Hurricane Cronesmoon ([info]cronesmoon) wrote,
@ 2008-03-05 21:37:00
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...and again.
That's it for me. I opened a ticket about that hunter last night, and I got a form response apologizing for not getting back to me while I was still online (they thought I would want to hang around to be ganked repeatedly?) and thanking me for taking the time yatta yatta. Tonight he's back in xroads and used a snake trap to kill me (and other unflagged lowbies) again. They didn't do anything, and they won't. I opened a ticket again, but I really don't know why. Blizzard doesn't care.

As far as I know there are no Horde hunters exploiting the bug on our server, so I spose I could safely run my Alliance lowbies, but this has left a pretty sour taste in my mouth.

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(Anonymous)
2008-03-09 11:48 am UTC (link)
Me again. :D I don't play myself but I'm aware of the problems you and some of my friends are having and I wondered if this might be of interest: http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,,2262449,00.html
The article is a little shallow I think, probably from trying to cover too many issues at once but it gave me food for thought.

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[info]cronesmoon
2008-03-10 12:21 am UTC (link)
Well, it's nothing to do with the snake trap thing, but yeah, the sexual harassment issue is interesting. Almost all my toons are male for that reason. I have some female draenei (read: hawt!!11!) lowbies, but almost never play them because I get bored of all the sexual crap from other players.

It seems bizarre to me since most everybody knows that most of the female toons are run by men (because that's what they want to look at, logically enough). And I've seen men who run female toons complaining on forums; for most of them, it's their first experience of that sort of sexual harassment.

None of that is surprising to me, though. One sees it often enough irl, because it's socially accepted and needn't be hidden. What surprises me in the game is the kind of deeply unethical and/or obnoxious behavior you see in people who know nobody can tell who they are. The game is very revealing in that way. People are anonymous and free to act out any whim, however unethical or cruel; and so they do.

That's what exploiting the snake trap bug is about. It violates the terms of service by "griefing" (making the game no fun for) other players, and it violates the pvp rules by killing "enemy" players not flagged for pvp (ones who are supposed to be at risk only from the environment, not from other players) and sometimes by actually flagging them for pvp against their will, so when they come back to life you can promptly kill them again more openly (snake trapping is always done only to defenselessly low-level players). It's cruel and unethical, and I hate knowing that otherwise average people are capable of enjoying it. But there it is. They even brag about it, and sneer at players who object.

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(Anonymous)
2008-03-10 08:20 pm UTC (link)
There's a whole rake of pyschology theses just waiting to be written on the subject. I find it interesting to see what some people will do just because they can, interesting but rather disturbing at the same time.

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[info]cronesmoon
2008-03-10 11:40 pm UTC (link)
Mostly disturbing for me. It's similar to the way people behave as tourists, where people can see them but nobody who matters (meaning nobody who knows them), so they are rude and obnoxious and otherwise very similar to spoiled brats. I saw a lot of that in Hawaii, and became accustomed both to the fact of it and to the notion that those same people might be perfectly nice at home. I was never comfortable with it, though, and I'm no more comfortable with the online version of the same behavior.

I think it's just an extension of situational ethics. I was startled once when a friend asked me to let him stay in a house I was house-sitting, even though I had told him that the owner didn't want anyone but me staying there. He said, "How will they ever know?" And he got cross when I said that was irrelevant. He really couldn't see it. Which seems fair: I really can't understand the idea that it's fine to break your word if nobody will ever know, so I guess we're even.

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