Sculli said:
Being outside this game, and likely MMOs in general for the last 2+ years or so has really made you idealistic. Ideals are well and good, Sculli, but ideals say crime would stop if we just hugged each other instead of got angry.
The reality of the situation (and human nature in general) is the 'good listeners' are the ones being taken advantage of by the 'attention whores,' because they know they will find their audience. The system is flawed because the people are flawed, and there's plenty of reward and almost no risk for being 'disloyal.' The people are flawed because, for the most part, we're young. There's no community because there's no connection. I know bits and pieces about people here and there, but /shutdown severs that tie between your avatar and mine. It's easy to take advantage of someone in-game and simply not care about it. How often have we heard players say those playing RMT accounts aren't 'real people?' How many times, cross-servers, have LS leaders stolen away in the middle of the night with an LS bank worth hundreds of millions?
It happens in other games, too - remember the WoW funeral for a guild's member that was crashed by another guild and PKd all the members, then posted video of it and justifying it by saying they shouldn't have held it in a contested zone?
People are using others, and being used by still others every single day in this game. We go out as a group to get items for an individual. We only do it as a group because it's impossible to do it ourselves. We stab another in the back because our backs have been stabbed. We complain that so-and-so's LS botclaims this HNM because our LS's resident botter has an out of date version. We denounce RMT while IGE is taking our order.
We can all spin tales of how well an endgame shell should work, about how great this server would be if this or that happened or if all the shells joined into a megashell and dominated everything. Maybe this is the answer, maybe it isn't. Maybe the answer is simply an endgame shell that does something else. Does things that benefit all who join instead of one. ToAU seems to have a lot of this content. Assault gives everyone points for winning, and every job has something to work towards when they do it. ENMs are the same way - everyone who goes in gets something when you succeed. Maybe this is too easy, or too repetitive. Maybe that JP Limbus shell has it right - get one person everything and then move on to the next, and hope everyone stays.
I don't claim to have the answer any more than anyone else. But I'm not going to blindly believe there's some sort of quick fix out there that will have the server deny human nature and the ease of abandonment this game provides to create an instant utopia.
And how is it that there wasn't a big thread about it? XD
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