Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

No exceptions!!!

Good rules are simple. Barely anyone reads 10+ pages ToS. Not to mention 100+ books full of laws of our countries.
Life is complicated. Simple rules can't summarize it. There is a whole set of professions to manage laws, as they are that complicated, yet they are not good enough. Because life is even more, much more complicated.

When the rule doesn't follow the life, that's an exception. If we look around we see exceptions everywhere. Actually there are so many that one might ask why there are rules at the first place? I did. I remember when I was younger and my teachers, parents, first employers set rules which were plain idiotic. Or just think about the traffic rules. Stop and wait for a stupid red light when no one is around. Why? Or why slow down in a town when there are no pedestrians around? Why to stop at the stop sign when you can see no one is coming? Stupid rules everywhere!

Since I invented the magic macro, we* are winning every match in Tol Barad. By a large margin. I mean assault under 10 mins (horde always take it at the night), in the following defenses the horde never has 2 bases fully captured. Except for one battle. As usually, we were grinding them down like trashmobs. They did not have a single kill, so they were not promoted. All the sieges were untouched. Then a pair of noobs got lost and one of them killed, promoting one horde, 6 minutes before the time is up. That one horde bought a siege to one tower. That siege could just destroy the tower. If only we could down that siege we could win in 15 mins instead of 30. That's clearly an exception from the "no one touches sieges" rule. We had all 3 bases, we could clearly miss one guy who destroys that siege.

I was healing the most pressed base (lame excuse), so didn't watch the map. All of a sudden "alliance lost WV", "alliance lost Slag" and we were losing on ICG. When I opened the map, I saw 1/4 of our players beating up the siege, while there were more sieges at the towers. I told one guy to destroy one siege!

Rules are needed because of morons. Everyone with a piece of brain would recognize that while one missing guy is OK, 1/4 is not. Also, when there are sieges everywhere, there is no point destroying them as new ones will come. With 10K DPS (optimistic in PvP gear, PvP spec, no buffs and debuffs) a 1M siege takes 100 secs. Replacing one takes 30. So the rule of "no one touches sieges" is redundant as no one would do that anyway. Except they do, giving clear evidence that they are dumb. However by implementing and enforcing this rule made the dumb people useful (less useless). They are now fighting at a base instead of being completely out of the meaningful combat.

OK, we need rules for morons. But why can't intelligent people break them? Because morons (as opposed to newbies) don't know that they are ignorant. They are sure in their greatness. If we would say "intelligent drivers can ignore red light", assuming that they would do only when no one is in the protected road, soon everyone would ignore it, filling the road crossings with wreckage and corpses. To make any system works the intelligent people must keep a stupid rule to avoid the stupid people breaking it.

There cannot be exceptions because every moron thinks that he is exceptional. The rules must be simple, rigid and enforced or there will be chaos. Not because people are "evil", but because most of them are dumb like ... someone who does 6K DPS.


*: "we" is understood as "the users of the macro". I don't say that the alliance always win since random allies don't use it (and can't PvP better than a random hordie). There are off-hour battles where no one from the guild is present. The guild is not guarding TB in any organized way, we just go to the battle when we want to.

9 comments:

Ðesolate said...

Tested a equivalent german version of this macro yesterday. I only had time for three battles of TB, but it worked quite well.
It seemed to disbalance the whole side, even without an organized core on our side.

We won all three battles. I hope that I‘ll be able to join in at TB to see the detailed effect on aggamagan.

Azuriel said...

In fairness, unless you specify who should be attacking the siege (in whispers), people will assume you are talking about them. And if you couldn't be bothered to check the map - "I was busy!" is same excuse anyone could use - they sure as hell couldn't.

As far as stoplight rules and such, well, those are enforced so they become habits that you don't even have to think about. Someone can be intelligent and still think they checked for pedestrians, and then hit one. Or they had a bad day, were distracted, etc. As a pedestrian, I don't care if Marilyn vos Savant is driving, I want her stopped at red lights. The marginal utility of Marilyn getting to her destination 45 seconds faster is not worth the 0.001% chance she will hit me crossing the street.

Ihodael of Darnassus said...

First of all, I truly believe Gevlon does good work in leading the battles (I disagree with some of the verbal methods used, but that stance has also change more recently): on average we tend to win TB much more than we loose it which shows that Gevlon has had some impact (it isn't random because we use to loose much more than we won or at least it was balanced).

However I also believe that Azuriel has a point in his/her first statement: it would be simpler to sometimes just have a direct command to one person. In our case I feel that is easy since we are usually a couple of PuGers in the battle so Gevlon could easily direct one of guildies that he trusts in PvP to get that lone siege. And I do understand that logic would simply be - check if someone is already doing it and if not take the initiative - however this won't happen in such an orderly fashion most of the times (or so I believe).

On a side note: yesterday we were involved in a lost TB. There were about 10 players, and about 4 PuGers. And we lost despite the fact that we fought well (or at least the battles I witnessed we did well: I recall two players rage tying some 5-6 enemies in a single base for considerable time). I proposed a strategy after the battle which I would like to see discussed to check if it could apply to this kind of situation (few players and few PuGers): PuGers band together (or any other team that knows each other, PuGers here is just an example) and keep following the attack zerg, reclaiming each of the keeps that they take. The idea is that while we can't control the behaviour of the 10 players involved, by denying them at least one base all the time (and most likely two), they can't win and they would need to setup an organized counter-attack which I find difficult to happen on the average TB random raid. Is this moronic or does it make some sense?

Pim said...

/agree

If a rule is well designed, an intelligent person will be able to deduce the times when it's appropriate to break that rule.

There is no simple line between "intelligent" and "moron." Some people are intelligent enough to know when it's appropriate to break a rule, but not intelligent enough to realize that they must not be seen breaking the rule. (Whether seen by authority figures, or seen by morons, both of which have bad consequences.)

Bristal said...

Agree with Azuriel above. There may actually BE a few M&S, but the truer answer is that nearly everyone occasionally ACTS like M&S.

Including intelligent people like you, Gevlon.

Likely there is a spectrum, some may act that way more often, some less. And it often depends on transient conditions.

But of course, "scoring" comes down to who is deciding what behavior is M&S. Since you are making the rules, Gevlon, you will never or rarely break them, as they are tailored to you.

Thus you can maintain the illusion of your own perfection and nearly everyone else is an idiot. Unless of course, you need them or want something from them.

Your asocial views are far from revolutionary, they're merely egocentric.

Anonymous said...

When you do attempt to monopolize the new raid, I would recommend adjusting your macro to involve raiding. So many morons want to raid that if you make the connection between raiding and TB, they will be sure to join.

Pzychotix said...

It should be said that in the case of an intelligent person breaking a rule, what is actually meant is that the rule is simply being generic and not enough in-depth to include exceptions for which a rule would not apply.

But again, it's because the M&S will glaze over these exceptions and not read them that we don't include these exceptions in the first place, in which case we let the intelligent people deduce these exceptions for themselves.

Fex said...

@Idohal

I'm on a different server and not much of a pvp player, we have a tendancy of losing tb. I've been in 2 losing battles and a dozen winning battles.

The one's we lost we tried interacting with the rest of the team, following their lead. Didn't work.

The winning battles, we followed chat, and claimed the zerged bases as ours. Telling others we'd handle that ( 3 of us in total ) and we did handle it. Not even recapture anything, but keeping 5 guys tied up defending with three allows the other 7 to take at least one of the other bases back. And when both were captured getting 1 or two guys extra usually solves the problem on assault. And on defence, in reality you only need 1 base in your controll at all times to win anyway. So having more then your team tied up on defence is a guaranteed win, Unless your team mates are utter scrubs. With 7 defending against 5 should not allow them to win at all.

Alessandro said...

Fantastic post, i love your insight in moron analysis!

I also agree with Azuriel, another reason for intelligent people
follow the rules is that sometimes our ape-routines make us to not
analyze the situation very well, otherwise we would think:

"Hm, i didn't sleep very well this night, so I can not trust my human-sensors that there is no pedestrian crossing at the moment and even though my eyes tell me it would be safe to cross a Stoplight i won't do it."

But even the smartest person is distracted sometimes, better to make it an habit like Azuriel pointed.