So, Chatterbox yesterday touched on the recent revelation that the notorious City of Heroes griefer ‘Twixt’ was actually a Loyola Professor named David Myers. David was being a naughty boy and griefing people in the PvP area that bridges City of Villains with City of Heroes, all in the sake of writing a paper. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, we now have first hand account of what he was doing. I think the following post should illustrate it nicely:

The article kind of glosses it over, but the paper goes into more detail about what he was doing. For those not familiar with City of Heroes, I’ll provide an example using WoW.

Imagine a Death Knight’s ability Death Grip, only with literally 10 times the range (Teleport Foe in CoX could be slotted for range and potentially have a range that reached beyond draw distance) and a recharge time of around 5 to 10 seconds. Now imagine that each side in a WoW battleground had a respawn point protected by unkillable NPCs that would instantly one-hit kill any player from the opposing side that gets too close to it. Now imagine that DK would do nothing but stand next to that NPC and deathgrip players to it over and over and over again, while constantly exclaiming in broadcast about how awesome he is. That was Twixt the majority of the time when he was in zone.

The rest of the time, when there were only a small handful of Villains in zone, he’d actually leave the base and engage in the same tactic only this time instead of TPing them into the drones he’d use the large number of faction NPCs that inhabit the zones to kill other players. One of the many flaws in CoX pvp zones is there are a very large number of faction NPCs in the zone. These won’t one-hit kill you like a drone will, but given their number unless you’re a Tank it’s likely you’ll die if you suddenly appear in the middle of a group of them. Unlike drones, faction NPCs will give you XP debt if you die to them, just like if you died in PvE. One of my favorite tactics during Twixt’s brief stay on Virtue was to follow him around invisibly and wait for him to set up in a large group of Longbow (Hero faction NPCs) and then mass confuse the whole group so they’d all turn to attack him. Oddly enough, that didn’t make it into the article. Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Edit: by the way, one of the bigger complaints about his tactic was that it really isn’t ‘PvP’ if all you’re doing is taking advantage of poor mechanics to allow NPCs to kill the target. It’s less ‘PvP’ and more ‘non-consentual forced PvE’.

- Nevermore

That post is from this thread from F13.net.

Now, while what he was doing is in the confines of the game, it does seriously seem like a mechanic that wasn’t meant to be abused. I question why the developers would allow such a skill to be used at such great a distance, but I’m sure it has to do something with the main gameplay – PvE. Now I’ve heard of people doing similar things in WoW, using some ability to knock people off bridges and into lava, but City of Heroes has a completely different playerbase. If you took the WoW playerbase and put it into City of Heroes, I’m sure this mechanic would have been fixed by now; they would have abuse it so much that the developers would have no choice but to take it out (or modify it). So, logically it doesn’t look like anyone has really abused the mechanic to this level before. Also with all of the public outcry that the article hinted out, we can assume the developer was aware of situation the entire time. By doing nothing they essentially gave him the okay to keep abusing the Teleport Foe ability, which made his argument stronger.

Basically, his argument is that if you don’t follow the conventions of a social group, they will try to oust you. I guess he liked CoH because, apart from the fact he already played it casually, it’s a game, so you can only do things in the confine of what the developers allow you to. Thus, in his thinking, if you do what the game allows you to, you can’t possibly do anything that is unacceptable to the group. As anyone who’s ever played an MMO knows, this is entirely not true. There are TONS of stuff you can do in an MMO that will piss people off, Age of Conan had collision detection so you could surround someone with mammoths (or put a mammoth in the entrance of a town) and they couldn’t move. In WoW you can go and wipe out the NPCs of an opposing faction’s town, if you continually did that players wouldn’t be able to advance in that town. In Eve you can suicide-gank (but then again, Eve is basically griefing you while you play it). The list goes on and on, every game has its share (I’m looking at you UO). Basically, the social group isn’t casting you out because you don’t fit their specific model, they’re casting you out because you’re a flaming douchebag.

You’d think a college professor would figure this out.