Today’s Daily Grind question comes from Luxxicon, a donor to our Kickstarter campaign. Luxxicon just wants to talk about open-world PvP. In fact, his question is superficially simple: “Does participating in open-world PvP make you a bad person or are you a good person who does bad things?”
Last year, psychologists found a strong correlation between displaying the “dark tetrad” of antisocial personality traits and admitting “sadistic glee” when it came to trolling other folks online. In other words, sadistic tendencies IRL did map to griefing tendencies on the internet and vice versa.
But I think that whether open PvP is griefing or not to begin with depends so much on the intent of the developers in an open-world PvP game. There’s a big difference between players who go into a game like PlanetSide 2 knowing that the game is designed entirely around PvP and expecting warfare to dominate gameplay and players who go into a game like ArcheAge knowing that the game is intended to be a well-rounded, multi-activity sandbox but insisting on turning it into a gankfest anyway. And even then, a game like ArcheAge will usually inspire vigilantes who certainly do participate in PvP but do so with a specific purpose to punish and eradicate griefers, which is another mentality of FFA PvP entirely.
And then there are people who play Rogues. You know who you are.
What do you think?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
