simply, yes. However, further consideration and thought is required. You describe a scenario that, currently, can’t happen, so it’s impossible to say what society would do in such a situation. We can only speculate what we, given our values, would want to be done. That’s something that’s different for everybody.

The bottom line, though, is that wrong was done and there is an accountability for that wrong. How that is handled has a lot of possibilities, but even though that person had a brain tumor, and that explains why they did something, it doesn’t excuse it.

Furthermore, in the case you linked, that wasn’t an in the moment decision. That fellow didn’t just happen to find themselves up in that tower with a high powered rifle, got mad at the world, and just decided to start firing. A lot of time went by between the moment they decided to take an action, and the realization of that decision.

You would have me believe that in this case, and others, human beings have no free will. You dismiss choice as if it’s not something that, as we know it, we have control over. Except we do… and it’s what defines us as a species. Conscious will as a general concept that we, as a whole, accept.

We are not mindless automatons carrying out long, and carefully planned actions with no opportunity to choose a different path. While we may become lost in emotion for brief moments, on the whole, these things remain choices that we make.

I would accept the thesis that the WoW population has a higher incidence of ADHD and Autism than the general human population as one that could potentially be proven true, but I would not accept that this would be the majority of the population.

These days gamers are not stay at home in mom’s basement at all. While certainly meaningful percentage of the population may be younger, many of us who were in the original gaming generation have grown up, have jobs and families, and we choose to spend our leisure time gaming. Games are accessible to everybody now, in all walks of life across a variety of platforms. This would suggest that any given gaming population would be comprised of a meaningful portion of humanity, barring certain groups prone to exclusion (ie, baby boomers and portions of GenX who didn’t grow up with access to these things).

Only Blizzard can release the actual data, and I think it would be very interesting, but I would absolutely bet that the folks we see exhibiting these behaviours in WoW come from all walks of life and at all ages.

For those folks who do act out as a direct result of ADHD or Autism, there are behaviour management strategies that they have access to, but require home/community support to be successful. A vacation from the game after repeated infractions is an appropriate instigator to seek out this support, but ultimately, all involved at that individuals level have to choose to seek out that support.

Except that it’s not outside of their control. Perhaps in the moment it is, but long term, absolutely not. We, as members of a society, have every right to want to expect to live free of harm from others, mentally and physically. A label of ADHD doesn’t give an individual a free pass on behaviour that the rest of society simply must put up with. Solutions may be more challenging, and require a stronger effort on the part of that individual’s community, but there is still accountability.

49

I find more joy in WPvP than bgs even though I gain NOTHING out of it beyond the enjoyment of doing it. Bragging rights alone. I loathe BGs not just for que times, but also getting the in BG to be grouped randomly with who knows. Some battles you endure a gaggle of “Road Warriors” that do nothing towards the objectives to win. As we lose they decide to mistreat everyone else struggling to gain the things to win stating “I’m top DPS what are YOU all doing?”. You get the premade that runs you over 30 seconds into the battle and could win in under 3 minutes yet drag out the fight until every last second has expired so they can farm graveyards for kills.

Every misery is shared across the factions- so let’s understand the true issue we ALL face is the length of the que times.

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51

So they only need 1 vote to vtk a healer in BGs?

52

You should check out this video :slight_smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ypOUn6rThM&ab_channel=GameMaker%27sToolkit

It’s not so long, roughly 10 mins. In short though, it would appear that care should be taken when driving engagement solely by rewards. Some rewards can be good, but overuse can be detrimental.

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53

We need more players like you concerned with solutions and less concerned with being disrespectful towards one another. As you state offering benefits available only to Alliance is the key. If you are Horde and don’t like it YOU MAKE AN ALLIANCE TOON- the goal. Quite honestly anyone that complains about the benefits the Alliance get isn’t paying attention. Even with those bonuses Horde groups can face 2 to 1 odds regularly. The gear bonus only gets that Alliance player gear faster. Perhaps that is why the imbalance has not been repaired.

I feel Blizzard is not going far enough. Offer mounts, mogs, some insane cool weapon available only to Alliance PvPers. Things people playing on Horde will never gain no matter how much they grind.

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54

a russian fighter pilot takes off with a new experimental airplane, flies it to a US base and defects. to the russians he is a traitor, to the americans a hero. one would kill him, one gives him honors.

the problem with assigning blame and demanding accountability is that morality is relative to point of view.

true, but tumors dont grow overnight.

im saying that you can not empirically find free will in the body, mind, or in physics. for something we use to judge if people should be executed or not, we know almost nothing about it.

to a point, a lot of ADHD meds dont solve the issue, they just make it so they can focus. ADHD is a monstrous mess of a disorder and 95% of it goes untreated and even unacknowledged. and often the very strategies meant to help are more destructive than doing nothing at all.

this is where a lot of people fail to understand ADHD, there is an assumption that they just need to be given the right plan or shown what to do and they will get it or suddenly change. its like giving running shoes to a kid and then getting mad at them when they aren’t suddenly running, you never bothered to see that they have no legs.

TBF tho, a lot of the anti-social mentality of ADHDers and autistics is due to bullying from neurotypicals in childhood. you may have the right to want to live in a society free of negativity, but actions have consequences and the negativity poured into kids by bullies in grade school doesn’t go away. if you try explaining that they have some obligation to behave well to society, you might as well be telling them they have to play nice with their bully. they are not going to take you seriously.

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That person is still accountable for their actions. However, in this case, they are effectively joining a new society with different values. Accountability certainly is relative, but it doesn’t go away. That pilot chose an action and that action has consequences, such as never being able to return home and likely being a target for the rest of their lives. These are consequences that must be accepted.

I think that’s my point. The scenario you describe had many opportunities for another path to be chosen and it wasn’t. There is accountability on the part of that person, regardless of what may prompted any one decision along that path. In your hypothetical case where that person was cured of their brain tumor and restored to their previous state of mental capacity, they are still to blame for the actions they took and should be held accountable. Note that I have not said what the punishment should be, or even that punishment (as we define it) is appropriate. I just said they are accountable and responsible.

There’s a lot of things we can observe but have no real explanation for yet. There’s a lot of things we used to have no explanation for, but now do. Just because we can’t explain something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, especially when we can observe that thing. However you want to philosophize the way we make decisions, we observably have the capacity to make decisions based on our environments and the information presented to us. Furthermore, we also have the capacity to reason, and to communicate that reason to others, with varying degrees of successfulness. In short, we make decisions and we can explain them to others, we perhaps just can’t yet explain the biological mechanisms that allow for this.

I didn’t say meds and I didn’t say it was easy. Just that there are support and strategies, and these are constantly changing and adapting to new information and discoveries. The bottom line though is that while some understanding is certainly required on the part of general society for individuals who have trouble adapting and coping, responsibility ultimately falls on that individual and their localized communities. I am not responsible for the poor behaviour of an individual in WoW and I’m certainly not to be expected to accept it. It should be expected of me to show some compassion and understanding by not responding in kind and instead attempting to find a short term resolution to any conflict I’m involved in, but past that I have a right to expect to not have to be confronted with that behaviour.

Understand that I’m not mad at them. I’m acknowledging that some folks have trouble expressing themselves and, for my part, doing my best to have patience with them. However, those folks doing that should not be a part of my game experience if they continue to behave poorly, by the standards generally agreed upon by society and the game community. It is not with malice that they be given a suspension, it is of necessity to give them an opportunity to understand that such behaviours are not welcome and to reflect on the fact that they now have a choice to find ways to make alternative choices.

Please understand that I’m not suggesting that blame is a binary thing. If a person with ADHD acts out, they are responsible for that behaviour. If someone bullied that person and instigated that behaviour, they too are responsible. Consider another scenario. I’m having a bad day… some things go wrong for me and I’m generally grumpy. Someone bumps into me in a crowd and I’m snap at them. They too are having a bad day and they snap back. Ultimately that person throws a punch at me, knocking me out and leaving me with a concussion. Who is responsible?

We both are, but to varying degrees. The person who threw the punch must take responsibility for that, but so too must I take responsibility for my own actions. We both had the opportunity to recognize the situation and attempt to defuse it, and if neither of us taken, we both had a part to play in the outcome.

It is important to take ownership over the actions we take instead of simply trying to defer blame to someone else. As I keep saying, there are reasons things happen, but they are not justifications.

Lets take the opportunity here to step back a bit. We’ve been narrowly drilling down on a small and targeted portion of the population who, as we both have acknowledged to varying degrees, have struggles with integrating into general society. We both seem to agree that special care and consideration is warranted in these cases, even if we don’t agree to what extent that should be taken.

Let us now consider the rest of the population. For every one individual who falls into the category we’ve been discussing, there are hundreds, if not thousands more who we would consider perfectly capable of the reasoning required to make good decisions. Should they be given a free pass for any and all behaviour because there exists a small population who seemingly can’t control themselves? What do you think would result from such a society?

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56

for a lot of people accountability = punishment.

i have a IRL personal example of this, when i was in the military i tripped and sprained my ankle. in the grand scheme of things this isn’t a big deal as my job ensured i would never see combat or even need to run to anything but a starbucks to get coffee, but i was actually given an LoC for destruction of government property because my captain believed in “accountability”.

it really was that rediculous:
me: crutches in to work
other airmen: what happened
me: i fell
other airmen: dude that sucks, you okay?
me: sprained ankle, but ill be fine in a week or two
Capt T: what are we going to do about this?
me and other airmen: what do you mean what are we going to do about this?
Capt T: Inemia isn’t fit for duty and that is against regs.
me and literally everyone around: are you serious?

the vast majority of accountability is manufactured by someone for their own personal interests. no accountability was needed here yet someone insisted.

so far, the best science can do is say that free will hides in the ambiguity of quantum physics and how a wave form collapses under observation. in essence, that your decision comes from the wave collapse of some particle in your brain that creates the chain reaction of nerve communication that is a thought.

not a very good model considering that E8 and intelligent design is starting to look better than M-theory.

we have a global situation now where people are too busy playing by the rules to to the right thing. my opinion is that every case should be handled on a case by case basis depending on the individual. but perfect judgment is something we only reserve for god.

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Tubbly and Inemia maybe y’all should make your own posts to talk about this. :thinking:

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To an extent, punishment is appropriate and reasonable. We’re just talking about those circumstances that exceed what is reasonable and normal, which is ultimately a very small amount.

In this case, it sounds like your Captain was a bit of a jerk. I don’t know what an LoC is, but I’ve had enough friends in the military to know how these things generally go, and what a lot of the prevailing mentalities there can be like.

Being given a punishment because you injured yourself in the reasonable pursuit of your job on a technicality was a judgement call, and an inappropriate one at that. You would have been well within your rights to contest that, ensuring your Captain saw consequences for their actions. As I said though, I have a few friends who have been in the military and can understand why you may have not chosen to do so. Understandable, but you made that choice and presumably accepted the consequences of it.

Does it matter? This is an observable phenomenon that, so far as we define our existence, gives us the ability to make decisions. Whether or not it’s an illusion by some as yet unexplained process doesn’t matter. All that matters is that to us, it exists, and it defines us in the way we view our existence. The ability to choose has become central to our identity as humans… as a direct result of that ability.

Do we need a universal model for fire to understand that it burns us? Having an understanding of that model lets us do so much more with fire, and that’s a wonderful thing, but at the end of the day it is not required to know that we should not stick our unprotected fingers in it. Observation is sufficient.

Unfortunately, we simply lack the resources to do this and so compromises must be made. It is acceptable to generalize for categories of individuals and deal with the exceptions as they arise. Perhaps we have historically not done so well at applying patience and compassion at those exceptions, but nonetheless it’s an adequate strategy.

Nobody is asking for perfect judgement, but what you are advocating is the very definition of anarchy.

You can’t reasonably expect me to accept that you would not expect judgement, punishment, or compensation were harm inflicted upon you by the actions of another.

59

I’m sorry you don’t find our discussion interesting. I don’t mean this in a snarky way, I’m being sincere. I do feel the discussion is relevant though. The premise of the OP is “folks are doing this thing to troll” and where the discussion has gone seems to be whether or not personal accountability is a thing, and whether or not individuals doing this should incur some form of punishment.

It’s gone on a while, but I, for one, am feeling engaged and interested. I’m usually the first to bow out when discussions reach “nuh uh, ya huh!” but I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet, though I honestly do feel we’re nearing it. It depends on if any new information, or areas of exploration, crop up :slight_smile:

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Na you’re all good men I was just trying to put a little humor into this conversation. Inemia and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, but Inemia will always tell you what she thinks I do have respect for her.

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61

I still don’t understand how a horde merc could kick someone but I always thought we should do away with factions in randoms so we wouldn’t need things like merc mode and bonus XP to balance the queues.

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62

That’s a slippery slope, good sir.
Odds are there’s a reason, or two, or ten, why someone gave up.
First, the obvious: if it’s mathematically impossible to win, at a particular point, do you continue? And, if so, is that admirable or just stubborn?
Personally, I’d say that either option is perfectly acceptable. If you want to continue running into the grinder, sure. Nothing wrong with that. If someone else doesn’t want to, however, they have the same right to decline.

If we’re talking efficiency, here, getting a losing BG over with, quickly, is the smart move. It’s not necessarily about being upset/rage quitting.

Now, let’s move on to the cases where someone actually is upset.
What, perhaps, could be the reason for that?
Have you ever gotten stuck in a random BG and you felt like you were the only one that didn’t lick windows?
I mean, we could think of endless reasons why someone might get frustrated but we’ll just go over a few: ignoring objectives, not targeting enemy healers free casting, not peeling for your healers, not being healed, etc.
You could look at that situation as, “Okay, no big deal. Maybe people just aren’t familiar with BGs and don’t know what to do.”
So, if that’s the case, what’s the proper response from you?
Do you ignore it? End up in the same situation that you’re already in but 15 minutes later? Do you try to coach them? Only for someone to tell you to shut up because they’d rather smack their faces off the keyboard than listen to someone trying to help? Or, do you just say “screw it” and idle in the corner until that BG ends and RNG, hopefully, provides you with a better team next time?
Really, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s whatever floats your boat.

I bring this stuff up because, honestly, if you advocate chilling off to the side as reportable, then I’d have to advocate doing other dumb things in BGs are reportable as well. One led to the other, right? Of course, none of those will be reportable - and shouldn’t be. It sucks. It’s frustrating. I get it. It’s random for a reason, though. You roll that dice and sometimes it doesn’t work out in your favor. That’s why, personally, I prefer to just lick my wounds and move on to the next fight. I’m not gonna hate on you for having a different opinion, though. You do you. Let them do them.

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This is one of the main things that me and Inemia disagree on and now you. :wink:

That’s the only reason I played this game is a kill horde and I’m good at it lol. If you take that away and try to make me walk hand in hand with the horde then I’m done with wow.