Crabs in a Pot

While looking up "schadenfreude" on wikipedia in an attempt to see if that was what I was feeling, I came across this amusing, if not exactly researched definition of "crab mentality."

This is slightly closer, but not quite it either.

See, it's not schadenfreude, I'm not taking delight in another's suffering. Quite the opposite, I'm actually feeling physical pain and possibly risking rising blood pressure (even though normally my blood pressure is steady as a placid pond) at reading about other people taking delight in another's suffering.

Crab mentality defines the morass of rubbish and shitstorm in the wake of Positron's announcements, all threads regarding the subject of farms and MA abuse shoveled into two official threads, on which people highly polarized and passionate + people who are just trolling or making an offhand thoughtless comment now and then are quarreling about.

And like one of the crabs in the abovementioned pot, I just seem rather unwilling to let the damn thing go.

Why?

I don't really know why. Maybe it's lost potential. Maybe it's just grumpy dissatisfaction with how people quash other people who don't fit in their nice neat playstyles and lump them all into a nebulous "them" to be feared and hated and fought.

And this "people" includes players and Positron.

I've pretty much settled down into a resigned "let's forget the MA for now" atittude, and am out to explore I13's merits by visiting and revisiting story arcs - especially villainside - that I haven't played, or played and forgot by virtue of being a dominator that gets crushed by purple triangles.

Staying redside and exploring brutes, doms, Arachnos soldiers and Widows and the odd mm and corruptor I wanted to make... along with street sweeping, story arcs, Ouroboros and TFs, can probably last me until this whole Going Rogue shebang, which again, I like the potential of, and can smell branching dialogue and moral choice systems falling into place.

Yet unlike the arenas and PvP zones, of which I can take them or leave them, and don't really care either way what the hell happens inside them... I find I do care a lot about the way MA is going.

Because to me, MA is user-created content, which means flexibility and choice. It was marketed as flexibility and choice and the freedom to go from 1-50 away from dev content as well as a creation system.

It doesn't really matter if during the Rikti Comm Farm period, 95% of my playstyle fell directly into the devs' dream playstyle - some honest, naive player meandering his/her way through thousands of story arcs written for players by players, avoiding storyless maps strewn with enemies.

I somehow feel obliged to defend and state the existence of that other 5% of me that lies to grind and street sweep and min-max and seek high efficiency, as well as the other players for whom "fun" does not lie in reading a wall of text.

And I find it extremely ridiculous that non-exploitative arcs are getting swept up in the frenzy to ban all farm-like objects in the MA. If there are no clear guidelines to follow, wtf is CS using as a judgement call? Their "hunches?" CS is one of the lowest paid, thankless jobs in the industry. AoC had a GM that cybersexed with a player. WoW had a GM who left a "press this button to kill anything" T-shirt with a player. For every CS rep who has a clue, there are equally others who do not. Is this the quality filter user-created arcs are going through? Random spotchecks?

It's the principle of it that's getting me mad. If I were a selfish pragmatic bastard, I could shrug, continue to make my maps which would probably not ring one single alarm bell, publish and unpublish as I feel like it, continue playing how I like, and if I got stomped on, that would be the point I make a fuss and quit, I suppose.

In the same way, I could shrug that my dominator is okay, he does decent amounts of damage, and as long as I eat a luck shield, I can kill EBs, so WAI, cry moar about PToDs.

But I can't. Cos it's the principle of it. I can't quite get to a more rational reason than that. Because I don't want to look like a selfish, arrogant, self-serving jerkwad that only has himself as the centre of the universe would be part of that principle, yes. And because the system just doesn't work if only some outliers are profiteering (yay, perma-doms) as contrasted with overhauling something so that all benefit (yay, I15 dom buff.)

Granted, exploits are exploits. Stuff that is broken is broken. When it's borked, it's borked. So fix it. I'm not saying don't fix it - unlike some in the camp who are just crying that their favorite toy got taken away, disgust at them polarizes some people even further.

But what the hell is with trying to rely on some kind of honour system, unclear guidelines, inconsistent after-the-fact enforcement of retroactive punitive action?

THIS drives me insane. I don't know why, but it DOES. Bat-frothingly, mad-dog-rabidly insane. Maybe because it's as effective (in my opinion) as trying to bail water out of the Titanic with a cheesecloth.

The story arc people are just going to (some smugly and self-righeously, irritating, but what can you do, story elitists are like the PvE version of stereotypical PvPers - some do exist and are jerks and give the playstyle a bad name) continue what they are doing.

The farmers are either going to leave the AE or continue what they are doing until your threatened punishment catches up with them, if ever. Arcs continue being banned randomly for remotedly resembling a farm or making someone somewhere unhappy. And the CS team gets bogged down in an overload of petitions, complaints, re-petitions, re-complaints, appeals and judgement calls.

And then you have the middle of the range who vacillate between the options, some more fearful and paranoid than others, others more complacent until it happens to them.

Life goes on, with a lot of bad feelings stirred up.

May as well NOT have tried to bail water with a cheesecloth. What the heck were you trying to achieve in the first place? Don't know, we aren't being told. *rolls eyes*

If "bad blood" was the answer, it was a pretty darned good attempt. Total failure at anything else, though.

I can't quite seem to get over this. Rationally, it's bad for my blood pressure and nobody else's. Rationally, I am well aware that people make mistakes. And that it's unrealistic to have expectations of perfection (or even acting like how you'd like them to act) from anything or anybody. (Never mind that this assumption was one of the critical flaws in the mess...)

Rationally, I know that some people cannot find it in themselves to apologize or smooth bad feelings over. Rationally, it is making a mountain out of a molehill of disappointed expectations.

I remember reading somewhere that guilt is anger focused in on oneself for not having met some kind of expectation. It's not really guilt. Maybe a slight bit of guilt for giving in to a Rikti Comm Farm, but on the other hand, it was rather instructive to see how the other half flies so to speak. Many of these people talking on high horses have never experienced a farm, fer example. I like to think it made me more open-minded.

I can't for the life of me recall what term was used for anger focused outward at other people for not having met an expectation. Was it frustration? Yeah, I'm suppose I'm somewhat frustrated. I expected this MA system to go as smoothly as promised, and to be as open and flexible as its potential implied - not to end up closed and restrictive as an overreaction against farming.

Especially since I have grown to accept farmers as part and parcel of the landscape of CoX. As long as they afford me the right to give them zero response when they send me a tell asking "farm or fill?", I'm quite happy to let them friggin' be. They play multiple accounts, they pay for the game to remain alive, they're bloody happy doing the same thing over and over again to create more supply and influence.

Yes, there will be mudflation of influence due to farming - but the reverse bid AH lets anyone siphon off a portion of whatever the current value of influence is with a bit of luck and strategy. The only thing you have to come to terms with is that your character build will never sport as many purples and desirable recipes as their characters because you're not spending every waking hour of your game farming. Well, duh.

Irrationally, I'm worrying away at this issue like a dog worries a bone. Mostly in the hope that the devs will respond and something else constructive gets done. Perhaps it is misplaced hope and misplaced trust. Perhaps I should just stop caring and giving a damn. That's sorta like a double tragedy though.

Some closure seems to be lacking. Are all the bans done? Judging from the one CS reply from a GM, not yet. They don't have any guidelines to go by either. Any revelation about these new badges that will point player behavior towards more constructive, non-badge-farming ways? Not yet.

*snorts*

Meanwhile, I shall watch with a certain amount of jilted schadenfreude as the news begins to spread about this fiasco through the blogosphere. They're starting to talk about it now - May 6 through May 12, I've seen the articles all declaiming the obvious failure of user-created content. I can only grin wryly. There was so much hope. All come to this. Not exactly to naught, but to this.