Ethics and WoW

[Deleted]

Over the years, many of us have been confronted with moral and ethical choices when playing this game.

Would it really be so bad if I ninja'd that trinket? Should the guild use DKP or loot council? Is it just fun, or in some way wrong to gank that hordie for a whole hour?

Other times, while not being directly confronted with choices, we have engaged in discussing the choices of others. We wondered how fair the LFR loot system was. Whether or not Ensidia deserved their ban for the LK normal kill. Whether the guilds that exploited in t13 should have been banned or just had their gear reset. Whether steady nerfs to DS were justified, and if Blizzard were being inconsistent in recognizing minority achievement in PvP but not PvE.

In short, we've encountered a wide range of moral and ethical situations that crop up within the context of WoW.

I'm a graduate studying Philosophy at Cambridge and my research focus is on computer ethics, specifically ethical issues related to MMO's. I think there's a lot of general interest in these issues so I wanted to create an informal space in which I could discuss aspects of my research, the research of others, as well as comment on past and current happenings within the community. If these kinds of topics interest you or if you have a moment please check it out at mmethics.wordpress.com. Content should be uploaded fairly regularly and anything and everything related to computer ethics and MMO's will be covered.

I'll sign off by opening a discussion; What has been your stand out moment where you considered an ethical issue related to WoW? Was it to do with cheating, or ninja'ing, or stealing from the guild bank, or something completely different? For me, the issue I found most interesting has been the debate between exploitation and 'clever use of game mechanics'. Specifically, when Ensidia used mages to spell steal Pollinate for Hodir hard mode. Whether the action itself was an exploit or not is interesting in itself, but I think the more interesting question is how Blizzard's actions affected their decision making, and whether Blizzard's subsequent response was the right one.

[Crym]

I still find the "if Blizzard doesn't prevent me from doing it than there's nothing wrong with doing it" attitude a lot of players seem to have now.

[pld]

I find an ethical decision I have to make as an officer in a guild of real life friends is...how do we address people who underperform. It's never easy asking someone to step out of raid or even calling them out for mistakes/sub-par performance, but when you factor in the fact that they're friends who you hang out with and see often, it gets even more difficult.

It's a tough balance between not playing favorites, figuring out what's best for the guild, and managing relationships.

[yjmark]

For me, I believe that you should hold the same ethical actions across everything you do. Thus, I act the same in WoW as I would in real life. I do not steal, cheat, etc... I know that the consequences in a game are less severe, but "severity of consequences" do not define my actions. "I" define my actions by what I believe is the difference between right and wrong.

As for the discussion on exploitations vs clever use of mechanics - that is not black and white. There is a fuzzy middle area where it is not clear. However, what Ensidia did was pretty obviously not a "clever use of mechanics". On the flip side, Blizzard's inconsistency in the past made it difficult for world first races to know which rules they "could" break without hopefully getting nailed. And world first races are always running on the edge, so Blizzard holds some responsibility in the matter.

At least, that is my opinion.

[diaskeaus]

My only two gripes are that: 1) developers seem not to punish players who mentally abuse others in-game. Sometimes the situations are quite serious., and 2) the Terms specifically state that continually ganking (and by ganking, I mean corpse camping with a group of people, not just random kills) won't be punished, even though it's a clear abuse of power on the side of players who think it's funny. Of course it is more prevalent on PvP servers, and those not on a PvP server will only really experience it if they are flagged, but killing lower-level quest givers, mobs, and quest objectives, is a good way to ruin someone's day.

Thankfully #2 doesn't seem to happen all that much (in my experience, anyways); this could be because leveling is so fast now-a-days, so people don't really have a reason to go around bothering people when there is so much still left to do.

I don't see a problem with ninja'ing (I don't do it), because in a couple of levels you can grind for that piece anyway, to your heart's content. Gear that drops in Mists, in addition (aside from heroics), is automatically calculated in LFR, so things can't really go wrong there. If you feel cheated in a guild, you know who the culprit is/was, and can deal with that person later with guild law or punishment.

Finally, Blizzard should not punish players for taking advantage of exploits. They should congratulate them, and then release a hotfix.

[Deleted]

I don't find almost anything of the stuff you listed above related to ethics. For example cheating or abusing some mechanic has nothing to do with ethics imo, cheating irl might be an ethical issue but ninjaing loot or using a hack has nothing to do with ethics. The only thing I find ethical in WoW is bullying someone, but really, ignoring someone solves most of the bullying issues. There are some other things also which would in principle be ethical questions, but everything within the whole game is so insignificant anyway so it doesn't matter.

[Trassk]

People playing wow use it as an escape from the real world and the 'moral constraints' they are told to live by. Ganking, its a form of bullying that they can get away with because its done in a game and not in real life. Stealing from other players, they won't get arrested for it in a game. Ripping someone off, they won't get told not to do this.

Wow, given what it allows to do, also opens the doors to satisfy many of the worst aspects of people in general, and without constraint.

[yjmark]

People playing wow use it as an escape from the real world and the 'moral constraints' they are told to live by. Ganking, its a form of bullying that they can get away with because its done in a game and not in real life. Stealing from other players, they won't get arrested for it in a game. Ripping someone off, they won't get told not to do this.

Wow, given what it allows to do, also opens the doors to satisfy many of the worst aspects of people in general, and without constraint.

imho - if you feel you are being forced to 'moral constraints' in the real world, then you have other issues.

[Deleted]

I don't find almost anything of the stuff you listed above related to ethics. For example cheating or abusing some mechanic has nothing to do with ethics imo, cheating irl might be an ethical issue but ninjaing loot or using a hack has nothing to do with ethics. The only thing I find ethical in WoW is bullying someone, but really, ignoring someone solves most of the bullying issues. There are some other things also which would in principle be ethical questions, but everything within the whole game is so insignificant anyway so it doesn't matter.

This mindset is exactly what the problem is, because these choices and actions, how small they might appear to you, are actually all about ethics.

But having a discussion about it is pretty pointless, because people who think like this do so because it's already in their nature. They have been brought up without proper ethics anyway. Blame the parents.

[Trassk]

imho - if you feel you are being forced to 'moral constraints' in the real world, then you have other issues.

Seriously? you want to go there?

Ok, lets imagine you live life by the kind of things you get away with in wow. You walk down the street, and some guy offers you money to take his gun, go kill ten people you come across and take there jewelry, giving it to the guy.
Then, you see someone who plays on an opposing football team you've played against. You decide to stab him in the back and laugh over his body.
Lastly, you go kill your boss and take all the money in his wallet.

Now, your telling me, the stuff you do in wow reflects just how you could act in real life? I don't know where you come from, but having the ability to beat up someone just for the fun of it and not get arrested for it does draw a line in the sand.

I wasn't saying people should ever consider the stuff they do in wow as something they should do irl, I'm saying there are people who have no moral constraint, who would love to beat up someone for the hell of it, to steal from people for the fun of it, and well irl they can't because of laws and rules, they get to satisfy that itch in something like wow. You understand?

[Ebonheart]

Over the years, many of us have been confronted with moral and ethical choices when playing this game.

Would it really be so bad if I ninja'd that trinket? Should the guild use DKP or loot council? Is it just fun, or in some way wrong to gank that hordie for a whole hour?

Other times, while not being directly confronted with choices, we have engaged in discussing the choices of others. We wondered how fair the LFR loot system was. Whether or not Ensidia deserved their ban for the LK normal kill. Whether the guilds that exploited in t13 should have been banned or just had their gear reset. Whether steady nerfs to DS were justified, and if Blizzard were being inconsistent in recognizing minority achievement in PvP but not PvE.

In short, we've encountered a wide range of moral and ethical situations that crop up within the context of WoW.

I'm a graduate studying Philosophy at Cambridge and my research focus is on computer ethics, specifically ethical issues related to MMO's. I think there's a lot of general interest in these issues so I wanted to create an informal space in which I could discuss aspects of my research, the research of others, as well as comment on past and current happenings within the community. If these kinds of topics interest you or if you have a moment please check it out at mmethics.wordpress.com. Content should be uploaded fairly regularly and anything and everything related to computer ethics and MMO's will be covered.

I'll sign off by opening a discussion; What has been your stand out moment where you considered an ethical issue related to WoW? Was it to do with cheating, or ninja'ing, or stealing from the guild bank, or something completely different? For me, the issue I found most interesting has been the debate between exploitation and 'clever use of game mechanics'. Specifically, when Ensidia used mages to spell steal Pollinate for Hodir hard mode. Whether the action itself was an exploit or not is interesting in itself, but I think the more interesting question is how Blizzard's actions affected their decision making, and whether Blizzard's subsequent response was the right one.

I honestly don't think its as black and white as most people make it out to be. In a competitive environment people don't really think about ethics and morals. Its all about getting the edge over someone and fighting for every little inch you can get.

Its similar in Football, where you have players diving inside the penalty box to get a foul or in other sports such as cycling where doping is rampant and even in baseball. Its no different than in raiding. Its competitive. People want to be the top few or even the first. They will exploit mechanics regardless of the consequences.
Its at the same time hard to judge raiding since its come a long way and more complex compared to what we had in early WoW. If you ask me if its more exploitable, I would say yes. Class stacking is also another form of an exploit.

However, its different when comparing to something like ganking an opposition faction member or ninjaing an item. I've camped some horde for sometime, maybe around 5-10 mins but I wouldn't even consider camping someone for longer than that cause I just don't see the benefit to me. I ain't spending my in game time harassing someone. However, Ninjaing an item depends on what is at stake. For me, loot isn't the be all and end all.

However, what I consider ethical and moral choices that impact the game are mostly your dealings with other people. Trolling trade chat when someone has asked a genuine question is for me personally, beyond all the smaller things that go on in the game. That itself says a lot about the person you are in the real world.

You can take all the rest, since raiding and PVP is competitive, however, something as simple as dealing with people; I'll draw the line there. So I wouldn't care what a guild does when it comes to abusing mechanics since people do the same thing in the real world.

The most common moral and ethical choices we come across seems to be related to trolling. Trolling of late, well since the dawn of the internet and chat rooms and multiplayer has simply been very rampant.

[Deleted]

For me, I believe that you should hold the same ethical actions across everything you do. Thus, I act the same in WoW as I would in real life. I do not steal, cheat, etc... I know that the consequences in a game are less severe, but "severity of consequences" do not define my actions.

An interesting and important question in the literature is whether the 'virtualness' of games impacts upon how they are treated in terms of ethical and moral content. Is it right or wrong to steal virtual goods, and is it right or wrong in the same way it is in everyday life? Two papers which touch on this are Ren Reynolds, "Ethics and practice in virtual worlds" and J. Croft "It's just a game - Ethical reasoning within virtual worlds". Looking at these kinds of papers will eventually be a major part of the blog

[Stede]

Great topic, OP.

In my dealings with other players in WoW, I'm quite ethical. That's my personality, and it's very much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of thing. I don't suffer jackasses, and I will take time to help those that genuinely ask.

I despise the development team for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the stupid crap where they screw around with abilities all willy-nilly. My main has always been a rogue, and the best example of this I can think of is simply the list of raid boss abilities that can be cloaked and the ones that can't be cloaked - regardless of them being magic damage.

To know your class and perform well only to get screwed by a mechanic you felt you had a legitimate counter to - strictly because the dev team abritrarily decided it was 'too cheap' - that's just horseshit to me.

But, that's not really interesting, imo. The interesting part of my WoW ethics surrounds the half dozen or so times that I've gold-capped. The tactics I've used, the theories I've crafted, the tools I've developed. How I crafted them, how I learned them, how I taught them to the masses and made them available to all - in time. How I've been a pillar of the WoW goldmaking community, balancing several factors at odds with one another.

You see, in goldmaking, opportunities are often limited by their popularity. If everybody is working the same goldmaking tip, then nobody is really making much gold. So, when I build a new tool - like a powerful shuffling spreadsheet - I initially want to keep it to myself until I can make some gold using it. After all, I made it, right? But I'm also a big contributor to the community - and without folks contributing to that, people will lose interest, and the community will die out. The compromise was a limited early release among established supporters of the community, followed a month or two later by a general release.

If you've followed me on all that - great. If you haven't, that's fine too. Things get even more murky if we dive further into the game and become critical of certain aspects. Milling, Prospecting, and Disenchanting are casts that can only be executed in the singular. There is no Prospect All, no Mill All, no Disenchant All. Blizzard will tell you there are some complications here, but they are far from insurmountable from a programming standpoint. Folks have been clamoring for years for some method - any method - that allows them to spend less time actively mashing a prospecting macro button every five seconds like a rhesus monkey, and allows them to explore the other facets of the game while still enjoying goldmaking.

If you've done any large bit of shuffling, it quickly becomes apparent how many scrolls are made using shuffled dust and not dust from DE'd greens or blues that drop. The demand of the AH and end-goods like enchants and gems requires folks who process these materials in bulk in order to sustain the end game economy. What I mean here is that this is a necessary process to the quality of the game. And the mechanic that enables it is, frankly ridiculous.

What then is the solution? Well, you can hold your breath waiting for blizzard, or you can walk the line of the ToS in the shadow of Blizzard's established stance on multiboxing - and run a dungeon on one account while the other interprets those keystrokes as mashing a button - like a monkey. Blizzard has established that does not run afoul of the ToS. So long as each keystroke is initiated by a user action, it's not a problem.

Then why the hell are we forced to metagame 2 accounts if the concept of this is 'technically okay'? If you had a script that simply sent the same monkey button press every five seconds - who would know? Would it still be a violation of the TOS if this is the mechanism by which your 2nd account proepcted ore while you raided?

Well, yeah, it would, technically. And that minute distinction really raises a lot of questions, particularly from an ethics standpoint, rather than a legal one. I'm not really trying to take a stance here so much as I'm trying to describe the subject in a way that promotes discussion. Though, in the interest of full disclosure, it was in grappling with this issue that I had my 'standout moment' in terms of ethics in WoW.

[Deleted]

I wasn't saying people should ever consider the stuff they do in wow as something they should do irl, I'm saying there are people who have no moral constraint, who would love to beat up someone for the hell of it, to steal from people for the fun of it, and well irl they can't because of laws and rules, they get to satisfy that itch in something like wow. You understand?

Trassk, this touches upon a very current debate within computer ethics. If the kind of reasoning you employ is sound, should it not also apply to people who want to commit child murder and paedophilia? Should we make a game for them? Perhaps obviously not you might say, but then what about a game that wasn't made for these people but had this kind of content. Should it be allowed? What if it ends up acting as a surrogate for these kinds of people, is that a good or bad thing. A lot of recent work has been done on these kinds of questions, a paper by Garry Young "Enacting taboos as a means to an end; but what end? On the morality of motivations for child murder and paedophilia within gamespace" is well worth a read.

[Trassk]

Trassk, this touches upon a very current debate within computer ethics. If the kind of reasoning you employ is sound, should it not also apply to people who want to commit child murder and paedophilia? Should we make a game for them? Perhaps obviously not you might say, but then what about a game that wasn't made for these people but had this kind of content. Should it be allowed? What if it ends up acting as a surrogate for these kinds of people, is that a good or bad thing. A lot of recent work has been done on these kinds of questions, a paper by Garry Young "Enacting taboos as a means to an end; but what end? On the morality of motivations for child murder and paedophilia within gamespace" is well worth a read.

Arn't you pushing the bar here suggesting that. It plays the old trend that people like violent movies, action movies and fighting films. But it doesn't mean just because they watch such movies they should then go out and beat people up or blow stuff up.
Human beings in there nature have so many faults, and if people find a means to satisfy there itch they have for violence in a virtual world instead of real life, its a better alternative. I am not saying it should ever be encouraged, but when developers make games of such nature, they know it will appeal to peoples basic human flaws.

[Deleted]

Stede, this is an extremely interesting post. Unfortunately, I am not well versed on gold making in WoW as i'm not much auction house player, and while I know there is a lot of literature on MMO economies, i'm not too hot on those either, but might be able to dig some out.

However, it does remind me somewhat of an issue I will be blogging about in the near future. The economy in GW2 during launch. I played in Nihilum for the short lived GW2 experiment and played the game pretty much non-stop so was up to date with all the ban drama. The thing was Arena Net's lack of endgame beta testing meant that serious flaws with the in game currencies, gold and karma, were not discovered. Gold was extremely hard to come by and karma was abundant. It was discovered that if one had cooking as a profession, they could buy certain ingredients for a small amount of karma, use a recipe to make some food and sell that food back to the vendor for a huge gold profit. This led to a huge wave of bans for purposefully disrupting the economy. Yet similar practice went unpunished. Further the ethics of banning (permanently) accounts for performing a legitimate in game transaction is fairly dubious.

I'm really interested in your story and concerns about how the artificial wall of multiboxing somehow seems to make an action ok. There doesn't seem to be anything in the practice that would suddenly transform the ethical decision. If you would like to discuss it more, feel free to pm me

[Stede]

Arn't you pushing the bar here suggesting that. It plays the old trend that people like violent movies, action movies and fighting films. But it doesn't mean just because they watch such movies they should then go out and beat people up or blow stuff up.
Human beings in there nature have so many faults, and if people find a means to satisfy there itch they have for violence in a virtual world instead of real life, its a better alternative. I am not saying it should ever be encouraged, but when developers make games of such nature, they know it will appeal to peoples basic human flaws.

And the nature of storytelling throughout the course of civilization inevitably relies of some kind of conflict, be it internal or external. Dercying violence in the medium of video games rings hollow when reading older literature and examining its themes.

[Deleted]

Arn't you pushing the bar here suggesting that. It plays the old trend that people like violent movies, action movies and fighting films. But it doesn't mean just because they watch such movies they should then go out and beat people up or blow stuff up.

Of course, such claims should rightly be ridiculed. The point was whether we can isolate a distinction between cases. For example, if we have an argument that says it's ok for people to play WoW to satisfy the itches to murder, shouldn't those same arguments apply to cases of more extreme violence and perverseness in games? Most people would have difficulty accepting that.

[kingriku]

During Wrath i was in a Black Temple raid where the RL told me he would ninja the Warglaive ( I said whatever thats your choice) especially since he told the group it was free roll on the very slim chance it would drop. Well during Illidan he dc'd for a long time and i got RL and ML, and vioula it dropped and everyone started wisping me things like "I'll pay 20k for it" and at the Time Dk's couldn't use it. So /rw No Carried would recieve the item and /roll top roller who could use it would get it, and thats how it went. (Btw back then 20 was a pretty decent amount of G) I couldn't sell it, i felt it would way too unfair.

[Stede]

Stede, this is an extremely interesting post. Unfortunately, I am not well versed on gold making in WoW as i'm not much auction house player, and while I know there is a lot of literature on MMO economies, i'm not too hot on those either, but might be able to dig some out.

However, it does remind me somewhat of an issue I will be blogging about in the near future. The economy in GW2 during launch. I played in Nihilum for the short lived GW2 experiment and played the game pretty much non-stop so was up to date with all the ban drama. The thing was Arena Net's lack of endgame beta testing meant that serious flaws with the in game currencies, gold and karma, were not discovered. Gold was extremely hard to come by and karma was abundant. It was discovered that if one had cooking as a profession, they could buy certain ingredients for a small amount of karma, use a recipe to make some food and sell that food back to the vendor for a huge gold profit. This led to a huge wave of bans for purposefully disrupting the economy. Yet similar practice went unpunished. Further the ethics of banning (permanently) accounts for performing a legitimate in game transaction is fairly dubious.

I'm really interested in your story and concerns about how the artificial wall of multiboxing somehow seems to make an action ok. There doesn't seem to be anything in the practice that would suddenly transform the ethical decision. If you would like to discuss it more, feel free to pm me

Ah neat! Yeah, the disparity between law and ethics is something I've been able to explore deeply in WoW. If I get some time, I'll shoot you a PM. Really interested to see how this thread develops