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PWE: Stop Encouraging Sociopaths
lordlalo
Member Posts: 460 Arc User
There is a real problem in PUGs -- no one works as a team. This is in part to the type of person that runs through a pug and part because either there is a language barrier or people just aren't used to the melding of strategies.
However, one thing is nearly always true no matter the pug, those who play as a team are greatly outnumbered and dwarfed by those whom seem to be mindless drones/bots.
Example 1 (more to come, I'm planning on running 2 additional experiments -- the second will show how easy it is to be a sociopath and how rewarding it is in this game, and the third will show the effect it has on FIVE brand new players I'm going to bring into the game that I know are very compassionate and empathetic folks -- I will be documenting all the experiences and data):
I've tested a theory, over the past week I have run a tacsort build through 4 pugs per day every day (since Nov 1, 2013). Each day, I would play missions that somewhat require some space-combat teamwork such as the Crystalline Catastrophe (10 players total -1 for myself), Hive Onslaught Elite (5 players total -1 myself), Vortex Elite (5 players total -1 myself), and the Cure Found Elite (5 players total -1 myself). Here are the findings:
Analysis:
As you can see from the number of times a PUG optional was foiled (there was more due to an honest mistake here or there I did not include), the chat conversations should have reflected this with at least a "I'm new and have no idea what needs to be done here. Any advice?" I personally love these messages, as I only see them once per 3 months and are a welcomed relief and hope that the game is not near 100% sociopaths.
Also from the sample group, I realize it is not large, but it seems to be typical and reflects my year's worth of experience playing STO near exactly. I did ensure that I played at a diffrent time every day. The first set was started at Noon EST, then 2 EST, then 4 EST and so on until I covered the 4am EST crowd (I'm a US Army vet, sleep is not a requirement :P). I did not find any anomalous data and tried to cover every time but the late morning hours which seems to have few people online and PUG'ing.
There is one more observation I'd like to make. As a tacscort, I died about 1 out of 2 PUG's. Some were more, which averaged about 1 per PUG. I did this pug in the Fleet Armatage with a tactical captain who only gets 5 available heals (Ltcmdr Engineer, Lt Science). This is one of the more common tacscort builds I see, and playing with the fleet, my death ratio is nearly always 0 unless someone makes an honest mistake - granted the members of my own fleet are hand-selected team-players and close friends both in-game and IRL (a very small percentage [10%ish] are purely STO acquainted players). With that being known, there seems to either be no incentives for a team to heal tacscort builds or they find that it has no benefit to their own scores and end-loot (very sociopathic behavior). This needs to be corrected.
From my calculations, PUGs are far from healthy in this game and needs some attention from the developers.
Here is a suggestion:
I welcome feedback, but don't troll and keep in mind one thing before you start a rebuttal that this doesn't happen or I'm somehow misunderstanding "everything": When you toss a brick in a pack of dogs, the one it hits barks the loudest.
However, one thing is nearly always true no matter the pug, those who play as a team are greatly outnumbered and dwarfed by those whom seem to be mindless drones/bots.
Example 1 (more to come, I'm planning on running 2 additional experiments -- the second will show how easy it is to be a sociopath and how rewarding it is in this game, and the third will show the effect it has on FIVE brand new players I'm going to bring into the game that I know are very compassionate and empathetic folks -- I will be documenting all the experiences and data):
I've tested a theory, over the past week I have run a tacsort build through 4 pugs per day every day (since Nov 1, 2013). Each day, I would play missions that somewhat require some space-combat teamwork such as the Crystalline Catastrophe (10 players total -1 for myself), Hive Onslaught Elite (5 players total -1 myself), Vortex Elite (5 players total -1 myself), and the Cure Found Elite (5 players total -1 myself). Here are the findings:
- Total Players in Sample Group: 147
- Number of heals received other than myself: 1
- Number of group text (chat) interactions (other than gg at the end): 2
- Number of times a player not knowing the script foils the optional: 14 (out of 21)
Analysis:
As you can see from the number of times a PUG optional was foiled (there was more due to an honest mistake here or there I did not include), the chat conversations should have reflected this with at least a "I'm new and have no idea what needs to be done here. Any advice?" I personally love these messages, as I only see them once per 3 months and are a welcomed relief and hope that the game is not near 100% sociopaths.
Also from the sample group, I realize it is not large, but it seems to be typical and reflects my year's worth of experience playing STO near exactly. I did ensure that I played at a diffrent time every day. The first set was started at Noon EST, then 2 EST, then 4 EST and so on until I covered the 4am EST crowd (I'm a US Army vet, sleep is not a requirement :P). I did not find any anomalous data and tried to cover every time but the late morning hours which seems to have few people online and PUG'ing.
There is one more observation I'd like to make. As a tacscort, I died about 1 out of 2 PUG's. Some were more, which averaged about 1 per PUG. I did this pug in the Fleet Armatage with a tactical captain who only gets 5 available heals (Ltcmdr Engineer, Lt Science). This is one of the more common tacscort builds I see, and playing with the fleet, my death ratio is nearly always 0 unless someone makes an honest mistake - granted the members of my own fleet are hand-selected team-players and close friends both in-game and IRL (a very small percentage [10%ish] are purely STO acquainted players). With that being known, there seems to either be no incentives for a team to heal tacscort builds or they find that it has no benefit to their own scores and end-loot (very sociopathic behavior). This needs to be corrected.
From my calculations, PUGs are far from healthy in this game and needs some attention from the developers.
Here is a suggestion:
- Scale rewards depending on:
- Cruisers: Heals (primary) & Damage Intake
- Science: Debuffs (primary) & Heals
- Escorts: DPS (primary) & Debuffs
- Engineer Captains: Heals (tertiary)
- Science Captains: Debuffs (tertiary)
- Tactical Captains: DPS (tertiary)
- Give engineers and science ships a reason to heal -- make the encounter require heals to other players or penalize or reward captains who heal by providing a feed-back effect (maybe a +1% rep gain for being thoughtful or -1% rep gain for being a sociopath)
- Or, ensure that EVERY captain and ship build has equal self-sufficiency tools available to them in PUGs. As it stands, and even as many guides state, tactical officers in escorts rely heavily on their team for survivability. Without this, they can't do their job: dps.
- Display a 5-Tabbed leaderboard at the end of EVERY PVE queue: 1: Overall Scores; 2: DPS; 3: Heals per second 4: Survived Incoming Damage per second; 5: Relevant Statistics (deaths, crit%, other's healed, other's buffed, mobs debuffed, etc.
- Give players a voting system in PUGs to allow the group to kick out players who would rather solo the content than play a part of a team opening the slot for another player. When a vote happens, players should be required to provide a required reason: a) AFK b) Under-Geared/Skilled for Elite (for tactical escorts that aren't dpsing), or c) Not providing support as a support vessel/class.
- Give players a "queue ignore" option so if they don't want to group with a player any more, the queue will always avoid putting them in the same group.
- Make ALL elite events more challenging and/or much harder than they currently are or give players another tier to join -- "Hardcore" where the mere word teamwork must be engraved in every player's play-style.
I welcome feedback, but don't troll and keep in mind one thing before you start a rebuttal that this doesn't happen or I'm somehow misunderstanding "everything": When you toss a brick in a pack of dogs, the one it hits barks the loudest.
Said NO to Arc. Gets punished by not being given a free outfit, free lobi, and free shuttle. Now forced to use Arc's site when trying to get to STO site. Still not rewards for beta testing the Arc website by force. Bravo Cryptic.
Post edited by lordlalo on
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I agree this is always the best option and this is what I usually attempt to do. But I as well as other non-fleet mates in chats that I've conversed with seem to agree that most fleets don't have a 24/7 schedule, and when your own schedule is erratic, being online when the rest of your fleet is on, can be an issue that can sometimes nudge you into a pug once or twice. However, the few larger 24/7 fleets out there that I've been in, suffer the same issues as PUG's which defeats the purpose IMO.
But to the point -- my own fleet is hand-selected to be a team of team players. A player in a PUG is there for one of two reasons: 1) their fleet is currently offline which is for me less than not or 2) they are sociopaths who don't fit well into their own fleet's events in which case, they shouldn't be rewarded at all, much less be able to get "fleet" (STO's hallmark of the word teamwork) marks by throwing the rest of their team under the bus.
Again, you are very right that it is best to play with a team-oriented fleet. But the question is, why in the world should you have to actually think about playing another build other than your comfortable "trusty" build because you see a PUG as something to do until your fleet starts logging in? I was under the impression that one of the great things about STO is the way information and strategies are shared -- you can group with other fleets freely in events and learn things outside of your fleet to bring these new ideas to an otherwise stagnated think-tank. This is not what happens any more it would seem or perhaps it is just because I know everything there is to know about STO (which I very highly doubt and mean that in the least condescending and most humble way possible).
Yes, it is one of the easiest ways of ending the inevitable run in with the "useless pug" syndrome. However, I might just point out that possible time zone differences and everything qualified under "Real Life" may prevent friends/fleeties from being able to form up a team for an STF. And although there are public and private STF channels available, most are private and the public ones are not worth mentioning in this.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/10052253
Why are you not rejoicing?
You are aware that not all have this option, right?
Same as the above; for control, I employed the services of a fleet mate to be the anti-sociopath.
My build: Oddessy Tactical Cruiser (all weapons are elite phasers) with full XII VR consoles
His build: Oddessy Engineering Cruiser (all weapons are elite phasers) with full XII VR consoles
My Stats:
Deaths: 0
Placement in CCe: 1st
Reward: 1 purple XII Shield Array (200K to vendor or 800K on the exchange), 80 Fleet marks (or Nakura Marks). I hit "need" on everything, and had an additional loot that vendored for about 1.2mil (by the way, It took an incredible amount out of me for the purpose of demonstration to hit "need" on everything although I needed nothing -- all of my toons have more than 200mil EC on them already and honestly and ethically earned through "greed" or solo)
Times healed others: 0
Times debuffed the entity: 0
Times healed self: 8 (I could have spared over 27 heals between cooldowns)
Damage taken: 110,081 (AOE only)
Chat conversations: 0
Number of times I could have healed to prevent a death: 14
Number of times I could have healed to offer support: 27
CONTROL TOON:
Deaths: 0
Placement in CCe: NA (no placement)
Reward: 60 marks
Times healed others: 23
Times debuffed the entity: 9
Times healed self: 12
Damage taken: 741,132 (tanked the whole time)
Chat conversations: 0
Number of times he healed to prevent a death: 12
Number of times he healed to offer support: 5
Again there are 6 more days, but you have a great preview of exactly how I believe this will turn out.
I was in a IE space run just recently all dps, and we got it done really fast. At the end somebody posted up a damage meter. Overall two people got 12k+ dps, one person did 8k, another did 6k and another did 5k. Nobody was falling behind, afk, and nobody died and our time on target(s) even without seeing a stat for would have all been pretty close to one another. Since we ran through it so fast borg didnt have a chance to regen a lot of shield and hull so total damage that had to be done can even be easily calculated but i'm not going to do that. Unfortunately i dont have the damage done by each person just their dps. But for the sake of this argument we'll say damage done goes corresponds with dps since we all maintained close to the same time on target and we were all moving from one area to another in a group and we didnt die. I mention all that cause for example if you do 5 seconds of burst and die you would have really really high dps but low damage done if the fight had continued on for a minute.
For these 5 people how do you decide who gets what for a reward?
damage done? damage taken? participation?
I know there is a voice system in game but I don't like it and I certainly do no want the adverts spamming me with stuff either. If there was a better way to communicate in game while pugging it would go a hell of a lot better. To that end if I play a good STF with someone I'll add them to my friends list and just send them a tell asking if they wanna do stfs and it works out pretty well
The game decides this. Most of the PVE's state in the queue, "Obtain top leadboard scores for additional loot". This means, if you are one of the higher ones doing damage (total damage, not dps) then you are rewarded more than others. For an escort, this is an Achilles heel because no one wants to heal him so he can take the top prize, so they generally seem to want him to die so his overall damage drops while everyone punches the mob at a steady rate. This is not the issue for just escorts, but for say someone that sees that someone needs a heal and blows their heals on them, and now, they need a heal. They likely will NEVER get the heal returned in a pug and will be penalized for being a team-player.
As far as I was aware the Reward was always a random one however high dps seems to trigger the 6 and 11 BNP's more often than not, that does need to be tested out.
The overall damage triggers this, not the DPS. In all the parses I've run, the one with the highest damage gets the high loot triggers.
edit for clarity: For instance, if I get 20K DPS, and go splat in a tacscort, come back do another 20K and go splat (with the longer cooldown) the overall damage begins to allow the others in the team to not only catch up, but to pass the total damage output. In some PVE's where the boss isn't that hard, you'll find that your high DPSers will get that loot trigger, while in other fights like Hive eSTF and CCe, this is not even hardly the case -- the trigger usually goes to the one that did the most steady damage and stayed alive.
It also says in the PVE descriptions that players getting top positions get the better loot.
PVE's should measure your class and ship's ability to do its job, not measure its ability to do the job of a tacscort. This is what I've identified as the problem at the root of the sociopathic behavior.
You cannot force players to be social and cooperative.
Even with your proposed changes, players will not play together unless THEY want it.
Sure there will be more heals etc. but they will be as antisocial as ever.
Other than that, your proposals are in vain as long as DPS is everything... sure you can scale my reward on my ability to throw out GW III, TR II and ES II...
But there is very little incentive to do so, apart from my absolute defiance and stubborness that will lead me to use them regardless if it is useful or not.
DPS is King and if you can't do enough DPS you're out, as I said sure I'll use my given abilities, debuff the CE but the most thing I need to worry about, is to do it so until my QFFP and AuxCannons (Yes, I fly a CC and Drain Vesta) are in position to fire at that thing.
Unless there will be different strategies and different approaches as how to actually win, like debuffs actually disableing an enemy for good (=counted as dead) or something like that there is little to no need for these abilities.
Sure it makes it easier for me to solo stuff but in Group Content with One or more Escorts it's completely useless to use any of my abilities...
Why? Simply because the enemy is dead faster than my gorram GravWell can manifest.
Instances of this include the dreaded Drone duty... I would love to do it but I simply cannot kill stuff fast enough and when I do all my abilities are on cooldown and I "struggle" even more to kill the next group.
A Tac with GravWell I and all his tacabilities can do it way better.
I think that is the real problem and unless Cryptic does something against this "DPS is everything that matters" your proposals will be in Vain or will have only the bare minimum effect ie. some will sure heal teammates but most will simply start healin/overhealing themselves the whole time to jump to the top of the ranking and the same goes for Debuffs... you will only get the bare minimum of useful ones but most will be used on lone Drones or such to get them the best reward.
There is no way you can track "usefulness" of these abilities and even Cryptic manages to deactivate Overheals, the perpetrator will just fly into the enemies, get damaged and heals himself all the time...
No i want you to tell me how the actual calculation would work.
How much does a successful space IE run yield now for Dil and marks? now tell me how your proposed system would calculate it for my sample group. What does the guy that did 5k dps get? what about the ones that did 12k dps? To take it a step further what about the 4 guys who go left on Khitomer and act as the primary kill team while one person goes to the right side to stop probes from entering the gate. Is there going to be a minimum reward? should there be a cap on how much you can get regardless of your performance?
My main concern is what variables are to be used to calculate who gets what for their reward and how you prevent people from abusing the system. Say if damage done was the determining factor for seeing how many marks you get. There are quite a few things in the borg STFs that have a mechanic where you have to kill this first or that other thing will keep getting healed. Even if people dont exploit that they can do an STF the normal way but would it end up turning into a damage padding contest?
Oh, would work. That would be mainly left up to the devs, but it would take into consideration what class and ship you are flying. For instance, if you are an engieer flying a cruiser, if you're not taking most of the damage (ie, you're not tanking) it would then look at your heals per second opposed to a damage per second score. If you were tanking, it would look at your incoming damage per second and rank you that way meaning the longer you stayed alive the higher you would be in the leaderboard. That is just an example and I'm sure there are flaws with it, but I'm sure PWE can expand on this to find a comparable solution.
I also believe that there should be a zero death bonus (huge bonus) at the end in either dilithium or marks. I would also suggest adding a refinery token to the game, allowing a player to refine say 20 more dilithium each (no limit to use them) and rewarding these to an entire team that goes an elite STF with 0 deaths for the whole team.
As for the numbers, on the first page of this post I posted the preliminary day one experiment of the current system. You can see there, that there is a gap of about 20 marks and about 1.5 million EC between the two "types" we're subjugating. I would propose this be reversed by keeping the top rewards for those at the top of the leader-board in their craft/class and the gap expanded another 20-40%.
I hope that is satisfactory. As I said, they were mere suggestions -- they have not been thought out or vetted by a team that does this for a living yet and I'm sure there are holes, exploits, and even some possible "I quits the game!" problems to it. But generally I think it could be tweaked and changed to a point that it would work for the good of the game and the community.
If you read my first post, as I said, the dog it hits.....
It is not a vain idea to attempt to fix PUGs. This would greatly make this game more desirable and likely attract more players. This not only means more fun for the anti-sociopaths, but it means more money in PWE's pocket.
As for "DPS is everything" as it stands, that is absolute truth with one exception: Your overall damage is everything according to the rewards system in place now. This means, classes doing their jobs (dps) are commonly knocked down by being DENIED heals to keep them off the leaderboards while those whom are healing rarely get it returned when they need it. This behavior which reaps the most rewards in this game dictates that your theory is false. Did you see my day-one experiment of being a sociopath for today? I'm fairly certain we can expect more of the same of that, and the fact is, the more anti-social you are, the more the current system REWARDS YOU. This shouldn't be the case for team events.
You slap your labels of "force" all you want, the fact remains, not giving as high of a reward for anti-social behavior is not force as a choice is present -- the choice being to play as a team and be greatly rewarded, or keep doing your same song and a dance to get a few peanuts for your time. This will encourage players to be more social. Even if it doesn't encourage chat, it will encourage a player to heal other players which could catalyze that chat. If it were me, in a pug now, I'd go back to doing what I used to, "If you need a heal, call it out, and if its ready I'll call it out when it is sent".
This is provoking social behavior by rewarding the hallmarks of teamwork, far better than directly rewarding anti-social sociopathic behavior in place now.
No.... I didn't say that. In fact I stated in the OP the rewards should first be based on the type of ship you are flying (the primary criteria), secondly on the ships support role (inferred), and thirdly gauged on the class you are. Your class would be the lowest weight in determining a score being as each captain only gets two to three abilities that make a big difference when used, while your boffs can quickly dwarf that. I also believe a system that allows for this method of scoring also allows for the most flexibility for the player. Of course I wouldn't put a player in a sociopath category while at the same time promoting this kind of flexibility :S Where did that come from? Did you misread something or did I mistype it?
But you insist on placing the rewards on the roles you deem fit. I really have to disagree here.
Right now STO has a lot of hybrid designed ships that allow captains to fill a variety of roles. There are cruisers with good DPS and escorts with crowd control abilities. What you propose would not work.
No, most ships have very specific roles to fill. That's not my word, that's PWE's. They're very sturdy on the subject that cruisers are tanks, escorts are dps, and science are support. I agree there are some hybrid ships out there, the Vesta, Chimera, and Battlecruiser comes to mind here. But that doesn't mean they are not still suited for their primary category and if you insist on using a defiant class escort with a tactical officer to tank instead of dps, then yes, chances are, you're a sociopath and would provide no benefit to your group besides that of comical relief. However, if you're an engineer in a Chimera, and you so choose to tank and do a good job of it, then you should be able to hit the leader-board on heals and damage intake for your captain which should grant you the increased rewards.
Again, my idea doesn't necessarily lock you into one loadout or another, however it does ensure that you are providing real benefit to your team and aren't an empty hat.
A cruiser with an engineering captain with a playstyle of DPS -- you couldn't have given me a more self-centered, self-absorbed, sociopathic play-style if you tried; at least the Vesta can aux-DPS. And many others feel you shouldn't be rewarded for throwing your teammates under the bus either. To each his own. Hopefully Cryptic gets the hint that encouraging sociopaths is the antithesis of a healthy community.
However, allow me to add, that if others in the team (besides yourself) were doing their jobs, and a meaty ocra escort was kept alive the entire time and spammed all their dps abilities (assuming a proper boff and weapon setup), you couldn't contend -- it is against the game's mechanics. So thereby withholding a heal for that escort gives you more total damage under the current system thereby rewarding you for throwing your teammate under the bus. In a system where this wasn't rewarded or penalized, if it were rewarding for playing as a team, you would find much less reward and would be left behind in your rather self-centered play-style very quickly.
But, if you like doing all the damage and healing yourself, there are always the episodes and single-player events to play through for rep. I find your play-style rather deplorable that you are rewarded heavy amounts of reputation for doing the exact same thing you do in single-player mode while there are others out there that crave a team environment of being able to depend on another class to get their own jobs done.
Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), also called dissocial personality disorder, is a personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for, or violation of, the rights of others. There may be an impoverished moral sense or conscience and a history of crime, legal problems, impulsive and aggressive behavior.
Adamkafei has made an excellent point, why should players be penalized for not playing the game as you see fit. This entire threads is about what you want, how you want others to play the game.
As I said before, the basic idea is poor and if you want to use the word sociopath again, I suggest you read the first paragraph again.
It's been said many times and will be said many times again, STO is not an MMO, it's really an MSO with multi-player functions.
Now in case you didn't know, a cruiser captain with full spec in threat control dealing no damage will never take an NPC off a tacscort that does lots of damage, so I'm actually doing my team more good by running a damage dealing cruiser than a healboat given nine times out of ten NPCs shoot me, in some cases even over tanking specs, should I be penalised for that result to my gameplay choice?
Also, do bare in mind that Cryptic pride themselves on player choice...
EDIT: Lets not forget a very important and kinda relevant Star Trek quote "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
As much as I was opposed to the leaver penalty It still happened......some pugs are horrible and some of those players have no damn right to be in elite but the way of the world is to pander to the lowest denominator....they have a right to ruin the STF as opposed to my right to expect the elite STFS only be allowed to elite players..same goes here...those sociopaths have the right to do whatever they want which overrides your right to expect competency so that you might enjoy the game.
Nice idea but it is a no go.
I have fallen (again) in the old habit of trying to abbreviate anything and effed it up again... I did not meant DPS as "the Damage you throw out per seconds" but as "Damage" itself as the underlying mechanic to everything, not "Overall Damage" and not "DPS" as both are too specific.
Again, sorry for that.
But your problem is the same as someone attributing his healing to "prayers" instead of "medicine".
Sure the outcome is the same, but the reasons are very different.
Tacscorts are denied heals, yes, because Damage is the only way things go and is rewarded according to its relevancy.
You can't win the game by tanking, healing or debuffing!
As it stands you don't even need a tank, a healer or debuffer as the very foundation of the game recognises only Damage.
Sure these types make it "easier" but they are nothing more than the sweet cherry ontop of a huge effing cup of Whoopa**, nice to have and look at but it's more likely you shove them aside to get to the real deal.
Edit: Here I am in full support for Adamkafei, his point and subsequent posters agreeing.
Now again to the Anisocial problem...
First off all, I don't think "throwing out heals" is by itself very social when the sole reason someone does it is not "I want to help my team" but only "I WANTZZZ LOOOOOTZ!" by getting to the top of the ranking.
It will definitely NOTmake players to engage in Chat or even asking/offering heals...
They will start to throw out heals randomly and most of these will still be for themselves and not get where it is needed. If someone doesn't care about the team and just wants his reward he will not magically turn around and care about you.
He will just realise that he has another way to get better ranking and use it to HIS utmost favor ie. either healing himself every moment the CD is gone or throwing around heals to random people every time he can.
As I said... They may throw you a heal once in a while and maybe when you actually needed it... but they don't do it because they wanted to help you or care about you, they only see you as another way to get Loot.
And what I didn't realised in my prior post... how do you want to track "Debuffs"?
I mean how can this work? Effectiveness? Number of Debuffs thrown out? Time enemy is stuck in Debuff?
Edit: I don't know why, but I get the feeling to deal with a Tacscort, not making #1 in Ranking because he got ignored and died too often.
Sure, people won't always do as you want / expect. So what? People are starving in the world. These are pretty pixels.
And as for the PUGs, did you try asking if anybody needed advice first? That could be a great ice breaker. For myself, I ALWAYS say "Greetings" at the start and twice have discussed strategies I wasn't yet aware of. I thanked people both times. And at the end, I always wish "Safe travels".
But that's me. I don't worry that others won't interact as I do.
It is a game. Relax. Have fun.
Cheers.
Builds:
http://tinyurl.com/kqqg8f5
http://tinyurl.com/n3ewgcw
so?ci?o?path
ˈsōsēōˌpaTH/Submit
noun
1.
a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
It's not what I want it is what benefits the TEAM. Again, every comment you have made so far fits the precise definition of sociopath. It would seem my assessment of the dog barking was absolutely correct.
I suggest you read the book "Inside the Mind of a Sociopath" -- it was included as part of my thesis.
I did not suggest that players be "penalized" I suggested they not be rewarded as those who are playing as a team -- there is a very clear difference.
Obvious troll is obvious.
You do realize that just about every MMO out there has team dungeons much like our episodes and PVE's, yes? What really separates this from other "multiplayer" games is the fact it is server side hit detection, and that there are open combat zones where massive amounts of players compete for mobs and/or objectives. To say STO is not an MMO is as false of an assessment as you could give.
Allow me to repost the definition:
so?ci?o?path
ˈsōsēōˌpaTH/Submit
noun
1.
a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
Players who join an STF or PVE, "need" on everything, do not chat, do not help others, collect their rewards and leave are as sociopathic as they come without being clinical. I searched for a while for the right word to use, and I do believe that hits the nail on the head. A sociopath or the encouragement and rewarding of that behavior by its own definition is counterproductive for a team-based community -- in fact, this could be the staple problem for loss of players.
Thank you for the clarification. I am not, or would I ever suggest that a player be penalized for doing damage, to the contrary, I'm suggesting they be rewarded more for working as a team. Think about it: Most engineers in a decent cruiser and solo most PVE's with decent dps, and their own self heals with some to spare -- SOLO. This is already somewhat in place in the episodes as a team of a greater number seems to be rewarded with more rare drops than a solo run. There is no reason that any escort should be (as they already are) penalized for being an tacscort and being denied a heal for doing what they're supposed to do. To throw your teammate under the bus to lower his overall damage because he's a high dps class, is counter-intuitive to a team function. And that's the premise of the idea.
To your random heals: If, the game calculated actual health restored per second as a scoring mechanism, it would work as a random heal would have nothing or little to heal.
Because many people as evidence of the comments cannot infer a problem, they have to see it through evidence. Obsession is not a word I would use. Necessity through passion is more appropriate.
Did I ask? In the experiment, no. Apart from the experiment? Every time and I usually get 0 response (the usual is about 1 response of "i'm new" per 2-3 months of doing 2-3 per day) with just as many foils of the optional.
The have fun part -- I agree. My fleet has a golden rule, "Have fun, but not at the expense of others". The thing is, not everyone in a PUG can have fun because there are so many folks that are having their fun and getting their fatz lewtz at the expense of their team mates by throwing them under that bus. This was a problem I identified last month when I had 4 friends from another game that are avid Star Trek fans who started to play, and as soon as they had to pug, they all lost complete interest in the game. I spent considerable time formulating actionable content to bring to the attention of PWE and the community. This is its result and its not over yet.
And yes, since you're happy to throw out the term sociopath toward people you know very little about, I'll stick with "obsessed".
Good night.
Builds:
http://tinyurl.com/kqqg8f5
http://tinyurl.com/n3ewgcw
Not really, think how much of this game is solo-able, even an elite STF has been solo-ed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXDXSehns58
Still wanna tell me it's an MMO?
That's not my image. But thank you for pointing that out.
I did a thesis on sociopaths for psychology, I know quite a lot about them, I also know this game is likely dominated by them. Did you know that some 12,000,000 in the US alone are sociopaths? Did you know that sociopaths are the offenders of every mass murder in US history? I know more about sociopaths than I ever wanted to know and find scholastic literature explaining the behavioral patterns to be very disturbing. For instance, lying, deceit, otherwise removing you in any way possible as an obstacle from their agenda is something a sociopath does without second thought other than "forced consequence". They can also mimic empathy (the very antithesis of a sociopath) when it is to their benefit. Again, very, very disturbing.
Now, you wouldn't happen to be trying to downplay a concern as an obsession because it gets in your way, would you?
So, if there is a forced consequence in this game for being a sociopath, perhaps we can make it less sociopathic if you like that argument. No, instead, I'm proposing more rewards for the opposite.
I already said it was soloable, in the very post you're quoting. How does this make it a non-mmo? The hallmarks of a MMO is open content where objectives can be achieved as a team and competition of objectives are created in open environments of several players or teams.
Because you can get so geared out that you can solo all the content does NOT discount it as a mmo, even by defintion, you are utterly wrong.