PvP and recreational sadism

[Feranor]

You're overanalyzing it. It has very little to do with a conscious attempt to "deprive the other faction of enjoyment" or something like that. Occam's razor demands a simple answer, and that answer is, in this case, that the majority of BG goers are poor players with no sense of strategy. If they see a red name, they head for it to try to kill it. In WSG it takes the form of GY camping, because that's where the red names show up. It's far more obvious in AB though, as people abandon nodes and leave them undefended because they see a battle taking place 200 yards away. This happens all the time. It's far less about maliciousness and far more about the OCD and poor tactical & strategical sense of most WoW players.

Occam's Razor forbids the introduction of superfluous entities and the making of unnecessary assumptions. Simple "If it's red, it's dead." doesn't account for them enjoying a completely lopsided "battle". What I'm trying to explain is why they don't just simply stand on the graveyard in order to prevent the opposing team from regrouping and potentially fighting back, but instead jump in circles and apparently have the time of their lives killing that single Night Elf that keeps on respawning over and over.

Saying that "they just kill those with red names" is describing a phenomenon (a slightly different one), not explaining it.

PvP is competitive. The more you crush the opponent the better you feel, no? It's for responses like yours. Whether they're well educated, or simply pure rage gibberish that reads like so: I H8 PVP I WUZ GETTIN FARMED BY THE HOARD THEIR A BUNCH OF FAT ANGRY VIRGINS. Knowing that you crushed your opponent enough to incite a response is fun. Not to mention if you've been losing BGs terribly, it's nice to finally have your revenge. Personally I find it a little boring when it's a complete massacre like that and prefer when you win with a decent lead.

But there is no competition. I don't get satisfaction from, say, "winning" a game of Chess when I have all Queens instead of Pawns and the opponent doesn't. They apparently do. And not just that, they aren't satisfied by "winning", they need to rub in it as much as they possibly can.

I mean, I've played the Horde side, too. You queue solo, you wait ~20 minutes for the invitation and then the Alliance dies so fast that you can barely get a shot in. It's boring. And it just seems pitiable to me that these players would flaunt this as some kind of achievement.

And yes, the response you mentioned is probably one of the main reasons for their behaviour. They revel in the thought that their actions in the game cause frustration to others. That's why I called it recreational sadism. I only share this in so far as I'm a sadist towards sadists. But I don't behave like they do because I don't want my opponents to think of me as someone who doesn't deserve a fair fight; because if they do, they won't give me one. This, by the way, is the backbone of competitive PvP in DAoC and the sole reason for its success.

edit: Nice thread btw OP, not the usual "ALLIANCE SUCKS", I think a lot of players enjoy close games more then facerolling the enemy team, it's only natural. Then there is a miniority that enjoys griefing others, it's hard to tell the difference between these 2 types of players when the teams are so unevenly matched though so it's easy to come to the conclussion that everyone likes to grief others.

Well, to put it simply, it's your mindset combined with the circumstance at hand that determines your decisions, so if you put the average player in a situation that encourages grief play (domination, anonymity, uninterpreted scoreboards, arbitrary ratings, ...) that player will behave in the way I described, unless he has some kind of code of honor or empathy preventing them from doing so.

[Soulstainer]

Occam's Razor forbids the introduction of superfluous entities and the making of unnecessary assumptions. Simple "If it's red, it's dead." doesn't account for them enjoying a completely lopsided "battle". What I'm trying to explain is why they don't just simply stand on the graveyard in order to prevent the opposing team from regrouping and potentially fighting back, but instead jump in circles and apparently have the time of their lives killing that single Night Elf that keeps on respawning over and over.

Saying that "they just kill those with red names" is describing a phenomenon (a slightly different one), not explaining it.



But there is no competition. I don't get satisfaction from, say, "winning" a game of Chess when I have all Queens instead of Pawns and the opponent doesn't. They apparently do. And not just that, they aren't satisfied by "winning", they need to rub in it as much as they possibly can.

I mean, I've played the Horde side, too. You queue solo, you wait ~20 minutes for the invitation and then the Alliance dies so fast that you can barely get a shot in. It's boring. And it just seems pitiable to me that these players would flaunt this as some kind of achievement.

And yes, the response you mentioned is probably one of the main reasons for their behaviour. They revel in the thought that their actions in the game cause frustration to others. That's why I called it recreational sadism. I only share this in so far as I'm a sadist towards sadists. But I don't behave like they do because I don't want my opponents to think of me as someone who doesn't deserve a fair fight; because if they do, they won't give me one. This, by the way, is the backbone of competitive PvP in DAoC and the sole reason for its success.



Well, to put it simply, it's your mindset combined with the circumstance at hand that determines your decisions, so if you put the average player in a situation that encourages grief play (domination, anonymity, uninterpreted scoreboards, arbitrary ratings, ...) that player will behave in the way I described, unless he has some kind of code of honor or empathy preventing them from doing so.

If you put an average player with no gear into a PvP situation such as the battle posed they will be dominated 100% of the time. PvP is about killing people as quickly as possible. It has nothing to do with greifing or trying to make them feel bad though those are gonna happen depending on the emotional status of the person behind the keyboard. If your weak minded or get all emotional over getting your rearend handed to you on a platter in pvp then maybe you should stick with killing game scripted stuff. When I first started pvping I got slaughtered by everything and I broke many a keyboards then I got tough skinned and got some gear and now Im the one handing out the asswhoopings. And I will be honest if your team is so bad that they can't get off the ress platform well thats when ima slaughter ya in groups. PvP is completely about 1 team being better than the other in terms of coordination/skill/gear. The team that wins is the better. If your the loser suck it up get better gear/skill/coordination and get back in there if you can mentally take it.

[Melkor]

Tunnel vision horde sadism works against them sometimes. The beauty of BGs is that they are objective based, not killing blows based. I'm on horde side and in my realm we are overrun with kill farmers who know nothing about strategy, tactics or team work. They go where the biggest collection of alliance players are and proceed to take part in a 20-minute long battle royal while negelcting what actually needs to be done - guarding bases, etc. Quite often they lose and then descend into a froth of QQ - "FAIL!" I find the alliance teams to be much better at teamwork actually (although to be honest I'm noticing more and more partial premades in alliance groups).

[Stanton Biston]

For a long time I've held a similar thought/conclusion about PvP as the OP does. However, in my experience, the phenomena transcends WoW- It's present in every online pvp game to some extent.

[Pack Storm]

Ok, where are the zealots? Blizzard said win rates are even so where are the zealots to regurgitate Blizzards holy word?

Dont even try to do deny that horde win twice as much.

---------- Post added 2011-06-27 at 06:03 AM ----------



Ya? And whats your point?

He is AFK'ing because he tried, and he finally gave up because he is surrounded by idiots who dont have a clue, so if he busts his balls trying to win its doesn't matter because 1 ally v 10 horde is going to have the same outcome as 0 ally vs 10 horde.

He tried already which is much more than what 99% of the people in BG's do.

Getting 3 kills and less than 1 mil damage in a time expired bg isn't exactly trying, it's sitting in a corner afk'ing.

[Nose Nuggets]

As a guy who pretty much only does random bgs on US alliance, i can say that we win about 35-40% not terrible considering the BG queue time, day or night, prime time or off peek, is less then 10 minutes. prime time its instant -> 90 seconds.

The primary issue i have found with alliance BG people is the lack of a team players. a lot of people simply dont care about the objectives or contributing meaningfully. they just want to pvp, which means hitting horde. so they just engage the first thing with red text over its head irregardless of any other factors. to put it bluntly, there is a complete lack of anything resembling tactical prowess. time of day seems to play a large role as well. this past weekend is a fine example. eots weekend, from about 3pm to 6pm PST on Saturday i think i lost 1 random EOTS. i queued for EOTS randomly throughout the day on Sunday and i think i wont 3 out of 10-13. i was hard-queueing for gilnaeus and AB (my favorites) and won 80% of those when i wasnt queing eots on that same sunday.

the amount of people i see stop and fight horde on the ramp to LM in AB, instead of just running past to actually cap the flag boggles my fing mind. i run around horde to get to objectives, i dont see many other people do that.

[God8010]

I see a lot of this in real life too. If you ask someone a question they dont want to talk about, might look bad on them, they can even go as far as to play incoherent. Take two random words from the last sentence you say, interject some emotional connection to some strong misunderstanding, raise the volume of their voice and distort any attempt at keeping that conversation alive.

I believe the problem is logic only has a place when you need a logical answer and life in general being very illogical. Everyone is perfect, everyone is the best, no one could do no wrong, all great and delusional but logical to some extent. Second it goes a place they dont like, we can just drop logic and add in babbling.

Still bothers me when you meet someone cool with one bad habit and see em trying this to run from repercussions. You know right then and there you cold never reeally depend on that person because when the chips are down the voice in their head takes a vacation.

[Socialhealer]

looks like people are pissed about 80% of their team being bots, and watching bots getting farmed.

[Flaks]

PvP is competitive. The more you crush the opponent the better you feel, no?

No.

There's no greater feeling than winning or losing in a nail-bittingly close match because both teams were so coordinated and played well. I definitely saw a greater frequency of this back in WotLK. A bit less in tBC. Quite a bit less in Cataclysm and literally never in MoP.

Healers work directly contrary to this as coordination seems to go out the window with imbalanced number of healers on teams.

[forwards1ca]

You're overanalyzing it. It has very little to do with a conscious attempt to "deprive the other faction of enjoyment" or something like that. Occam's razor demands a simple answer, and that answer is, in this case, that the majority of BG goers are poor players with no sense of strategy. If they see a red name, they head for it to try to kill it. In WSG it takes the form of GY camping, because that's where the red names show up. It's far more obvious in AB though, as people abandon nodes and leave them undefended because they see a battle taking place 200 yards away. This happens all the time. It's far less about maliciousness and far more about the OCD and poor tactical & strategical sense of most WoW players.

THIS! So very correct. The OP is trying to make a generalization about people that has about as much basis in fact and sound theories as doen the Loch Ness Monster debate. Why make an attempt to go all intellectual on the subject when the answer is so very simple? Most people in pvp are bad players, pure and simple. Not understanding tactics or the objective of the bg doesn't make someoen sadistic, it makes them a poor player.

On a side note, how does graveyard camping = sadism? Sadism is the derivation of pleasure as a result of inflicting pain, cruelty, degradation, or humiliation, or, watching such behaviors inflicted on others. How does killing pixels translate to this? By your "definition", me takign my T2 dk into randoms is sadistic, becasue the average player has absolutely no chance of surviving a fight with me. Hell, an average player has no chance of surviving a fight with any T2 player (a real one, not a win trader or someone who bought their rating/gear). This kind of thing is what pisses me off about forums and the internet in general. Someone trying to post psuedo-intellectual bullshit that has no point. So you get into a bunch of gorups where people can't play? SO what? with 9 million subs, there are bound to be a metric crap ton of crappy players out there. Just because you happen to see a bunch of them doesn't mean people are sadistic or defective or anything. Its the law of averages - in any group large enough, you're bound to see all ends of the spectrum. And I can guarantee that you are convienently leaving out the times where the situation was reversed.