(Some of you might think this post should not be in the Out-Of_Pod Experience forum but since this is about wishing harm on players outside the game, I felt it belongs here. I’m cool if a mod moves it to General Discussion or whatever).
I just read the latest blog post on James 315 Space. I am stunned and disgusted that someone would wish harm on another just because they lost a ship with game mechanics working as designed.
I’ve been playing MMOs for a long time and (as some family members who will remain nameless claim) perhaps a bit too much of them. I’ve come across players who treated me like garbage and stabbed me behind my back during in-guild politics. I had a few players who tricked me on the Exchange Market and ganked me while trying to complete a quest item in a pvp zone on WoW, and in this game scammed me of 15 million ISK during my first week.
I’m not happy about all of that being done to me but I always remember there are people behind the characters they play. They are human beings. No in-game act deserves wishing real-life out-of-game harm on another player, or on who that other player cares about.
I am asking, in the spirit of Friendship Week, for those out there who take the game too seriously and go totally unhinged to ---- please ----- take a break, go outside for a long walk, and during that long walk try to remember it’s only a game, and not worth getting so murderously angry over.
Not just any ship. An awfully fitted ship. That porpoise could be used in a children’s counting song: 0 Boosting Modules, 1 Cargohold Expander, 2 Survey Scanners, 3 Empty Rig Slots, 4 reasons to get ganked.
But…the ship is not real. The person who destroyed their ship is.
I have a problem hearing someone say they hope someone is “in the wrong place at the wrong time and catch a hot one in the skull”. I’m not saying players shouldn’t get angry playing a game, I’m saying they should govern themselves accordingly like they do in real life.
I’m actually a really nice industrialist player, and I support PvP in all forms, including suicide ganks, because it generates quality player game content.
It is entertainment, like football. People that get invested deeply in it see the variables a valuable. Some deal with it in a reasonable way, others become aggressive either verbally or physical.
Just make sure you have someone calm to talk and reason with outside of the game. Someone that doesn’t play the game and can look at it from a different perspective and tell you that the values in your spreadsheet aren’t important, after all, the reward was the friends we met and the adventures we had no matter the cost.
