Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

I'm sorry!

To the post I announced the removal of a lolling moron, I got an interesting comment from Xaxziminrax II: "I don't care that you don't apologize, because apologizing is pointless. It won't pay repair bills or get you flasks half price. Mistakes were made and apologizing won't undo them."

Absolutely true. However apologizing have a real informational value: it announce that you recognized the mistake and you are attempting to not do it again. While the apology itself won't undo the harm you caused (the compensation gold will), it informs the others that the statements below do not apply to you:
  • You don't know about the rules.
  • You don't care about the rules.
  • You are refusing to accept your mistake and blame it on some "luck", which also means you'll do nothing to fix them.
Of course, like every system it's abused by freeloaders on the expense of socials who follow norms and want peer respect. Among socials you can break the rules regularly as long as you keep on apologizing and expressing how sorry you are. This make the socials to feel good as you are "respecting" their norms and by humiliating yourself, you place them (the non-offenders) above yourself. So they tolerate that you rob them again and again by breaking the rules protecting them.

Obviously this is not the case here. At first, if you caused gold-value damage with a wipe, you have to pay compensation. "I'm sorry" won't help you out here. On the lol-offense, apologizing buys you just a few free passes. Sooner or later the serial-loller will be fired. The apologizing loller will last longer than the non-apologizing, but it won't save you if you don't improve.

The big difference is that socials want you to be good, while an asocial want you to do good. I can't care less if you can't or don't want to. If you don't, you're out.
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The morons for today are those annoying goldsellers who bring several lvl1 chars to a city to make them lay down and form the letters of a goldseller site. Why? Because someone finally figured out how to deal with them: if you use your piccolo of the flaming fire, they stand up and start to dance, breaking the formation (video). Even better, if they use a hack to fly in the air, dancing can make the hack crash!

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

tried the piccolo yesterday, didn't work :(

Dean said...

"Because someone finally figured out how to deal with them"

minor point but this is nothing new, people have been doing that for quite some time. It also works with a few other times.

Ygg said...

personally, I consider the goldsellers self-made letters to be the first real manifestation of Art in WoW.

Denethal said...

It won't always work, as the sellers port the characters high up and have them drop to their deaths. Dead characters won't dance.

Kind of sad that they fixed the totem annihilation of low levels. Ruined everything for the goldsellers.

Xerian said...

Interesting.

I absolutely have to try this next time I see these floating nuisances.

Artavur said...

I personnally always apologize in whisper to one of my raid leader when I screw up, and I do it for the exact purpose that you explained. To show him I know I fucked up, and that I will try and not to do it again

Syl said...

actually it's not true that you can do the same mistake 'again and again' in a social environment; you can do it once, maybe 2-3 times but in every community forgiveness for the same offense has a clear end and toleration span, just like you described for your own example. it does also often go with some form of compensation - there's many forms of that.
so actually you are doing exactly the same socials do too, if you're willing to give someone another chance and see if he learned something. ;)

Alrenous said...

I think you wanted to say, "socials want you to look good"

Being good is being a good person is thus actually doing good. Social obsession with appearances mean they just want you to appear good.

Alrenous said...

Philosophy is excellent.

Socials are obsessed with appearances. As long as you appear to be a good person, they'll let you freeload off them to an alarming extent.

However to an asocial, only doing good is important.

But isn't this just two different definitions of good?
By their actions, socials don't actually care much about their material well being. What they most care about is not being jostled out of their pillowy illusions.

Asocials actually want stuff, for which those pillowy illusions are just obstacles.


At first blush it seems like neither is actually wrong. There's nothing intrinsically more valuable about the illusion of wealth vs. actual wealth. It'll all be gone when you're dead regardless.

However, I draw the line against socials, because the asocials are capable of leaving the socials alone with their illusions - if only the socials were capable of leaving the asocials alone with their wealth.

Anonymous said...

I find that nihilistic approach of "nothing will matter since we will die anyway" to be quite bad to this discussion. Death is the final "loss of value", thus it should not be really considered as a comparison point for value, only what comes before it.

The whole social "illusion of wealth" paradigm is at best stupid, and quite frequently becomes pretty dangerous. No matter what you wanna appear to be, reality will be different. Having a Lamborghini while deep in dept, spending freely without any monetary rearguard and so on have very real long term consequences.

And no, it's not the "government", "evil corporations", "mass consumption culture" or any of that bullshit that it's at fault, it's your own stupidity to not recognize the principle that bad things happen ALL THE TIME that can't really be protected from, but can be resisted with proper preparation.

Wilson said...

Of course, in a social (by pretty much anybody's definition) guild, there would be no need to apologize for saying "lol" or failures to capitalize because, well, nobody would give a rat's ass.

Meanwhile, a fresh random sampling of level 80s below the "some are more equal than others" rank suggests that the majority still either raid infrequently, or do not raid at all (and no, I don't count doing Naxx in 232s as raiding). The benefits of not raiding in an "asocial" guild, as opposed to not raiding in any other kind of guild, or no guild at all, continue to elude me. Why are there they there? Since the size of the guild is decreasing I guess some of them are wondering the same thing.

Alrenous said...

Nihilisism is bad? Okay, sure. I was hoping to evoke a system of properties with a shorthand, rather than focusing on that particular aspect, anyway.

"The whole social "illusion of wealth" paradigm is at best stupid, and quite frequently becomes pretty dangerous. No matter what you wanna appear to be, reality will be different."

My point is that the social doesn't much care. It isn't actually dangerous to their illusions, just their wealth.
As long as the social has their self-justification, they don't mind that their unearned Lamborghini consumes their house, marriage, and relationship with their kids.

We can be pretty sure of this, because even if fully appraised of the likely outcome, socials keep their Lamborghini anyway. They're almost happy to let it destroy their wealth and relationships, even their actual life - as long as their pillowy illusions survive.

Anonymous said...

What I still haven't figured out is how you have yet to acknowledge or admit that your guild with no rules seemingly has more rules then a progression guild... oddly while I can agree with some(the charging for crafts is good imo), the chat stuff is kinda silly imo. In my guild we use raid chat and various other channels for communications, an examplee is melee chat and ranged chat. Gchat and general chat are usually turned off or in a seperate box during raids. Also why are you against ventrilo? The bulk of the major fuckups in your raids would be easily fixed if you could yell "hey shitbird, get outta the fire or move from the iceblock/cutters...etc". Even if you only used it for tank communications and to call out retards you can mute everyone that you don't want talking or has no critical role. Even setting up phantoms for healer bind tank binds and such.

But at the end of the day its your guild and you can do what you see fit..

Anonymous said...

Anonymous: "Also why are you against ventrilo? The bulk of the major fuckups in your raids would be easily fixed if you could yell "hey shitbird, get outta the fire or move from the iceblock/cutters...etc"."

Tell a man to get out of the fire, save him for one time.
Tell a man that fire is hot and hot is bad, save him for all times.

The reason Gevlons uses no voicecommunication is exactly this, he prefers to chat (raidchat is allowed after all) after a wipe, finding out what went wrong and then fix it by fixing the player, not the reaction.

Squishalot said...

@ Alrenous - someone with the 'illusion of wealth' attitude won't keep their fancy car, because it'll get reposessed once they can't afford to keep up the repayments. Then they won't have a house, they won't have a job, family, etc.

I take issue with your idea that 'wealth' = 'doing good'. By any which common definition of 'good', obtaining wealth at best can only 'be good', as opposed to 'doing good'. To 'do good' would require an outlay on your part for someone else's good.

Alrenous said...

Quite. In the end they lose the car as well. But again I have to assume they prefer their illusions, because even if you explain to them how to keep their car, they don't do it. They prefer to stay on their wealth-destruction trajectory.

We could do the 'good' debate properly and define terms, but I'm betting you don't have the patience.
Mine: a good act is an act which improves someone's life.
Wealth: things you value. By definition, getting wealth improves your own life. However, giving your wealth to a social tends not to support their illusions, and is a complete waste.
Even socials generally can't support each other. Instead they step on each other's toes from time to time, because by definition an illusion cannot be consistent. But it's impossible to work out every lie you need to tell unless you have the exact same illusion. So they generally don't support each other, but simply fail to offend each other.
A 'good' person according to another social is one who goes for long periods without stepping on any illusion's toes.
Though in the end, reality cannot be denied. The human brain cannot outsmart nature herself.

Evidence:
Socials, especially heavy socials, cannot keep friends very long. A few years at most. Eventually the truth comes out and they can no longer avoid being honest with each other, which starts fights. At this point they either become 'enemies' or start being stiff and formal-or-something-similar, which basically means avoiding meaningful socialization.

To put it in marriage terms, they either divorce or exchange some petty snipes and nothing else.