real-life project: question of ethics in MMORPGs

Pirengle · 04-21-2003, 01:31 PM

I am an avid gamer, and my schoolwork often reflects this. If I’m not submitting fan fiction to writing workshops, I’m writing papers and presenting projects on gaming issues.

My final project for my computer science class is a presentation on the subject of the student’s choice that reflects all the skills learned in class. My project is a PowerPoint presentation on the question of ethics in MMORPGs. I chose this topic partially because I own several of these games, and partially because I have a chance to teach the class about something that means a lot to me and that they don’t really understand.

I already have the framework of my presentation, I’m now looking for input. I can’t exactly look in the library for this kind of information. ^_^ I’m also cross-posting this on several fora, so I apologize if this is the second or third time you’re reading this. (Who knows? Maybe the topics discussed here will be different.

)

Major points of the presentation
--Rights of the gamer vs. rights of the company. (“I paid good money for this game, so I should be able to do this” vs. “You bought our game, you agreed to our rules, you play in our universe, or else.”)
--What is considered offensive matter and material by the designers of multiplayer games, how the designers implement these censors, and tactics used by players to get around them. (Examples: “nudie packs” for Sims Online, profane character and account names.)
--Which rules apply to whom? (Should everyone be punished when a few people break the rules? A big example is Blizzard’s purge of 131,000 D2X accounts for hacks, including some 3rd party storage programs that weren’t really cheating but fell under the category anyway.)
--Selling items from the game on private websites and eBay.

What do y’all think about the points? Do you have any stories to tell, or quotes to share? I’m also looking for screenshots of strange behavior, maybe an offensive account you saw or “justified” cheater mentality. Please PM me if you wish to share.

There are also two polls up: Should a free MMORPG server become pay-for-play to curb cheating? and What would you do if your account was broken into and then deleted for cheating? Please vote in these polls--your input is appreciated!

Thanks for all your help, and discuss away! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 04-21-2003, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Pirengle ]

/)eathKiller · 04-21-2003, 02:27 PM

Here's what i've seen of MMORGPS:

PSO - Had a great environment, it offered alot of nice players, and then people started cheating with their gamesharks, PKERS can also steal items because when you DIE that means you DROP your MONEY and all of your weapons! OK so Sega figures out how to stop them, but then a day later the cheaters are back and unstoppable. So Then Sega makes all of the users start PAYING to play the game and makes us all buy Cable modems for our Dreamcasts AND makes us pay for new keyboards and we have to pay extra if we want to keep our characters when transfering over to PSO version 2.

Alright... So that's done... BUT WE STILL DROP OUR WEAPONS AND ITEMS WHEN WE DIE! In order to actually get a weapon in PSO that "works" it requires the player to play for a minimum of 7 hours to obtain it, and that's for just one, after that it takes longer and longer periods of time and with 4 players in a party theres only a 25% chance of your actually getting it... OH AND IN less than a week in, cheaters are able to dominate Version 2, and it doesnt even last a few months before sega, once again, asks everyone to pay more, by now they also are making us pay more to receive less, but the addiction must be fed, and the moderators purposly cut off people who are trying to meet places outside of PSO, for example: ICQ numbers, E-mail adresses and the word MSN Messenger are banned along with all the curse words.

This means that the only way to stay in touch with your freinds is by PAYING to meet them, THEN sega cutts the servers and says "oops you all have to buy X boxes and Gamecubes now to keep playing or try our new PC version!"

ok so we go to the effors of all of this, now lets look at the "Promotional Changes" which were done for the "good of the community"

PC version - It's impossible to minimize the window, if you do the game cuts off and you lose all of your account information which you then must PAY FOR to get back! Just for minimizing the window! Oh and they still found out how to hack it...

X box version - You MUST have cable and you MUST at all times use the voice chat, there is no keyboard only 2 way communication which is choppy and barley understandable, and yet people are expected to put up with it, do you know how annnoying it is to stand in a lobby with 500 people and try to have your voice heard? It's unthinkable! the voice chat comic-book like baloons were a way better idea OH and on top of that, they hacked this version too without even needing a gameshark!

Gamecube Version - The worst by far, it had an international release but the keyboard was only sold in tokyo, THATS RIGHT, NO KEYBOARD, NO VOICE CHAT, just the game full of online players with no means of communication! Look out now! it gets even better...

To move to any of these platforms REQUIRES the loss of one's characters, items, and account information so they must pay again, they have fewer online quests and fewer things to actually do in the games (Though they add in stuff under the guise of "improvements" which actually do little else aside from making players play the game LONGER) (for example to reach level 200 in the Dreamcast version you needed 95 quadrillion XP points, the highest XP giving monster was the last boss, Dark Falis, who gave a WHOPPING 8 thousand points, THATS RIGHT now in the NEW version of the game, Dark Falis only gives 2 thousand points, it still requires 95 quadrillion to get there, and to make thing worse, the most powerfull weapons in the game aren't emphasized anymroe and are impossible to find (same went for the DC version actually but at least you could kill dark falis with an S rank crossbow, now you'd be lucky to hit him with an S rank crossbow (that's the strongest and most over-used weapon by the way, it's usually just called a spread needle) Anyway...

THEY ALSO took out many abiltiies for hunters added more for rangers (being a ranger I can't really complain) and defuncted the games system of ballance while making it nearly impossible to fight eachother communicate and level up...

NOW on to the next game:

Earth and Beyond -

Oh joy another pay to play, only problem is, it's played off as being this gigantic universe, but in reality it only takes 5 minutes to reach from one end to the other, SO the expectation is that the player will NON-STOP go to and from one station to another across the galaxy until they level up to 150, which requires as much fighting as trading and exploring, OH OK, but Exploration Isn't even EARNABLE after you've discovered everything, so how do you plan to level up 50 Explore levels? IMPOSSIBLE! and yet thats how the players are expected to play OH and on top of this, they make the players have level up 80 times EVEN AFTER reaching 150, which is NO easy task, just so that they can develop SKILLS which they should've been able to develope WHILE PLAYING, all for the sake of forcing players to play the game for a longer period of time and fork out more cash, OH and no Offline play is even acceptable it must be online , it doesnt say that ANYWHERE on the box...

ALRIGHT next game:

Ragnarok Online -

Oh my god...

It's a game... That's fun... has a huge player base... Constantly evoulving universe... lots of player interaction is emphasized, terrific magic system, GREAT battle system, and it's FREE!

HEY I THINK I...

No ... WAit... AAAH! The Koreans slapped a 15 Dollar TAX on it just to play!

Just when it looked like we were actually going to have a good game...

Next MMORPG:

"The world"

There is no description as to how perfect this game was, player customization was unlimited ranging from having just 2 arms to 197 if you felt like it, The system balanced out so even the level 100s would have problems with level 1s... its free too, and YET...

IT'S SERVERS WENT DOWN AFTER A MONTH...

This is probably because it was free..

NEXT GAME!

The Creme of the crop: The absolute WORST MMORPG of all time:

Final Fantasy 11...

There is no balance in this game's system, it has too much time-consuming eyecandy leaving open large gaps which players could EASILY get disconected from OH and yes, any player can rob any other player... Even if you don't die...

THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

Most corrupt MMORPG of all time award goes to:

PHANTASY STAR ONLINE

Why?

IT STOLE 80,000 HOURS AWAY FROM MY LIFE, AND 3,972 DOLLARS FROM MY BANK!

The lesson here kiddies?

MMORPGS:

Just Don't Play 'Em!

Bungleau · 04-21-2003, 02:50 PM

I think you need to specify your focus a bit more. Until I saw your three points, I thought you were going to cover ethical decisions during gameplay (is it really wrong to kill peasants if the game doesn't penalize you?).

It sounds like your real focus is further spread out. You've got pirating software (point 1), age-appropriate extensions (point 2), rules for an online gaming site (point 3), and capitalism spreading to the real world (point 4). Any one of those points would make for an interesting discussion and a well-received paper.

Pirengle · 04-22-2003, 12:22 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Bungleau:
It sounds like your real focus is further spread out. You've got pirating software (point 1), age-appropriate extensions (point 2), rules for an online gaming site (point 3), and capitalism spreading to the real world (point 4). Any one of those points would make for an interesting discussion and a well-received paper.

I wish I could only focus on one, but what I'm doing is pretty much an overview of these topics. This is me the Avid Gamer presenting this to a classroom of female college students whose idea of challenging thought is whether to purchase the peasant blouse or the low-rider boot cut jeans at Abercrombie & Fitch. (Well, maybe that's stretching it a bit, but you get the idea. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

) I can go in-depth, but no matter how approachable I write it, I'm going to leave my classmates (and professor) confused. Better to go simplistic, especially when the grade for your buoy class depends on the project. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Bungleau · 04-22-2003, 12:50 AM

How long is the presentation supposed to be?

In general, unless you've got about two hours to cover this, I think you'll be better off picking one of your four topics and focusing on it rather than trying to do all four of them justice. But that's me, and it's your call.

I guess the real question for me is what you want to educate them about, convince them to do, or convince them to think about. Knowing the end you're trying to get to makes the journey there much easier.

/)eathKiller · 04-22-2003, 09:44 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Bungleau:
(is it really wrong to kill peasants if the game doesn't penalize you?).

In pso: Peasants ok, but other players? No, and the fact that the game had been set up so that you could be either robbed or revived by anyone who was in the game (it had to be one or the other) then it was a terrible idea, especiallys eeing as how hard it was to actually obtain worthwhile items. And on top of this: In order to booste your stats you had to raise a virtual pet, and only the ugliest ones were strong :/ some were badly planned though, like the Sonic Mag made the user invinciible every 5 minutes for 8 minutes, oh wow what a cool idea, unfortunetly there are so many instant-death spells in the game it's not hard to kill someone who'se invincible and take their stuff! I think the worst decision by sega was that if any item was on the ground and you got disconected it would be deleted, even if it wasn't yours... So transfering items from one character to another was a difficult and dangerouse process, requiring the leaving of trust in a player to stay online for at least 20 minutes while you unplug one VMU plug in another re-register on the network, put your 36 character password and 28 character login key, actually get on the network (took about 8 minutes on 56k) log into the game (3 minutes there) and then pick up your items HOPEFULLY if your freind is still there!

OH and here's something that will spark the female interest: All the Female classes had 10 points taken away from each stat when compared to the men... Now where are the ethics in that?!

04-21-2003, 01:31 PM	#1
Pirengle Symbol of Cyric Join Date: April 20, 2003 Location: Sarasota, Florida, USA Age: 42 Posts: 1,101	I am an avid gamer, and my schoolwork often reflects this. If I’m not submitting fan fiction to writing workshops, I’m writing papers and presenting projects on gaming issues. My final project for my computer science class is a presentation on the subject of the student’s choice that reflects all the skills learned in class. My project is a PowerPoint presentation on the question of ethics in MMORPGs. I chose this topic partially because I own several of these games, and partially because I have a chance to teach the class about something that means a lot to me and that they don’t really understand. I already have the framework of my presentation, I’m now looking for input. I can’t exactly look in the library for this kind of information. ^_^ I’m also cross-posting this on several fora, so I apologize if this is the second or third time you’re reading this. (Who knows? Maybe the topics discussed here will be different. ) Major points of the presentation --Rights of the gamer vs. rights of the company. (“I paid good money for this game, so I should be able to do this” vs. “You bought our game, you agreed to our rules, you play in our universe, or else.”) --What is considered offensive matter and material by the designers of multiplayer games, how the designers implement these censors, and tactics used by players to get around them. (Examples: “nudie packs” for Sims Online, profane character and account names.) --Which rules apply to whom? (Should everyone be punished when a few people break the rules? A big example is Blizzard’s purge of 131,000 D2X accounts for hacks, including some 3rd party storage programs that weren’t really cheating but fell under the category anyway.) --Selling items from the game on private websites and eBay. What do y’all think about the points? Do you have any stories to tell, or quotes to share? I’m also looking for screenshots of strange behavior, maybe an offensive account you saw or “justified” cheater mentality. Please PM me if you wish to share. There are also two polls up: Should a free MMORPG server become pay-for-play to curb cheating? and What would you do if your account was broken into and then deleted for cheating? Please vote in these polls--your input is appreciated! Thanks for all your help, and discuss away! [img]smile.gif[/img] [ 04-21-2003, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Pirengle ] __________________ [img]\"http://img.ranchoweb.com/images/pirengle/quintesson.gif\" alt=\" - \" />

04-21-2003, 02:27 PM	#2
/)eathKiller Dracolisk Join Date: January 5, 2002 Location: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Age: 39 Posts: 6,043	Here's what i've seen of MMORGPS: PSO - Had a great environment, it offered alot of nice players, and then people started cheating with their gamesharks, PKERS can also steal items because when you DIE that means you DROP your MONEY and all of your weapons! OK so Sega figures out how to stop them, but then a day later the cheaters are back and unstoppable. So Then Sega makes all of the users start PAYING to play the game and makes us all buy Cable modems for our Dreamcasts AND makes us pay for new keyboards and we have to pay extra if we want to keep our characters when transfering over to PSO version 2. Alright... So that's done... BUT WE STILL DROP OUR WEAPONS AND ITEMS WHEN WE DIE! In order to actually get a weapon in PSO that "works" it requires the player to play for a minimum of 7 hours to obtain it, and that's for just one, after that it takes longer and longer periods of time and with 4 players in a party theres only a 25% chance of your actually getting it... OH AND IN less than a week in, cheaters are able to dominate Version 2, and it doesnt even last a few months before sega, once again, asks everyone to pay more, by now they also are making us pay more to receive less, but the addiction must be fed, and the moderators purposly cut off people who are trying to meet places outside of PSO, for example: ICQ numbers, E-mail adresses and the word MSN Messenger are banned along with all the curse words. This means that the only way to stay in touch with your freinds is by PAYING to meet them, THEN sega cutts the servers and says "oops you all have to buy X boxes and Gamecubes now to keep playing or try our new PC version!" ok so we go to the effors of all of this, now lets look at the "Promotional Changes" which were done for the "good of the community" PC version - It's impossible to minimize the window, if you do the game cuts off and you lose all of your account information which you then must PAY FOR to get back! Just for minimizing the window! Oh and they still found out how to hack it... X box version - You MUST have cable and you MUST at all times use the voice chat, there is no keyboard only 2 way communication which is choppy and barley understandable, and yet people are expected to put up with it, do you know how annnoying it is to stand in a lobby with 500 people and try to have your voice heard? It's unthinkable! the voice chat comic-book like baloons were a way better idea OH and on top of that, they hacked this version too without even needing a gameshark! Gamecube Version - The worst by far, it had an international release but the keyboard was only sold in tokyo, THATS RIGHT, NO KEYBOARD, NO VOICE CHAT, just the game full of online players with no means of communication! Look out now! it gets even better... To move to any of these platforms REQUIRES the loss of one's characters, items, and account information so they must pay again, they have fewer online quests and fewer things to actually do in the games (Though they add in stuff under the guise of "improvements" which actually do little else aside from making players play the game LONGER) (for example to reach level 200 in the Dreamcast version you needed 95 quadrillion XP points, the highest XP giving monster was the last boss, Dark Falis, who gave a WHOPPING 8 thousand points, THATS RIGHT now in the NEW version of the game, Dark Falis only gives 2 thousand points, it still requires 95 quadrillion to get there, and to make thing worse, the most powerfull weapons in the game aren't emphasized anymroe and are impossible to find (same went for the DC version actually but at least you could kill dark falis with an S rank crossbow, now you'd be lucky to hit him with an S rank crossbow (that's the strongest and most over-used weapon by the way, it's usually just called a spread needle) Anyway... THEY ALSO took out many abiltiies for hunters added more for rangers (being a ranger I can't really complain) and defuncted the games system of ballance while making it nearly impossible to fight eachother communicate and level up... NOW on to the next game: Earth and Beyond - Oh joy another pay to play, only problem is, it's played off as being this gigantic universe, but in reality it only takes 5 minutes to reach from one end to the other, SO the expectation is that the player will NON-STOP go to and from one station to another across the galaxy until they level up to 150, which requires as much fighting as trading and exploring, OH OK, but Exploration Isn't even EARNABLE after you've discovered everything, so how do you plan to level up 50 Explore levels? IMPOSSIBLE! and yet thats how the players are expected to play OH and on top of this, they make the players have level up 80 times EVEN AFTER reaching 150, which is NO easy task, just so that they can develop SKILLS which they should've been able to develope WHILE PLAYING, all for the sake of forcing players to play the game for a longer period of time and fork out more cash, OH and no Offline play is even acceptable it must be online , it doesnt say that ANYWHERE on the box... ALRIGHT next game: Ragnarok Online - Oh my god... It's a game... That's fun... has a huge player base... Constantly evoulving universe... lots of player interaction is emphasized, terrific magic system, GREAT battle system, and it's FREE! HEY I THINK I... No ... WAit... AAAH! The Koreans slapped a 15 Dollar TAX on it just to play! Just when it looked like we were actually going to have a good game... Next MMORPG: "The world" There is no description as to how perfect this game was, player customization was unlimited ranging from having just 2 arms to 197 if you felt like it, The system balanced out so even the level 100s would have problems with level 1s... its free too, and YET... IT'S SERVERS WENT DOWN AFTER A MONTH... This is probably because it was free.. NEXT GAME! The Creme of the crop: The absolute WORST MMORPG of all time: Final Fantasy 11... There is no balance in this game's system, it has too much time-consuming eyecandy leaving open large gaps which players could EASILY get disconected from OH and yes, any player can rob any other player... Even if you don't die... THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! Most corrupt MMORPG of all time award goes to: PHANTASY STAR ONLINE Why? IT STOLE 80,000 HOURS AWAY FROM MY LIFE, AND 3,972 DOLLARS FROM MY BANK! The lesson here kiddies? MMORPGS: Just Don't Play 'Em! __________________ [img]\"http://membres.lycos.fr/th8or/ZeroSigForIronworks.gif\" alt=\" - \" /> o.o;

04-21-2003, 02:50 PM	#3
Bungleau 40th Level Warrior Join Date: October 29, 2001 Location: Western Wilds of Michigan Posts: 11,752	I think you need to specify your focus a bit more. Until I saw your three points, I thought you were going to cover ethical decisions during gameplay (is it really wrong to kill peasants if the game doesn't penalize you?). It sounds like your real focus is further spread out. You've got pirating software (point 1), age-appropriate extensions (point 2), rules for an online gaming site (point 3), and capitalism spreading to the real world (point 4). Any one of those points would make for an interesting discussion and a well-received paper. __________________ B Save Early, Save Often Save Before, Save After Two-Star General, Spelling Soldiers -+-+-+ Give 'em a hug one more time. It might be the last.

04-22-2003, 12:50 AM	#5
Bungleau 40th Level Warrior Join Date: October 29, 2001 Location: Western Wilds of Michigan Posts: 11,752	How long is the presentation supposed to be? In general, unless you've got about two hours to cover this, I think you'll be better off picking one of your four topics and focusing on it rather than trying to do all four of them justice. But that's me, and it's your call. I guess the real question for me is what you want to educate them about, convince them to do, or convince them to think about. Knowing the end you're trying to get to makes the journey there much easier. __________________ B Save Early, Save Often Save Before, Save After Two-Star General, Spelling Soldiers -+-+-+ Give 'em a hug one more time. It might be the last.

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