aylwyne wrote:The griefer motto! j/k
I do think that this type of attitude is the cause of many of the harsh feelings that people develop and that come out especially with PvP. It's very easy to detatch the avatars you see around you from the people behind them and thus act in a way that you wouldn't to a person.
I've often heard people say that you shouldn't take things personally but that's just not how us human beings tend to work. We personify everything. We name our cars. We call ships ‘she’. We have pet rocks. We personify. It’s not a surprise that when presented with an avatar that looks quite human, that shows emotion, and that we designed to look just how we like, this tendency to personify and invest our emotion is even greater. Expecting people to detach from this just isn’t realistic.
No rules of war? In most societies through history there have been rules of war (don't target officers, messengers and diplomats strictly off-limits, etc.). Today, there's certainly rules and laws governing warfare (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_war). It's not surprising that the community wants to see some structure and rule behind the PvP system and not just have open anarchy.
Society's written laws of war are nice and all, but they are mostly the evolved sensibilities of western thinking. Often, our enemies choose not to adhere to them. Do we declare them exploiters and ban them from play?
Essentially we do, yes, assuming we win the war
But that aside, simply choosing to further limit the abilities of a force of players to defend themselves is not a tried and true method of game design. In fact, I count it a major failure in development thinking, regardless of what the
industry experts like to spout in September in Austin.
PvE and PvP play, if limited, allows for only a set few actions a player can take. In other words, there is no real thinking involved. You have 6 things to choose from, press the right button.
There is no possible method of accurately recreating a leadership atmosphere in PvP, for example, if there is nothing for you to do but click the button and order the troops to attack, or root somebody yourself. It's boring. There are no options.
Let me provide a couple well-known scenarios and see how they fly:
Prior to world war two, Heinz Guderian developed a method of fast, slashing attacks using concentrated armor forces in combined arms offensives with infantry and air forces to achieve breakthroughs that could then be exploited. Later, the allies named this new mobile warfare, Blitzkrieg. What he was doing was exploiting several things...terrain, objective positioning, weather, technolgical superiority, and other more minor considerations, to achieve an objective quickly and destroy enemy communications.
Later, in 1943 in Russia, faced with massive and superior Soviet artillery, the Germans chose instead of defending mountain terrain, to implement what became known as Reverse-Slope Defense. By using these tactics, they denied their presence on the front, observed slope of hilly terrain where they could be targeted by superior artillery. Instead, they hid on the opposite side of the hill and set up interlocking fields of fire, making that defense a lot tougher to break since artillery could no longer be accurately employed. They exploited the terrain to achieve an advantage, or in this case, remove the enemy's advantage.
In Stalingrad, the Russians threw every available man into defense of the pile of rubble. With inferior tactics, inferior training, no air superiority, poor leadership, bad morale, and facing the most powerful army in human history ever assembled to achieve an objective, the Russians successfully defended that rubble from the German onslaught long before Operation Uranus cut off the 6th Armee and killed it.
How? They totally removed the German advantages on several levels. The Germans were not trained or equipped to deal with urban warfare. They were open-field mobile forces, and when caught in city limits, it was only a matter of time and sacrifice. They further took the German superior leadership from them, by sending armies of snipers after their officers, forcing low echelon personnel into the unstable role of commander. Instead of employing massed artillery there, they relied on independent mortar teams that could more accurately target in an urban environment. They exploited the situation and removed the enemy's advantages to achieve the victory.
In Africa, during Montgomery's offensive into Lybia, the Germans were tricked into believing that the British army would be striking in one location by deploying an entire offensively postured army...made up of cardboard trucks and tanks. When Rommel defended against an assault at that location, the British launched an assault from the other and kicked them back to Tunisia as a result. The British exploited German intelligence and their own ability to use these new methods of redirecting the attention of the enemy to achieve the victory.
When the German Me-262 Jet fighters showed up on the scene in 1944, there was a great outpouring of hope in the Luftwaffe and in Germany in general. These new aircraft were fast and powerful, and their allied counterparts could not match that speed and firepower. As a result, it was predicted allied daylight bombing would screech to a halt in a matter of just a few weeks. Instead, the allies turned to chasing those bombers down to their airfields, and shooting them out of the sky as they slowed to land. The result of the deployment of the jet fighters was inevitably a depletion of the German pilot reserves, and a shortening of the war.
Are all these exploits?
Yes. They are.
In the military, though, they are called
tactics.
