Non-toxic PvP
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@Juniper said in Non-toxic PvP:
if I’m in the Pirate faction being a menace on the seven seas, I don’t want to be constantly having arguments with another pirate who believes a REAL pirate never takes another person’s property without permission, and I’m making life hard for pirates by giving them a bad name.
OK, but… why are you constantly having that argument? Why aren’t you like “pfft whatever” to that guy? Why isn’t he being ostracized by the other pirates? For that matter, why is the captain even keeping him on board the ship?
I don’t fundamentally have any objection to a PC going around saying that pirating is bad actually. But it seems to me that there are a million ways to deal with this issue ICly.
@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:
With that said, and with the explicit caveat that I don’t see outliers as inherently problematic, it can and often does become a problem when the outlier ethos gets normalised in the setting it’s supposed to be pushing back against.
For sure, outliers taken to extreme CAN skew theme. I also recall being on The 100, and being a bit peeved because my PC (who was trying to stick to the established theme) was constantly being undermined by the outliers.
In such a circumstance, staff has two choices: limit/control the outliers, or allow theme to drift organically from what was originally established. Neither is right or wrong, but the stance should be made clear so all players are on the same page.
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@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:
@Roadspike said in Non-toxic PvP:
The pacifist is a player archetype who will join a moderate or high conflict group, then do as much as they can for their faction without engaging in the central conflict.
This is what I’m reacting to.
But you cropped out half the definition. It doesn’t make sense without the second half:
Then, when they get backed into a position where they’re called upon to resolve a conflict by fighting it out, they’ll agree to the fight but refuse to fight back, letting the opposing side win, in order to give the other players the most unsatisfying resolution possible.
There have been plenty of pacifists in SH that don’t act as the proverbial rock in the shoe. They don’t stand in the way of scenes, they don’t unnecessarily prolong assured victories, and they don’t make the resolutions agonizing.
By removing the second half of the definition, you’re missing the core problem of the player archetype I was describing.
I’ll digress, though. We’ve discussed this example thoroughly.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
I agree with the sentiment that instead of removing a character archetype completely as an valid option, there needs to be a clear separation and understanding of IC and OOC intent. One must also acknowledge that playing this type of character is similar to playing a ‘bad guy’ in a cooperative PvE game.
It’s incredibly challenging to play a ‘bad guy’ that not only provides more depth in a story but also ensures that everyone is having fun in the process instead of being antagonized. Playing a pacifist in the examples provided is just like that, it needs to be done in a way that can enrich the story, provide different perspectives IC, while also doing in a way that it’s not just to troll other players. ICA = ICC definitely comes into play, if a pacifist’s actions becomes a detriment to the group’s success or survival, they can be removed in an IC manner, whether it’s exile or whatever else. Just like if a pirate continues to proclaim and protest the pillaging of goods, they are forced to walk the plank.
If it crosses into the OOC boundary and the player is just there to give everyone a hard time, that is when staff has to step in. As I mentioned in an earlier post, whether it is a PvP or CvC game, staff needs to be fair but also direct in its decisions. This includes asking problem players to leave as soon as they become a problem and do not change. If a pacifist is doing it to troll others, they should be shown the door.
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@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP
OK, but… why are you constantly having that argument? Why aren’t you like “pfft whatever” to that guy? Why isn’t he being ostracized by the other pirates? For that matter, why is the captain even keeping him on board the ship?
I don’t fundamentally have any objection to a PC going around saying that pirating is bad actually. But it seems to me that there are a million ways to deal with this issue ICly.
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@Juniper I do not understand the meaning of your cat.
@Jumpscare said in Non-toxic PvP:
But you cropped out half the definition. It doesn’t make sense without the second half:
No, I read the second half. I consider “agreeing to fight but then refusing to fight back” to be in line with “being part of a high-conflict group and avoiding conflict”.
Of course it’s better when players can cooperate and find a mutually-agreeable solution. But when it comes to PVP (or even CVC) that’s just not always the case. Sometimes people want opposite things and there really is no reasonable compromise.
As long as the person is OOCly handling it well, I don’t really consider it to be “poor sportsmanship” (as someone else cited) if their character has sour grapes. Some characters are annoying ICly. Avoiding them has always worked well for me.
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On a total tangent, I have mixed feelings about the term CvC and I don’t generally use it. Whilst I totally agree that conflict should be between characters and not players, I think that in reality it’s often messy in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious, provable, or fixable, and I’m not convinced that asserting there’s a distinction does anything to ameliorate these issues.
When players get salty over conflict not going their way, they will rarely actually say that. Instead they’ll say stuff like “I’m upset that this other player cheated/used an exploit/is being unthematic/is unpleasant OOCly/is hogging scenes/can’t write for shit/has a super generic character/only cares about the mechanical win” etc. even when whatever complaint they’re making is provably untrue.
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Yeah I agree. “CvC” just comes across to me as spin.
My understanding of PvP was already that our characters duke it out IC, not that I’m literally attacking players.
When I used to play GoldenEye 007 with my buddies on the good old Nintendo 64 and we put that shit on PvP mode we didn’t actually start shooting each other up with golden guns. And Nintendo didn’t have to come down and be like, “Nah bros, chill! It’s CvC!!!”
(Though we did talk shit plenty and accuse the other of cheating all the time or having a better controller. But what’s wrong with that?)
I don’t think using the term “PvP” for decades contributes to the problems we’re discussing, and I don’t think changing it to “CvC” solves any of the problems we’re discussing.
Hell - when your team is losing a football game a common refrain is that the referees rigged it. I don’t know what to say. Losing is going to result in salty balls some times. You should see my cousins play Uno.
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@howyadoin said in Non-toxic PvP:
I don’t think using the term “PvP” for decades contributes to the problems we’re discussing, and I don’t think changing it to “CvC” solves any of the problems we’re discussing.
I don’t think changing it to CvC is intended to solve problems, just clearly delineate IC vs OOC. For some people PvP bears the distinction that indeed the player of the character wishes to end the fun of other players.
Also, if you approach IC conflict in a fully RP MU (so a MUSH or MUX or whatever) as though it’s a round of all slappers in Goldeneye, I would suggest that you’re in the wrong place and would better be served by a PvP MUD.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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I don’t know that the term CvC solves any problems, but I also don’t see it as spin. In my mind, calling IC conflict where everyone is working together to tell a good story CvC reframes the conflict to one where the players can be cooperative.
PvP doesn’t suggest to me that the players are going to start hitting each other. To me, the difference is that in PvP, the players are trying to one-up one another OOCly as well as ICly. They aren’t cooperating to tell a story, they’re pitting their OOC wits against one another as well as their IC wits (there could even be some situations where there’s OOC competition even though there’s IC cooperation, maybe two characters are working together one a project and are ICly cooperating, but the two players each want to one-up the other and come out looking “best” from the cooperation).
And PvP can be fun as hell, don’t get me wrong. There is indeed a different rush to knowing that you got one over on another real person, not just that your character won the dice rolls.
I don’t think that CvC should suggest that something is more or less messy than PvP, I think that it should suggest that the players are cooperating even though their characters are competing.
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@MisterBoring said in Non-toxic PvP:
just clearly delineate IC vs OOC.
If someone is having trouble delineating IC vs OOC when bad things happen to their character, I don’t think changing the letters is going to help.
@MisterBoring said in Non-toxic PvP:
For some people PvP bears the distinction that indeed the player of the character wishes to end the fun of other players.
But sometimes they literally do. It’d be nice if we all lived in an ideal world where there was never any OOC bleed and everyone was a perfectly good sports, but that’s just not the case. Many people like PVP over PVE precisely because of the other P in the equation. It really IS about going up against other players and winning. That doesn’t mean it’s malicious, just competitive.
Good sportsmanship is more about playing by the rules and not being an a-hole than it is about making sure the other person/team “has fun”. (Especially when your idea of fun is “I win” and so is theirs.)
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I think that a core problem is that upwards of 90% of players in this hobby want their characters to be Cool. There are players who enjoy playing weird little gremlins or satirical characters they see as totally separate from themselves, where they get to have fun at that character’s expense. These tend to be my favourite players, but they are in the minority. Mostly people have fantasies about being Sexy or Strong or Smart or Cool that these characters, and their wins, are meant to fulfil.
So as much as we can look down on people who see their character’s loss as their loss, for having trouble separating IC and OOC, the reality is that this is most people. And even if you are someone who enjoys playing the foil or the weird little gremlin, I’ll wager that at some point you’ve realised that what most people enjoy about your characters is they get to feel Cool in comparison, when they’re putting your character down or beating them up or being morally upstanding in contrast to your character. And you’re OOCly giving them the thumbs up that no feelings are being hurt in the process. That’s why playing what most people consider a “good villain” is basically a service you’re providing other players, because they get to feel Cool rooting for their own character against yours, while you’re always holding back just enough that it never feels humiliating or futile. This is CvC, but you’re serving the needs of P through a C veil, and if you stop doing that, the feelings that arise are PvP.
So staff can call it CvC, but they need to understand that it’s still ultimately a balancing act of managing player egos.
