Salvos Rhoska wrote:Ingame, I will cheat, steal, lie, exploit, manipulate, kill and altogether take advantage of every opportunity I can to primarily earn ISK, and secondarily to cause loss to other players deliberately and intentionally (even of there is no profit in it, but mostly if there is). I understand, appreciate and practice loyalty as well as teamwork when it supports my own interests or is otherwise ofnmotivation to me.
Offline I am a 33yr old (bday today) nursing student with the history of a short military tenure, and dropping out of first legal studies and then psychology. Im glad to have found my "true calling" at last and its the best thing to ever have happened to me aside from my family. It would be, and is, completely unconscionable to me to ever act IRL as I do ingame. Both professionally as a nurse towards my patients and colleagues, as well as otherwise in my private life towards other people. I have a very strict and complex moral system that has taken me years to distinguish and for which I make sacrifices, because it is what I believe is right and its the person I want to be.I dont hold other people to, or expect them, to share my moral views. Those are their own business ans their own prerogative to define. And even if they are at odds with my own, I respect them for what they are, as they spring from the same source as my own do. From personal choice and autonomy. And most importantly, from responsibility
...
Upon introspection, the real reason why I do so, is a mix of sadism and showing that I am better than others.. The vicarious pleasure of extending my reach and negatively affecting another human players existence. Their tears are my joy and giddy pleasure. That is the cherry on the cake, after the original rush of competition and conflict where they try to protect what is theirs against my deliberate action to deprive them of it, or, in my own adrenaline rushed attempt to defend myself in from their attempt to do the same to me.
....
Summa summarum: These are my introspections on my personal moral dichotomy (and dilemma) between behavior as who I really, mundanely, am, in my day to day professional and private life (Im not kidding about any of that) and how I behave in this game. Before anyone starts shouting "SOCIOPATH" , I ask and recommend that you seriously, deeply, question yourself about your own behavior, why you do it, and how you reconcile that difference (if there is any) to your own honest self.
Well, to put it bluntly, it seems that you get high on people-¦s suffering, as demonstrated by your choices of walks of life. Law-related activities are a prime field to witness strangers in disarray, and possibly do them in. The military is pretty self-explanatory.
There are quite a few sadists in the health professions, especially amongst nurses who take care of the elderly. Maybe their sadism is a result of having to wash old people-¦s butts on a daily basis, but I-¦d say the seed of it was in them already.
I personally think people like you have no place in an online game, since games are made to play pretend, and suppose the pursuit of ingame goals, as opposed to RL ones.
There is a huge glaring problem when a certain category of players use an online game as a platform to reap Schadenfreude, and care more about the RL reaction of some absolutely unknown random Joe whom they have had no business of any kind with, than the ingame benefit they get from scamming/ganking/whatevering him. You say you do it for the ISK first, but after a few paragraphs of self-introspection, you write
Salvos Rhoska wrote:What I am REALLY looking for, is a reaction that shows I reached out and touched you
Schadenfreude-oriented gankers are a blight on online videogaming, since they will look for every little flaw or borderline exploit to get an advantage over other players, and this forces devs to plug holes that could have been left open for reasonable and fun-loving players to "exploit". In the same order of idea, CONCORD is there because of gankers. If those players were screened and banned, there would be no need for an all-powerful space police, players would police themselves and have fun doing, some play pretending pirates, some play pretending police, etc...
The foundation for a sound gaming community is players who assess that the collection of pixels they interact with is controlled by other fellow gamers, and the common sense that springs from this: don-¦t be a jerk.
Ultima Online was trammelized because of camping gankers. This sharded the sandbox, and forced devs to impose hardcoded limits on PvP. I believe the age of anonymity on the internet will come to an end in the future, once too many schoolgirls have committed suicide because of anonymous trolls trolling them.
All the cop-outs stating that RL and internet activities are de-coupled are just, well, cop-outs. Ethics, in an open sandboxy environment (that is, not Counter-Strike or Battlefield) are context irrelevant.
And, "it-¦s a game". Well, start behaving like it-¦s one, instead of having a hard-on for ingame actions that will purposefully make other players rage IRL.