Node ninjas and social norms

There is a common belief among social people: their social norms and unwritten rules keep the society running. If everyone would be selfish and anti-social, the society could not function and everyone would starve.

Victor wrote me a letter about an "unethical" activity, node ninjaing: "Have a server that is rather populated, meaning that at any time there's another player within a reasonable distance of another. Say that Player A finds a node that is guarded by several monsters. He can choose to fight them (thereby using some of his time) with the intention of reaching the node, gathering it and making a profit (work profit). Player B, which is in the vicinity notices that Player A is fighting monsters and swoops in and takes the node. What happens in this instance? Player A does the work (=time), but receives no work profit. Player B does no work (~0 time) but receives business profit. (exploiting Player A's dumbness)

Ok, so what next. Well, it's not illegal so all's fair. Player A says 'screw this shit' and stops cleaning the mobs to the nodes (=0 work, 0 expected work profit). Player B doesn't have any more dumbness to capitalize on so it's (0 business profit). The commodity contained in the nodes go up in price, the crafters using that raw material have to charge more, consumers buy less, crafters make less profit = recession in that segment= everyone suffers."

This is a perfect example because it offers both solutions to the "unwritten law" problem. The first solution is cooperation. If you go out alone to mine, you just have work and no ore. If you go out alone to ninja, you might find some victims, might not, in perfect situation (where nobody is a moron) you find none. However here comes the cooperation: you go out with a partner, one starts mining, the other fight the monsters and split the ore. It's not "morality" that keeps one in the partnership, simply greed: half ore of a mining tour is much more than all the ore of a single mining. And you won't get a second mining if you don't give half ore to your partner. Of course you can cheat your partner and find another one, but that costs time. On the top of that if someone finds a "honest" partner, they stay together and won't take new partners, so I can't get to them. Sooner or later every "honest" guy find each other and the "dishonests" find no victims.

The second solution is regulation: if the situation gets out of hand, the lawmaker (this case Blizzard) must do something. They will set a written law against the harmful activity, for example link the node to the guarding monster. By attacking the monster the mine becomes unlootable to everyone else.

Note that the existence of "social norms" slows both processes down, therefore make it easy to be a parasite. If just 1% of the population ninja nodes - since 99% are ethical - Blizzard is not motivated to do anything (as there are very few whiners), and people don't actively seek partners, as the chance of being ninjaed is low. So the few node ninjas can do whatever they want, making huge profit.

Social norms make parasitism profitable by stopping the "ethical" people from doing it, therefore artificially decrease the supply of parasites. The few parasites get all the resources available. If no one would limit himself from taking money from the table, parasitism would quickly lose profitability by 3 means:

• The undefended resources would go more ways. There are always morons who don't defend their stuff. If I'm the only one selling arrows as singles, all the gold of the morons go to me. If there are 10 like me, I just get 10% of the gold. With enough "unethical" people, my share would be so low that doesn't worth bothering, I'm better off doing something else, maybe something useful.
• The morons go down. If there are just few parasites, the moron can get lucky and keep his resources as no parasite found him. If there are many parasites, he will lose surely, so he'll be forced to either not be so dumb, or simply die (stop playing).
• If the personal defense against parasitism is too expensive, the people would be forced to create some group-solution, like punishing the parasites. (Note: shaking fists and calling them "unethical" is not punishment, just QQ.) Personal defense against IRL robbery would be too hard, so people simply set laws to imprison burglars. However if most people doesn't do legal parasitism, then there will be too few victims, and the others won't bother to set a law. Laws always hurt everyone a bit, so people will only set them if they feel that the danger of lawlessness is higher.

So: the world where everyone is immoral is Utopia, where no one is parasite (for a significant time being). As soon as a loophole is recognized, it will be abused by masses, forcing the society to close the loophole.

Of course one can claim that the other Utopia, where everyone is moral is also parasite-less. However the moral Utopia has two serious problems:

• It's not evolutionarily stable strategy: if just one immoral person born in this Utopia, he will quickly becomes the richest (= most powerful) man in the system, breaking it apart. If just one moral person born in the immoral Utopia, he simply dies.
• There are always morons: people who simply act dumb. This is not a moral issue, they don't act because of morality, they act because of stupidity. The immoral Utopia destroys them, the moral keeps them alive, allowing their poliferation.

Finally, linked back to the previous post: those who preach moral, are usually the most immoral members of the society, so following them = being victim. Here I'm not claiming that there are no moral people. I claim that those who talk about morality are usually not doing it.