Greedy Goblin

Friday, April 9, 2010

Lvl 80 positions opening to gank guild

I wrote in the initial post that only at or below lvl70 characters are accepted to the ganking guild. I wanted to prove that you can level up in this extremely hostile environment without top level help.

Well, the environment wasn't actively hostile. Of course some of our members was ganked badly, but of their own damn fault, like going to STV or corpsecamping someone (what were you thinking? He will just lie there instead of logging to his main?).

But, despite I wrote a warning on the realm forums, and announcing that we will operate under harsh death penalty, no one bothered to hunt us. I mean it's damn easy. You just start a lvl1 ally, "/who Inglourious" and go to the most populated zone and corpsecamp people there. But no, none of the hordies bothered to do this little action for his own safety. The time he gained by not ganking us now is much smaller than his losses will be because of our lvl 80 ganking. The logical move would be to destroy us when it's easy (I assume that if someone gathers some -1000-5000 scalps he'll give it up).

There are several answers for "why not gank us", all flawed. Some are social, some are not, but all are moronic or slacking:
  • He does not believe we will reach any strength. He could see that there are 100+ players in the armory. He could start a lvl1 ally, ask for an invite and he could see we have 100+ accounts and also they are not inactive (I kick those). So, with a very little effort he could recognize that we are here to stay. Yet, making a little effort is too much, it's easier to just guess.
  • He did not even heard about us. He should be informed about the server he's playing on. Considering how small the alliance faction is, he should notice there is a new, large guild formed. He should read the realm forums. I've seen /general mentioning of our guild. If he overlooked or choose to ignore it, too bad.
  • He thinks he can defend himself. I guess they are the same guys who claim they don't need safety belts since they are good drivers. We will attack in geared, practiced groups. It doesn't matter if you are Orangemarmalade himself, you'll be just another honorkill (unless you make much larger effort to organize groups for dailies and farming).
  • "Why should I fight for all of us?" That's a crucial point here. If a hordie choose to fight us, he spends his own time defending the whole faction. Those hordies who don't fight us will be equally protected! The tragedy of commons hit again. Of course if they would be a group, or if they would really be "selfless, helpful" they would fight for their members or out of goodness. But they are not! For M&S "being helpful" is a lie. It means "others be helpful with me".
  • One marshmallow now is better than 2 marshmallows 15 minutes from now. Some people simply can't think of the future. Hunting us now is no fun. That's all that matters. The fun now. They are unable to think of the "unfun" that the ganking will cause.
So out of these reasons the hordies choose to not fight us while they easily can. There is no huge obstacle to defeat, so leveling to 80 is only matter of time, not skill (besides not doing very dumb moves like dancing front of Orgrimmar or corpsecamping someone). Because of this, invites for lvl 80-es are now open. Gevlon will be online (mostly) every day at 19:00, /w for inv. If you can't be online this time, send me a letter and we'll arrange a meeting.

PS: obviously we're still open for rerollers/low level transfers.

Hot tip: buy all the Oily Blackmouth, Blackmouth oil and Stranglekelp you can find. In WG we have high tenacity but always stunlocked. Free action potion is extremely handy.

34 comments:

Kaaterina said...

What about reason:


*They do not care.

Literally everything can be done from within Dalaran these days. Or on flying mount back. Or at odd times when you're not online.

It's not like you're the first people who start characters on PvP servers to gank.

If I'd get ganked, see that it's 5vs1, I'd rez in a hidden corner, mount up and leave and go do something else. If I'd get Corpse Camped, I'd log an alt and play that.

So yeah, what about reason "They do not care about you, since you'll only be insignificant annoyances at best."?

You do not bring a napalm bomb to kill mosquitos. You either bring mosquito repellent (flying mounts), or just not go where the mosquitos are.

Ladron de la Noche said...

"One marshmallow now is better than 2 marshmallows 15 minutes from now." How is this statement false? Unless you think a marshmallow is worth 15 minutes of your time.

John said...

I think the server simply... don't care.

"The greatest insult to an enemy is to be ignored."

So many gank groups have come and going - the server goes on. Sooner or later you (or your guild mates) gives up and goes to do something else.

And then the "carebears" win, simply by outlasting your interest in this effort. You won't end up exactly proving any of your theories though.

I almost can draw similarities between this effort and the blue-gear raiding effort. Sounds like an exciting fun thing to do... a few people tried it, you have some successes... But eventually just got bored and move on.

Anyway, good luck

Sean said...

@Kaaterina:
What about reason:

*They do not care.

Literally everything can be done from within Dalaran these days. Or on flying mount back. Or at odd times when you're not online.

It's not like you're the first people who start characters on PvP servers to gank.

If I'd get ganked, see that it's 5vs1, I'd rez in a hidden corner, mount up and leave and go do something else. If I'd get Corpse Camped, I'd log an alt and play that.

So yeah, what about reason "They do not care about you, since you'll only be insignificant annoyances at best."?

You do not bring a napalm bomb to kill mosquitos. You either bring mosquito repellent (flying mounts), or just not go where the mosquitos are.


This is the reasoning of the sensible. Part of the ganking project will show that "sensible horde" will be unaffected. However, the "social horde" will suffer.

However, what I believe will happen is that Gevlon will find that the number of "social horde" is much less than expected.

The ganking project will find that the horde just doesn't care about PvP. They will not fight back but merely avoid the gankers.

At the end of this, because WoW is not designed as a "Darkfall-type" game, the ganking project will then come to an end. Not because the the gankers couldn't fight, but due to boredom, since the Horde will evade rather than fight.

Anonymous said...

A couple of thoughts on why noone cares:

1) Questing is no longer the main way of lvling characters. You get ganked? Time to LFD or queue for BGs.

2) The horde population is so big that for the individual player, no impact is felt. In such, it's illogical to spend efforts getting rid of something that is not affecting gameplay.

3) Presuming that your numbers do grow (also at lvl 80), the type of play you are involved with is still of no relevance to the majority of the playerbase. Most players spend time in Dalaran when they are not in BGs or raids.

If you want to impact other peoples playstyle in a negative way you will have to start griefing, and is that really what you are after?

Anonymous said...

You have lost it on this one project.

In order to become a threat, you would have to close the main economic/social centers, i.e. go to Oggrimar and make stop all activities in the bank/AH/trainers for hours everyday (at busy time of course), good luck with that.

Just by killing a few socials what are you expect to achieve?

Or try to close all access to ICC at peak time, that will get you some of the attention you seem to want.

As the first poster has said, they just don't care about you because you pose not real threat, you will have a few posts every month in realm forums saying how they are going to attack horde/alliance cities. What makes you different?

Would a good strategist/leader forewarn the enemy side about their plans?

Anonymous said...

As Kaaterina said, it is because they don't care. The only two things people do where ganking could affect them are dailies or gathering professions, and you can even do several dailies in the safety of the Argent Tournament sanctuary zone.

Gevlon said...

The "just don't care" is no new reason, it's a "cool" version of the "he believes he can defend himself".

Several activities need going outside: dailies, gathering, weekly instance, achievements (fishing contest anyone?). While these are negligable to a rational player, they are the "fun stuff" for socials.

Also, players hate being controlled more than actually being killed. Which generates more QQ? Pom-Pyro or death grip?

While a rational can easily accept that "going to Naxx (weekly) in prime time is a no-no", the social will be outraged that we "block" him from this gameplay.

Also, everyone connected trough the economy. If you corpsecamp the chinese herb-farmer, everyone pays more for flasks.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon said
"Several activities need going outside: dailies, gathering, weekly instance, achievements (fishing contest anyone?). While these are negligable to a rational player, they are the "fun stuff" for socials."

So you target things in game you think is lame and try to destroy them, by engaging in an activity (griefing) that lots of people find lame.

Sure, why not - its your 15$ and your time. But getting upset with your "victims" for not fighting back or caring about your assaults? Shouldn't the rage be directed at your guild for not griefing effectively enough?

As a last note:
Griefing is a purely social type of play. After all, you are not gaining any kind of meaningful rewards in game, only the perceived hate from your fellow players.
What makes that so different from collecting pets for the perceived admiration of others?

One is motivated by negative feedback - the other on positive, but none have meaning outside this feedback. You even rate your success based on the emotional responses from others.

As a last point: You seem to relish when being in opposition to commonly held beliefs. That you challenge them is admirable, just don't fall into the trap thinking that all commonly held beliefs (in this case: World PvP dont affect gameplay for most people) are wrong.

Gevlon said...

@Last anonymous: at first I gain tanglible reward, the information that will be published here.

"One guy tells me #@$@ you" is an emotional response.

"72.8% of the people tells me to #@$# you, 11.3% logs out, 24.9% tries to fight back": scientific research.

Also, I'm constantly trying to define objective goals (as opposed to the QQ). It's not easy since I'm in a much uncharted field, practically only Twixt did research on it and if you read his paper, that's highly anecdotal, he ran no statistics, set no objective goals.

Tomorrow (saturday extra post) I will post a plan that is measurable and will impact (if I'm right).

Anti said...

it might be intersting to combine PVP and Ecconomics.

do a large amounts of bids on low bid AH sales. then close all the Horde AHs by keeping them dead for as long as possible.

would take a huge PVP organisation but i'm guessing you might be the closest to qualified there has been. except perhaps Goon Squad.

Anonymous said...

@ Gevlon

I did read Twixt's paper. It was a poorly contrived attempt to mask griefing as science (as he broke pretty much any guideline regarding ethical conduct). If you followed TerraNovas discussion on it, you can see some of the central critiques - and implicitly: Why it isn't published. (In its current state its not peer reviewed or published, which on the scientific scale rates it just above a blogpost).

If you want to know what impact your guild have had on the server you need to monitor play (log on times, zones players are in etc) before the ganking guild, during, and after. This requires some resources I presume you don't have.

Counting the responses and logging them systematically will give indications to how players react to griefing. An interesting goal, but seems to be quite on the side from the original intent. As, if this is your goal - you don't need a guild. You can simply do it on your own.

Also, it doesn't make it science just by counting. There are methodological and ethical implications that real science have to adher to, which you are ignoring.

Anonymous said...

Well, I think that the basic issue here is that the ganking guild is aiming to have a negative affect on the gameplay of others in an enviroment where it's almost impossible to do so in a sustainable fashion. Even if the guild managed to 'close' an area in icecrown, it would be for a very very short period of time. WG finishes and a horde pvp army decends on you. No army? No problem. Just go somewhere else.

No-one cares because the ganking can be avoided, ignored, defeated or will fail in itself. There isn't going to come a point where the ganking guild has more resources (pvp players) to perminantly stop players having fun.

I think this is more of an ego thing, you want attention and you want a following. But in the forums the same rules always apply 'don't feed the troll'.

The project will fail in intent as people will ignore you. Individuals may react, but the community simply will not notice and will not really care.

Anonymous said...

Heh, i hope that means the project proceeds well.
Some suggestions (although propably you will know them):
1)Random ganking won't be effective, they will just mount up and leave
2)Capturing WG all the prime times will be effective but extremely difficult, so good luck with that, it will be hell of a mess
3)Propably the most 'annoying' thing you could do is i) blocking the entance for the weekly hc and ii) blocking the entrance for icc. Icc will be easy, assuming numbers and good co-operation as it has a very good chocking point. For weekly it will depend. Ulduar will be semi-impossible (although slowing them down via blocking access to stone could work), naxx should be very easy. ToCr impossible as ganking isn't allowed. EoE should be also very easy.
4)Daily spots camping is what will propably get half the funboiz quit. Most of them are too retarded to raid seriously anyways. I would suggest the ToCr dailies for an start and then the hodir ones. Also, if you greatly expand, scholara could work, and it could have double benefit because you could also gank farmers at the same time. But still, such a huge area would require at least 30-40 people patrolling.

As a final note, i still suggest creating a level 1 horde side and destroying the economy.

Anonymous said...

On a highly populated server a lot of twinking is going on. With a hundred accounts of level 70-80 gankers working in teams of say 10 you could have a "let's make Zul Drak unplayable" day.

Kill all questgivers in the zone, gank every player showing up to quest, hope that some call their friends and devastate any reinforcements.

You can also make Icecrown dailies impossible.

You can block people from getting into Icecrown raid instance because they have to unmount and walk a bit.

Even though Dalaran is protected and leveling can be done via dungeons/battlegrounds, Gevlons Gankers will make an impact on the server. People _will_ cry.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't fight you either,
its a waste of time,
i play games for fun,
in wow that means engaging in challenging activities,
ganking lowbies is just boring, so i won't do it.

If you're 80 and geared come back unless then i won't bother with you

best regards,
your horde 2k+ arenaplayer

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I've not quite followed how you can block IIC? I've not walked in to there since it first opened. The LFR / LFD tool bypasses the need to summon anyone or walk anywhere. You just get the raid/group ported in.

As for the 'make and area unplayable' um, well, even if you could then people would just fly over and go somewhere else. Or if you stayed too long then WG army pops across to wipe the problem away.

Long and short of it, I think bordom and apathy will kill this off long before it reaches any level. Especially as half of the players don't leave dalaran other than for lfg or WG.

Arkonos said...

Anonymous said...
"As a final note, i still suggest creating a level 1 horde side and destroying the economy."
09 April, 2010 11:51

Gevlon just tries to harm the social and dumb players. If he'd destroy the market it'll affect the good players as well. (At least if it ain't the chopper marked)

John Newhouse said...

When will you win a WG?! :O

Micah said...

Kaaterine, being on the back of a flying mount won't protect against engineer druids.

Wilson said...

Or maybe they're well aware of what happened with your Undergeared project - an initial burst of enthusiasm and lots of members, and even some early successes, but a rapid downward spiral as pretty much everyone, including you, lost interest. In the end, nothing accomplished. Calling them morons for not soiling themselves and scrambling to dedicate their lives to opposing you when you bring nothing to the table but tough-guy talk and a 0-1 record is absurd.

Anonymous said...

This project has already succeeded in providing some interesting material to read. If some think it will fail because people will get bored and move on to other things, that is not what I would consider failure. I would suggest that the project has simply run it’s course and the outcomes may or may not be what was expected. If and when that happens this project just like the Undergeared project has succeeded in providing some interesting discussion and derive some thought provoking moments for me of people’s behavior in the game. As for the suggestion that the reason it will fail is because people do not care. I love that reason. It makes me think about how people tend to diminish someone else’s accomplishment by minimalizing the achievement for that person. To me as a casual player, there are many things in the game that would be an achievement for me. But someone else would certainly point out to me that I was not the first and might actually be the last in fact to get that achievement. The only real certainty is that if you do not try something at all - that will guarantee failure. If you try and fail… that is one less failure toward achieving your goal.

But then, I’ve always been a bit naïve about things…

To anyone on the U.S. Servers if you are interested in joining the U.S. Undergeared project. You can still join. Do a /who undergeared on the server “The Forgotten Coast” Alliance side and ask for an invite. I will be on Saturday morning probably for awhile 5am to 6/7am and whenever else I can sneak on. I am Mythstaken on the server. Or you can find me on the Duskwood server Alliance side on Amukamukamuk where I pursue gear to make up for my lack of skill. I’ll log over and give you an invite.

Sorry to try to use your blog Gevlon to recruit folks but since this is where I got interested in it – I thought you’d be okay with that.

Have a good weekend all!

P.S. Posted as Anonymous because I could not get my account info right for some reason.

WeekendWarrior

Anonymous said...

One more suggestion though for your ganking project. I would suggest targeting the leadership of the "socials". Go after the guildleaders and officers of the guilds. Just think what would happen if you could make them decide to do a server transfer. Good times... good times...

Weekendwarrior

Klepsacovic said...

@Gevlon: "The "just don't care" is no new reason, it's a "cool" version of the "he believes he can defend himself"."
They're not at all saying anything about their own abilities. They're commenting on your abilities: You cannot actually do much to harm them. Most people simply don't care and have little reason to care. You picked the wrong game for a ganking project.

Anonymous said...

maybe no one ganks you because they don't care. They are just online to play with their friends and they dont care about what others are doing.

Eaten by a Grue said...

It's sort of silly to say "since we operate under a harsh death penalty", the Horde should have come out and ganked us early (to presumably put us in a hopeless scalp deficit).

Your death penalty is a self imposed rule, and any rational person will see that this rule can be amended on a whim, so why would they spend effort playing under these arbitrary rules and hope that you, an adversary, would not just change the rule to benefit yourself.

Also, many people just simply do not consider hunting down lowbies any fun. Lacking any reward for this activity, people will not do it.

Kobeathris said...

I really think you need to engage in more forum warfare. I don't know if you have read the sins of a solar spymaster series by Mitanni, but you should. It is based on Eve, and is mostly about alliance warfare in that game, but insofar as it can be done in WoW, you are essentially trying to do the same thing. If you really want to make the Horde socials miserable, ganking alone isn't enough. You need to really crank up the mockery, hurt their feelings, and make them feel small and embarrassed. I would recommend some alts in trade chat too warning them where you are about to strike, doing it, then mocking their failure to do anything about it.

Kaaterina said...

"Micah said...

Kaaterine, being on the back of a flying mount won't protect against engineer druids."

You're assuming a lot of things.

You're assuming that:

a) the opponent is not a paladin
b) the opponent is not a priest or mage
d) The opponent isn't an Unholy Dk
e) The opponent isn't a BM hunter
f) the opponent doesn't have a 310% drake
g) that the engineer druid has a 310% drake
h) that the druid is a boomkin.

So yeah.

Watch out enemy horde because you'll get ganked by engineer boomkins with 310% speed if you don't have a 310% mount and you're not a paladin, priest, hunter, mage or DK, or druid OR engineer yourself.

That sounds... threatening. Really.

Tonus said...

I admit to some surprise that there has been so little trash talking in that thread. Perhaps the horde on the server have become cynical from seeing other attempts to organize the alliance or from dominating the server so long. Or maybe for many of them it is basically a PvE server so they don't even notice.

It should be interesting to see the reaction if this takes off (ie, if you can gank enough people to cause the horde to organize and seek you out).

Justisraiser said...

Gevlon,

Suppose I'm reading cnn.com and in the comments in one of the posts, I see someone say, "I am starting a new cult that will cause traffic jams for all Americans. I will get my legions of followers to take to all the freeways in America and drive exactly 5 miles below the speed limit. For every car we get stuck in a traffic jam I will earn 1 point, and every car that manages to drive past my traffic jam, I will deduct 20 points. But I will give you a chance, we will have to earn money to buy our cars first, we won't just use the cars we already may own."

(I'm using traffic jams are something that is very frustrating because not technically illegal, just like ganking).

Would you take to the streets and hunt him down? Would you immediately seek him out and drive past him to cause him to "lose 20 points"? Would you even know he existed? I doubt it. The idea that someone could get hundreds of people that would spend hours of their time clogging up roadways for any material impact is ridiculous.

Four weeks later this same guy posts in another cnn.com article comment section. He says, "Haha! I now have 20 followers and we have now all purchased large cars. Now anyone that already has a car can join us. The fact that nobody tried to stop us indicates just how M&S the American population are. They should be browsing every single piece of information on the web to find out about us. They should have harassed us at our jobs so we stopped earning money to buy cars. They should have found out where we drive and driven past us to get us -20 points. They'd rather do their jobs and see their loved ones than take action against us. They think in the worst-case they will still find ways to drive around us or just take side streets. Everyone is an M&S."

Nobody will spend any time trying to stop every crazy traffic-jam-causing cultist because the vast majority of them will have no impact on ANYONE'S life. Have an impact. Make a difference. Until then this is just another project like Ungeared -- your followers weren't committed, you didn't even achieve what you previously accomplished before, and besides a handful of blog posts, nobody gave a crap.

cheesewhizz said...

To be honest the death penalty is the reason I didn't join this project.

Having such a harsh death penalty limits the options for true world pvp and dominating the horde.

You could do allot with a guild of dedicated pvpers who are willing to coordinate tactically.

For instance you could declare every Saturday a no flight zone and repeatedly kill the flight masters in the horde cities. You could close down sections of the world to anyone trying to quest (or demand they pay a toll to quest death free, more humiliating than an actual gank). You could camp raid instances and prevent raids. You could do some wacky and amazing things.

But the death penalty limits your actions to hit and run skirmishes where you outnumber the horde. You can't close down an area because you can't risk deaths by an equally geared and organised opponent. You can't do new things because there is a penalty for failure, time and time again game designers have shown that having such penalties only makes players act in ultra conservative ways as they are far more concerned about losing what they have than what they can gain. If you are really serious about this project Gevlon you need to treat it as a mini game within wow. That means reward people for achieving certain goals and not punishing people for failure.

I would like to roll a warlock (a class that has pvp problems and I have never played) and join this guild, but having rules which mean risk taking is not encouraged puts me off. This isn't cowardice (it's a game what am I afraid of? or lazyness as I am a good pvp'er and understand the importance of tactics in pvp warfare) it's simply that I don't think it would be a worthwhile goal at the moment.

Battlegrounds and guild systems are going to be far more important in Cataclysm so this guild is actually the perfect starting point for some goblins to make something really special, a PVP equivalent to Ensidia rather than just ganking their fanbois.

Shifttusk said...

@Kaaterina & Micah

Druid's can't knock you off your mount anymore.

That being said any engineer can rough you up while airborne. I don't care if you have a fast mount. Eventually you are going to make a turn, stop or run towards XYZ point while being chased where another guild member was waiting. You should be most worried about killing spree specced rogues however. A PVE geared rogue will easily kill you inside a killing spree even if you're in pvp gear. THey stay on you the whole time while up there too.

Darkgold said...

I hate how Blizzard has to market to the widest community. I also play heals (and I am NOT a team player), and a low end tank. My low end tank consistiently trumps every other DPS. He is a prot paladin and with two spells, (Hand of Reckoning only if a DPS drew aggro or on pulls) Consecrate on almost every pull and Avenger's Shield to pull, I can out DPS the DPS. It is sickening, as now all of the hard workers get less paid. It reminds me of the democrats, believe it or not. The rich people who worked hard will be paying for the drug addicts and whomever else.

Klepsacovic said...

Oh, Kirby, you're cute when you're angry and spewing nonsense. How exactly are the tanks getting less paid? We pay a slightly higher tax in the form of repairs, but we are capable of much higher incomes. If you're wondering how to stop paying for drug addicts, I suggest writing your congressman and demand that the government stop wasting your tax dollars throwing people in prison for drug use. Prison is expensive. And crowded. They're running out of space for the murderers and thieves.