UO had that sort of jerks too. Heck, some guy went ahead and figured out a way to kill Richard Garriot’s (creator of the Ultima franchise, otherwise known as Lord British) immortal in game avatar during an event. Which was very amusing.
Many of the Red side of UO were nice enough guys that just really enjoyed murdering people, taking all their stuff and bragging about it while taunting the deceased. 
It’s just that most people on the receiving end of it tend to take those things personally.
I think that first week or 2 was the best fun I ever had in this game, and I wish everyone could experience it! But, I wouldnt trade the portal networks for anything. And I am so glad there are people willing to take the time.
That first week:
Omg! My neighbor has gleam! Where did you get THAT!?!
Rubies weren’t a thing, so fuel was peat or straight coal.
That feeling, opening your first portal to the metal planet! And then immediately you are dead… because protections…
Everyone had to farm… Desert Sword… Sap… sap…sap… Desert Sword… sap sap sap
You needed gold or silver to make a refinery… so ya… that was a thing
I loved it. But again… wouldnt trade the networks at all…
Anyone can have that “first week” (or first couple weeks, I didn’t see any portals at all during the first week, tho apparently PS had some up in like a couple days) experience tho, if they really want to.
All it takes is self-control in abstaining from using shops and other people’s portals until you can make your own, for the sake of personal challenge. 
You know you can go the other way, right? That it’s a loop?
Boori is still better than Finata.
Way better than Finata. Earlier I was stuck in an unplayable lag loop on Finata. Kept rubber-banding back from a mile away. I finally escaped through a portal… To Boori. 
In the end, this is a game and games are played to be won and lost. Maybe it is direct competition or perhaps it is a prestige/reputation thing, but people play for a reason.
Some people cannot handle a loss, so they feel the need to make everyone else miserable. Others just enjoy being jerks. For those sorts of people, though, there are other players who wish to fill the roles of judge, police, or peacekeeper to stand up against the jerks.
This talk reminds me of ArcheAge. There are the two game factions, but if you wanted to be a “jerk”, there was a third Pirate faction you could join by committing enough crimes and being kicked out of your initial faction (the trial s were even run by players). I think games like Eve, Ultima, RuneScape, and ArcheAge are getting it right by taking a step back from the community and instead placing systems that allows the players to regulate themselves.
But yeah, this is WAY off topic 
I can often seem “jerky” in forums. I’m just honest and blunt and don’t walk on eggshells. Meet me in party chat (or IRL) and you’ll find I’m a totally laid back dude who is loyal and cooperative, regardless of my actions in the game. I just don’t always find playing “nice nice” is the best strategy all the time.
My neighbor in UO was a “red”. Nice guy. Helped me defend my house once when it was raided (friend forgot to bank his key).
That’s the only downside I feel towards portals. Sounds like it was great fun discovering and exploring. Hard to recapture such moments. Jealous.
Most people are decent enough in the right circumstances, it’s just that gaming in the last decade or so became a bit… disconnected from its origins in some genres.
I have fond recollections of a misspent youth in arcades, where you’d literally pay to play and often enough be completely massacred within like fifteen seconds while having all sorts of trash talk thrown at you. Usually, but not exclusively, in Fighter machines. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and such. In that particular culture it was very unseemly to complain that so-and-so made you waste your coins.
That’s probably where I learned not to take that sort of thing too personally.
That’s what I usually picture when I remember the UO / EvE pvp scene, that most people call jerks, people carrying on this aspect of gaming. But I suppose we currently live in a climate of political correctness where that sort of thing seems too uncouth.
And, of course, that particular style of competitiveness and, let’s call it sportsmanship for lack of a better word, doesn’t necessarily fit well into every game. It would be a terrible fit for Boundless, for example, which tries to emphasize cooperation over competition.
I just want to circle back on this, as I didn’t mean to start this particular tangent. I was an arcade rat growing up too, mostly playing MvC and MvC2, and I well recall the trash talk and the aggressively competitive nature of those games. The average player age was also something like 15. I wasn’t around for UO, but my experience with EVE and it’s players has all been astoundingly bad, if you couldn’t tell. I’m sure some of those guys were nice people in the right circumstances, but all any of them ever talked about and seemed to enjoy was killing newbs, scamming people, and how much IRL money they destroyed. And playing the game myself, I can kind of see why (EVE is maybe the most boring thing I have done in my life, aside from preparing taxes. Just not for me), but if all a game offers is being a jerk, why are we playing unless we are jerks (and I understand that isn’t all the game offered, but it’s all I saw in my time there and my time talking with other players about it)?
You call it “a climate of political correctness,” I call it not being a 15 year old any more. Just because you see my name as “Lennon” and my avatar is a green pantless space cat, that doesn’t not make me a 30 year old man on my end of the screen, and at least where I’m from there are standards of discourse and decorum for adults. My main gripe with EVE is that they said “Ehhh, who needs decorum, everyone loved being a 15 year old bully, right?” and just ran with that negative, gamesmanship filled (I would never call that sportsmanship, it is the exact opposite) world, which might foster enough people for a game, but it can’t make a good community. Here, we have almost opposite goals: not a ton of gameplay but what could be an incredible community of helpful, thoughtful pantless space cats.
oh yea … instead of boori i could go around the ring of dozen portals, together with rubber banding from the ps platforms and waiting for worlds to connect… and american servers arent great too (just not as bad as australia)
i still have to find a map of the ps hubs (too lazy for that, cause aqua hub is there for me and i dont need any map there)
and u still didnt address the problem that i have with ps hubs: u need to travel intercontinental to get anywhere.
aqua hub lets me stay on the continents server. Thats where most rubberbanding after portal travels come from: finata doesnt lag for me at all, cause its on european soil (@jtanner28 )
The game you mention reminds me of BattleStarGalactica online. Totally mismanaged by incompetent devs but the people I flew with were awesome. No pc’ness, lots of trolling and 90% of the time we’d go yolo, flaming the opposistion as we charged in.
Forged a lot of friendships, even with the enemies. Best was a crazy fun guy from NewZealand, one armed but still piloted great. Miss him actually, never stayed in touch. ‘sniff’
For my response I was basically using that term because this was the context I felt the question was asked in:
Basically when something is so available it becomes worthless in a way.
I’m very familiar with the concept. But there’s some difference between how one acts while playing, and how one acts in life, much like very few people that play GTA go around hotwiring cars and bludgeoning hookers.
As a disclaimer, I completely agree (as I mentioned in that reply) that this sort of competitive gameplay, and all incidental player behavior that can come from it, should be kept well away from Boundless, but I think bringing some balance to how those PVP-centric games are viewed can be constructive for the sake of the gaming community in general.
It’s kinda hard, and takes a lot of practice, to not take it personally when you’re on the losing side of some real stakes PVP (as is the case with EVE and UO and other games of that nature. Archeage probably, that someone mentioned, but I never played that one). I’m sure it’s also true of other genres, such as LOL and perhaps Fortnite (I don’t play either of those) where the stakes are probably much lower, just due to the competitive nature of the thing, and the LOL community is widely regarded as the most toxic community to ever form outside of imageboards.
But there’s something at the core design of those games that isn’t necessarily centered around acting like 15 year olds: viewing other players as content much in the same way that a raid boss might be viewed as content in a pve-centric game.
Have you ever thought “oh my, I seem to have murdered about five million goblins. I wonder if they had families…”? Generally, said goblins are seen as slightly mobile bags of experience and loot that you don’t give much thought to. In extremely pvp-centric games such as EVE and UO, that’s true of other players, too.
You can hang out with them, help them, etc, but push comes to shove, if you see 'em on the opposite side of a battle, at that particular moment they’re basically a goblin. They’re depersonalized bags of xp and loot.
Much like when as a kid, hadoukening the living snot out of Chun Li, I’d just see Chun Li as an entity entirely disconnected from the player controlling her.
I don’t think that’s necessarily an age thing, but more of a consequence of competitive game design. Speaking strictly from personal experience, I’m well aware (and fond of the fact) that I’m a perpetual adolescent and will act as a 15 year old for the rest of my life, and yet It’s not a design that appeals to me personally anymore.
I certainly don’t think it’s a design philosophy that should ever be considered for Boundless, but I still think it’s a valid form of game design, and it shouldn’t be demonized nearly as much as it tends to be in the heat of forum discussions.
And as for,
I think that standards of decorum and discourse are all fine and well, tho it sounds like a bit of a bore, but at least where I’m from it’s perfectly appropriate to yell expletives when, say, one’s toe hits that sneaky coffee table when one gets up in the middle of the night to take a leak. The climate of political correctness however demands that our discourse be automatically censored and prevents us from using the full spectrum of language even when it is appropriate.
As to forming communities, I don’t know how your arcade rat experience was, but the arcade rats I knew did indeed form a good, tight community. However, as it happens, it was a community that, viewed from outside, looked like a complete mess and it’s internal code of conduct didn’t make much sense to outsiders. I believe it might be the same with competitive, pvp-centric sandbox MMOs and their communities.
… veering ever further off-topic, but it’s such an interesting tangent.
STORY TIME!!!
So this is my favorite character I had in any online game ever, to this date over the course of 20+ years. I had a red named Orestes. I created him after Perfect Circle release it in 2000 or so. I was in college running track, and in my down time I played UO on a dedicated T1 line. For anyone who remembers back then, dial up was still the main thing. T1 lines were for business’s only. The college I was on scholarship at happened to have T1 wired to all the athlete students dorms. During that time, there was a HUGE advantage of playing on T1 vs dial up. Stupidly huge.
So this character I had, he was Legendary Grand Master in Fishing and Macing, as well as min/maxed for high health and dexterity. No intelligence which meant my resists were garbage. As a result I ran naked with a robe, but no one knew I was naked so as a result of being naked I had no penalty modifiers. I used a warhammer. This is important because the warhammer in this game caused the opponent to become stunned for a bit of time.
The way this skill system as designed people saw that I was a LGM Fisherman, but didnt know what else I was specced in. They just saw a red name in a robe which implied a poor dude who screwed up killing ‘good’ players. Best. Bait. Ever. The moment I saw them slowly charge me on dial up with weapon switch or begin casting their spell message then I instantly disappeared off screen because of how much latency advantage I had on T1. Since they initiated the hostile action I was able to attack them with no real repercussions. I’d beeline back on to the screen with my hammer equipped, stun them then proceed to obliterate them.
They’d come back to their looted corpse just saying “But you’re just a fisherman.” I’d just run off and set up in a new town and get ready to do it again. Man, those were some fun times ;p
Sorry @Arkhainn your post brought that exact memory to mind after reading that. lol Man, that’s something else.
I agree with your points largly, but I think you are conflating a few things that may not necessarily deserve that. Let me give you a few example from my arcade rat days, and maybe this can bridge what we are talking about.
Trash talk is fine in competition, and in the heat of a game saying “Man, your game is weak AF” or “I’m going to fireball you 3 times, fake fireball, then gap close and combo you” and then doing that to them despite you telling them that is solid trash talk and will always have a place in competition. That same opponent saying “Hey, little [gay slur starting with F] boy, why don’t you come here and [preform sexual acts] after I beat your [gay slur starting with F] ass.” is just rude/bullying behavior.
You are right, in a PvE game I have never considered the goblin/orc orphans that I am leaving behind when I go grinding mobs, but, and maybe this is just because I played some team sports when I was younger, my opponent in a fighting game was always the person, not their characters, and there is a level of respect that (should) come with competing against someone. It’s the difference between making a hard tackle in a soccer match because it was there and you wanted to make a clean physical play to send a message vs. latching onto someone’s shoulder and dragging them down to dislocate it and take them out of the game. One has a level of respect for the game and the opponent, the other doesn’t.
This is a slight mischaracterization, I think, and is equally harmful to discourse as what you are describing. No one is going to call the PC police if you stub your toe and say “Ow! ■■■■!” What it does do is try to raise the level of discourse by making statements aimed at others more constructive. It’s the difference between your posts and posts by certain members of this board that I shall not name here but we all know who I mean. Maybe there is some situation where “■■■■ you, you don’t know ■■■■ about ■■■■, stfu you [racial slur]” is appropriate, but talking to strangers isn’t one of them. Do some people take it too far? Of course, and they should be called out for it as well.
This is also an excellent point. My friends and I say just terrible, awful things to each other all the time, as did the arcade regulars when I was growing up. But those people are all friends, and those are fairly small groups (maybe 15-20 arcade regulars where I played in the clique I ran with). The anonymity of the internet, too often, makes that the default way people behave to everyone. Maybe thinking about the level of discourse is boring, but, personally, I find it makes for better communities. Once people join and realize everything is cool, or they opt-in to some group, then you can haze the ■■■■ out of them. 
To keep going back to my time in the arcades, when I was new all anyone ever said to me was fairly clean trash talk (while we were playing), and “good game” afterwords. That was how they treated all of the randoms, too, and it’s how the community grew to the point where those randoms became regulars and friends.
Edit: Sorry, this was already a long post, and I just realized I forgot to respond to one thing.
I have no issue with games that are competitive, or devs fostering a “kill or be killed” attitude in their games, those of course have a place. CoD, GTA online matches, Planetside, and quite a few more do that really well. My issue is specifically with EVE, and the devs coming down 100% on the side of “well, you won’t let that happen again, will you?” on things like scamming, griefing, slurs, etc. That is why I call the game a cesspool. Either the devs wanted it that way, or the community was already so trash that the devs figured their only way forward was to sanction it.
I suppose we have somewhat different experiences from games like EVE. Perhaps things have degenerated since I played it (many, many, many years ago… for about a year sometime around 2005-2007), but the trash talk aspect in pvp (and the whole trollish behavior that you described as wanting to cause financial loss and whatnot, which wasn’t exactly a thing then as I played before real money was officially involved) was, at the time, more of a sort of immersion thing, I suppose, which I was trying to draw a parallel with the trash talking in arcades.
I wouldn’t call it RP, necessarily, tho some people would take it to RP levels, but it just makes sense to, you know, raze and pillage when you’re playing the part of a pirate, and it is I think a sign of good game design that people feel inclined to act as the characters they’re playing.
Precisely. I think it’s a fair argument to be slightly more conscientious of one’s discourse when engaging with strangers, of course, and it is how I generally try to behave personally, but I can also understand certain gaming communities, be it EVE or LOL or whatever, where one would assume that their opponent is already ‘in’ with the culture of the group, a part of the clique as it were, instead of randoms that might one day become regulars.
One could also argue that it absolutely presents a barrier of entry for the newcomers, and it might well scare 'em away (creating an infinite feedback loop), but I assume that in some of those communities the newcomer is such a rare sight that the existing playerbase might simply start from the safe assumption that everyone they encounter is familiar with the in-game culture.
Perhaps I’m a bit too optimistic (despite usually being accused of cynicism) but the way I look at it, it’s more of a consequence of the game design being extremely ‘sandboxy’.
What I mean by that, and there’s a parallel to be had here with Boundless, which is also a sandbox in this particular sense, is the devs allowing the players to basically have full control of the game universe.
In Boundless this would be exemplified, for example, by a lack of dev-made, or NPC-run, Portal Networks, shops and such.
In the case of EVE I think it stems from wanting the sandbox, player-run aspect to go as far as allowing for self-policing. Can you run a scam on some player-run corporation? Sure. But then, when your character gets stalked and constantly killed for the next RL year, you’re just going to have to grin and bear it, because no GM will come to your aid either.
It’s an interesting experiment, if nothing else, and it did seem to end up, perhaps predictably, as a bit of a Lord of the Flies social structure in game, but on the other hand, it does make it a very interesting game to read about (and at least as far as I’m concerned, more fun to read about than to play).
Is it something I’d like to see emulated in more games? Not particularly, tho one or two to carry on the torch would be interesting if they popped up, but to me at least, it seems more like the devs are committed to their (mostly) hands-off approach from launch to the bitter end rather than as something that was sanctioned post factum to the game because the community got too rowdy to control.
Thank you for getting us back on topic, I’m kind of sorry to have derailed but this was a fun derail, thank you for the conversation. I think the dev direction in boundless so far has been pretty good, if the communication lacking at times. But I do see the parallels to EVE, and that is why I always try to call it out. I don’t think the correct direction (for this game) is to, say, “Well it isn’t against ToS” when dealing with some of the friction we have seen pop up over the last month (building next to people, gleam towers, cutting off mining to resource rich areas, etc). Devs/GMs foster community as much as the people in it.
Edit: Suppose there was actual competition in boundless. Like, the higher your place on the planets prestige list, you got more footfall money, or at the end of the month the top 5 cities all got something. In that world, I would expect some trash talk (“Your town is ugly, I’m gunna pass this in 2 days” ). What I wouldn’t want or expect are comments to the nature of “You suck, go kill yourself, no one will miss you.” One is talking about an activity that both are engaged in, the other is a personal attack. It seems like you would brand both as equally valid “trash talk” but I would not. The latter is 90% of what I saw/heard in EVE.
It happened organically, so that was nice.
Anyway, my point of view on this is that community policing is fine, and should remain well and firmly in the hands of the devs (and community managers and such) but there is a line where too much dev interventionism would go against the player-run / sandbox elements of the game, and some things that would cross this line have been proposed in this topic.
Proposing that we need ‘free, dev-maintained portal networks because it isn’t fair that some groups run portal networks and I can’t by myself’ (I’m paraphrasing, I guess) is one such example, there were others.
If there is, indeed, some imbalance, then I think it is productive for the community to band together to brainstorm solutions that can be proposed to the devs. But some “issues” being raised recently aren’t issues at all.
If, for some mechanical reason, some players were unable to run portal networks (say, if you had to be a gleam club member to open portals) that would be an imbalance and well worthy of discussion (and fixing). What most people presented in the topic so far, however, was more of a case of confusing can’t with won’t.
Other cases (“no use for warping”, “no sense of exploration”, etc) would be, in my view, coming at the problem from the wrong direction, that is, messing with something that is working well, to make something that is under-performing seem more attractive.
(Some nutshelling there to steer things firmly back on topic :P)