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Eh it all rounds up to different approaches to things. You chose to avoid interaction with players if possible and we more or less took a similar path in that sense. The main difference would be that we ended up using them for our own entertainment, primarily because we were given a chance to do so by becoming the governor.

If we had to put it simply, our disappointment in the players served as a factor to lower our standards of "what is bad" in our eyes. It's pretty emotional based as you mentioned, but not quite in the same sense that you are describing. We aren't resenting people or anything, after all they did nothing to us. In this case it's emotional in the sense that we found it entertaining therefore we did it. I suppose that can fall into trolling but yeah.

However while entertainment is nice and all, there is another purpose behind it all. As mentioned fairly early on, we enjoy pking. You could probably say that in the end what kept us the most entertained in the game is the pking, because there aren't many other games where you can pk in the same combat system. But unfortunately the pk system is somewhat lacking and there is also the mindset which I will explain now.

By strange mindset we are not talking about "these players are stupid!". We wouldn't be surprised by something like that, or rather it's to be expected in games like these. Although I typically find that smaller communities are meant to have better community but anyway Wakfu is somewhat different in this case. What we found strange is that, while we had perfectly legit reasons of killing someone (it's in war after all), people seemed to look at us as if we just broke and unwritten rule not to, well, kill the enemies of my nation.

Naturally killing one or two people was not enough to judge the entire nation as such, but we've killed many people and their reactions are at the point of which we've already seen the same thing being said numerous times by different people. Some people decide to tell us "you're now on a black list!" "prepare to be hunted all day!" "NOOB!!" and so on. Although mass majority of those threats round up to nothing. Alright, so maybe taking the initiative to kill people is a bad idea. Let us wait for people to try and kill us in war instead. Unfortunately it turns out that even letting them take the initiative does not work out, because as long as we counter back and kill them they'll... still go on insulting and then crying to their guild for help.

So, it appears that no matter what we do, killing people in general is a bad idea. Alright, so what other options do we have? Dueling people? Wonderful, except a good chunk of the people will just reject requests and while it is probably possible to some extent, it is generally an inefficient way of pking. Especially when in a party.

We were then stuck in a dilemma, what could we do to get our fun pking? Well this links back to the story again, we concluded that we'd simply become infamous. So infamous that people would hate us to the level of pking us on sight. In a certain sense you can say that we were trying to cause a disturbance in the mindset of the players. At the beginning a good chunk of players seem to have registered pking as a "bad" thing, therefore they will not do it. Thus what we will do instead is to agitate them to start pking instead, while simultaneously inspire others to do the same as us.

... Thoughts like such were more or less just a joke though as it's easier said than done to practically brainwash an entire player base. But we did go ahead with becoming more infamous just because, you know, we could. There's no reason not to and it's a lot easier to become infamous than to become famous after all.

Lastly, well even if you say that we have no rights to dictate what players can do, that is precisely what the government system does. It lets us decide what players can do. And so we made full use of that system.

If I had to say, it is a matter of perspectives. To us it's nothing more than playing a prank. Therefore we won't regret it, nor will we feel guilty about it unless something goes horribly wrong and a bad thing happens. But to the "victims", they'll probably be looking at this as the end of the world or something along those lines. Well their over the top reactions is what makes watching the whole thing entertaining to begin with though. This is noted in several points where the truth is either exaggerated or bent towards their own convenience. If I had to describe it, it's like one of the times we were fighting, we spent the entire session winning and losing battles while outnumbered by the enemies. Then in that one scenario where we pked them alone in order to prevent them from regrouping properly, we ended up being accused of fighting with unfair numbers instead. Hence to us, it's honestly not as bad as many seem to make it out to be. They're simply going off and making things look worse, but I won't bother arguing who is right or wrong in this case since it's completely subjective.

It appears that we are drawing parallel lines here so any more comments would likely be futile. Indeed we were drawn in by the combat system, there aren't many similar MMOGs after all. If you take the stand point of being more serious about the game than an average player, then we would probably take the stand point of being far less serious than the average player. Since we have no real objectives other than our own entertainment.

This will mostly be repeating previous statements but, generally speaking it is probably because that this isn't our first game that caused us to be jaded towards players in general. It doesn't really matter if they are old or young because adults can act as stupid as the next person on the internet (not to mention you need to be 18+ to register an Ankama account without permission from parents as someone pointed out so it's not really our business that they're playing, though most probably don't read/care). The responses of a large chunk of players come off as completely illogical to us. This is inevitable in a very large game as, the larger the game you have the more likely you'll have a group of idiots mixed in there. But seeing it in a smaller game like Wakfu came off as somewhat of a surprise. Not to mention they came with the strange mindset as well.

And so, unfortunately we no longer have any energy (or motivation for that matter) to try and correct things anymore, instead we'll take a more carefree attitude towards the entire thing. It's not really a matter of looking down on people, it's troublesome and we have no reason to deal with them, so we ignore them instead. Like that, as often seen in pks, we often just silently kill people ignoring responses, at most responding only on our whims.

This goes to explain our attitude towards majority of the player base, but not why we decided to stage the entire thing.

I believe the best way to explain this would probably taking an analogy of watching a movie.

When you watch a movie, you'll probably prefer a movie that excels in one way or another. Perhaps it has a touching story, plenty of action, great acting, special effects or whatever. It all depends on your preferences but regardless, when you watch a movie you'll normally always want to watch a good one. So what happens when this movie is disappointing? You will obviously not hold the movie in high regard.

But there are cases where a movie gets so bad that it ends up becoming a comedy with you laughing at how things could get that bad. That is entertaining in its own way although not something you'd go out of your way to watch. Do you see where I'm going now?

Indeed, that's essentially the stance we took towards the player base. And it's not really limited to Wakfu as it applies to most of the games we've played so far (excluding a certain few) and that is why we called this our entertainment.

Therefore it is simply a matter of respect. After all this time of dealing with people like them, we no longer have any respect for them nor do we want to try and reason with them while knowing well that it would be difficult. I do hope that in real life, people are less... well, stupid, as they seem here which is why I say that we have no intentions of looking down on people. Go figure how it feels to have to try and lead a party with half of the people off in their own world doing things that contribute nothing to the battle. As much as I enjoy staying neutral, this alone is something I can't reverse seeing that it is a problem of experience.

Another point of interest here is that as mentioned before, we simply do not find our own actions a big deal either. It's just being exaggerated on the way and in some cases the truth is bended. To set an example we had an earlier post (before we added poaching laws) where someone was convinced that the potential -3 CP for losing a battle equaled being unable to attack monsters. Which was actually what inspired us to set poaching up to begin with. We figured that since he was going to complain, we'll just make it the truth then.

It's simply on the level of an inconvenience, you may lose CP but that never was very valuable to begin with and if we had to say, it really only influences new players (my condolences in that case). For the sharper players they may have found that there is a very simple CP bug to abuse for millions of CP at will, as seen from the CP count of Bluze.

If you value your CP more than doing whatever you are meant to be doing then go ahead and take some time off Wakfu to do something else. In reality we found that a portion of the players quickly gave up and began killing things regardless of CP. If they turn into bandits and get captured by guards then they'll be forced to sit in jail for a while. However neither of these things make normal game functions "impossible" as many seem to think. It is ultimately an inconvenience which if given a choice, you'd rather not have it. The closest we've gotten to ruining a game function was probably setting taxes at 70% then declaring war on all nations to prevent people from going to other nations to sell things.

And so, as a matter of fact, this entire thing was only made possible by the unreasonable people to begin with. Yet at the same time, the scale of this is probably only comparable to a patch that nerfs classes. Whenever a big nerf comes you'll always see people going on about quitting and how Ankama ruined things. Give it a few days and it calms down, a few weeks and it's forgotten as most people have already gotten used to it by now.

Finally, yep it's not particularly nice to give fellow players a bad experience, and that's why we're not trying the slightest to justify things. We did it while knowing very well what we're doing and the possible consequences, however we went ahead with it anyway. Everything for the sake of our own enjoyment indeed. It would have been too much of a waste to see an opportunity like this and not take advantage of it either way since it's not something you come by very often. There's really nothing strange or illogical about it, we found it fun so we went ahead with it regardless of how many people would hate us for it.


This post has been edited by BanditsAreUs - October 21, 2011, 17:39:23.

There seem to be some odd replies and points which I will not bother responding one by one, let's try to cover everything in one go.

Alright, let me greatly simplify things to make it easy to comprehend.

• What sort of intentions did the cruel bandits have in mind as they built up the story?

Why of course it was for our own entertainment, nothing more nor less. We never tried to justify it and there is little argument saying that it was a "good" thing. Hence we can more or less exclude the responses that seem to imply that we've been trying to do so.

• Isn't it morally wrong for the bandits to do such cruel things to fellow beta testers?!

Of course it is, we are causing a fair amount of people to hate us. However can you say that this does not happen even in normal gaming? Wakfu is somewhat of a special case because people seem to make a big deal out of dying with no penalties, but generally speaking most people wouldn't be so happy if they were killed by you and perhaps lost a level or their precious equipment they spent a month saving up for.

The difference here is the scale of things. Typically we only see players quarreling amongst each other, it isn't anything new nor is it anything special. But what we ended up doing was something in a much larger scale. Remember that all of this initially began when we started pvp on this game, it was the mentality of the players that gave us the inspiration and motive to pull this off.

Now on the moral side of things, isn't it morally wrong to cause people to suffer?

Sure it is, but go ahead and tell an average pker to stop doing it because "it makes people feel bad" and see how they respond. These are things that we can do because we know that this is a game and not real life. If you kill someone, they won't die in real life nor will they suffer lifetime torment because you killed them. More likely than not, after a good nights sleep they'll get over it.

If we had to say the biggest differences between our standards and the standards of much of the community (as it would appear anyway) it would be that we don't really take the game seriously to begin with. As long as it amuses us it's perfectly OK. We hardly even find the things we do a big deal ourselves. To us it is just people making a big fuss over nothing, however that is entertaining in its own way therefore let's watch. Personally due to the patch mid-way into things, I've even created Bontarian characters to train up while under the laws with little difficulties. There wasn't any support from my main character as his head tended to be hunted on sight despite being a poor little vice. As a matter of fact, for me, it proved to be an amusing experience as I picked up a habit of hiding behind trees and such when guards tried to hunt me. My new character ended up having his CP piled up to somewhere near -1000 before I decided to kill it myself and wait out the time as I left to do other things.

Admittedly, if I honestly wanted, I could have just logged into my character and switched off protection laws during the period that I trained.

But considering the scale of things, there should surely be some resistance in doing something so morally wrong right? This is where the mindset of players gave us the motivation to do it.

It is frankly difficult to logically reason with a child throwing a tantrum because things did not go their way and because this unfortunately isn't our first game, we have become somewhat jaded towards even putting effort towards that direction. Therefore we simply gave up, unless the person sounds reasonable we will neither respond nor care what they think.

As a large portion of the Wakfu player base seems to consist of children, the result is that we could honestly care less. My condolences to those who can be reasoned with as they will be forced to tag along with our play, but for the others... I don't have much to say.

We are by no means looking down on people, in fact just the opposite since we're just human as well. But we have neither the energy nor effort to bother dealing with them and really would prefer ignoring them altogether.

Besides that, playing the role of a villain isn't bad once in a while. Fairly refreshing if you ask me.

• This isn't an experiment!/you can't predict what people say and do!

Some people seem to be oddly stuck on this part, it has been stated several times by now that it was simply a byproduct of our actions. Since it wasn't anything near our intentions, it's obvious that it's nothing near a proper experiment. We simply just found it interesting how perfectly the whim of ours came together and it ended up being a fun observation for us. It's like the generic stories you read or watch about someone becoming evil in order for people to unite against him. The so called "necessary evil". Seeing ourselves take this role (even if unintentional) was fairly amusing to say the least.

Of course we knew how the community would most likely respond. As noted in an earlier post, we started by killing many people. Considering how mass majority of them responded in the same generic insult, it would be only natural to believe that a large chunk of the community would respond in the same exact way when we started this. And they did, as observed with the large amount of people trying to kill Sabotage when he passes by while throwing incomprehensible insults towards him.

For Ankama, it was simply the logic that there were good odds that Ankama would not have heard the voices of the players to begin with (because of the absence of a CM). And even if they did, it would be possible for them to leave it alone because unless Sabotage truly broke a rule, they aren't really obligated to ban him. Even without this entire fuss, we can for an example see that before Sabotage became the governor, there was a topic fussing about how Sabotage was killing people in Maya bay. Just because he's making many people hate him, would Ankama be obligated to ban him for that reason? Probably not, at least I don't recall hearing many games banning people for a reason like that. In reality, it was apparently mentioned during "inside Ankama on air" what the response from their side was.

--

So overall we can see that it's honestly nothing complicated. For the more simple minded we can just be thought of as the generic villain that appears for the heroes to eventually beat.

Hm let's answer these points one by one, first of all, we obviously can't simply see the future. However we can logically reason what kind of movements both the community and Ankama will take in response to our actions. The obvious reactions from the community would be a huge mass of hate towards Sabotage. Following that reaction, there will be efforts to overthrowing Sabotage. This is made especially obvious in the attempts to vote out Sabotage during his mandate. It would be more odd to expect the community to do nothing but cry when under dictatorship.

Although we couldn't say for sure, there were fair odds of Ankama not making a move against us. This is because that while we may have been doing some "evil" things, all of the things we used were existing functions within the game. It was Ankama who provided the materials for dictatorship and we made use of these materials. It would certainly be difficult to say that Ankama created these functions for them to not be used.

The conclusion met in the end is that Ankama would only act against us for different reasons and that it would be somewhat unlikely for Ankama to take action against us for the sole reason that "players hate us". To top it off, it is also fairly well known that the English player base lacks a community manager, which would have made it more difficult for Ankama to notice the situation to begin with. Although truthfully, we didn't factor in that other communities had managers as well, or more accurately we didn't know of their existence therefore that was a miscalculation on our part.

On the second point, this is what we call differences in standards. We hardly call our actions "bullying" as we do not see our actions as anything of significance to begin with, it also relates to the aforementioned strange mentality.

We can see that many of the players complained "they can't kill monsters!" "they can't do anything!" but more accurately, the truth is not that they can't do anything but that they don't want to do anything. The reason being that if they did, they would be penalized and they do not want to be penalized. There is a big difference here because, on one hand I am blocking you from doing something, on the other hand I am merely demotivating you from doing something.

You can say that it is because of this mindset that the situation managed to escalate into something this large. Admittedly, we did this while knowing very well how much the players will hate us for it. This is something you might not understand but, when you kill so many people for no reason, you begin to find that mass majority of them react in the same way. This essentially served as a reference for us.

Finally for the third point, you seem to be misunderstanding something. We are not trying to take credit for the wonderful effort by the community to overthrow Sabotage, that is simply a result or byproduct of our actions to the end. Ultimately it was done for our entertainment, and that is what games exist for. Entertainment is subjective and our entertainment just happened to be a little grand than others this time around.

I am hardly glorifying our actions as some sort of heroic deed for the greater good, since in a certain sense you can say that we're really like evil villains watching people suffer for our own entertainment. However we figured that it would be nice to let some know the story behind the scenes during the entire thing

A story of a demon, a clown and an alien Let us tell a story, a story of how everything began, a story of how everything ended.

Once upon a time there were three people who began playing a game called Wakfu.

Interested in the relatively rare combat system for a MMORPG, they quickly became very interested in the game. Naturally as with any other game they played in the past, they killed things and became stronger while conquering dungeons on the way.

However their interests were not limited to conquering dungeons, they were always interested in PVP aspects of games and that did not change in Wakfu either.

Unfortunately, unlike other games, there is nothing like a PVP arena and other people with the same interests were scarce in numbers. Therefore they began researching ways to fight other players in this game without drawing penalties onto themselves.

As a natural result, this led to them participating in wars and killing players from other nations. During this period they noticed something odd, people were for some reason surprised by their actions and often threw insults.

Realizing that this community has an odd mentality towards fighting, they decided that instead of being nice and friendly players as they usually are, they would take a step towards infamy instead. This was interesting in its own way to them as it was trying out something they had never done before.

These players were always the kind of people who exploited any loopholes, gray zones or imbalances in the system. So with their direction decided, they began plotting exactly how they would cause an influence within the community. It would naturally be a difficult feat if it were a very large community, though from the size that they observed, they judged that even if they are few in numbers it should be possible to cause an influence.

Believing that, they began looking into how it is possible to cause the most chaos possible with the least effort just like the principle of least action.

They slaughtered as much as they could when online, they created the guild Bandits to spread their name, they came up with tricks and bugs to gain an edge within battles and they observed how people and their guilds usually reacted to our actions.

As a product of one of the tricks, the character “Sabotage” was born. Originally as a full lock character to combine lock, k'mir and tree together to “sabotage” enemies.

Eventually from their efforts, ripples began appearing within the community and they met people who shared the same interests as them. Some may have not wanted to dirty their hands, but they did offer them their support.

After hearing about how certain governors decided to set taxes at 70% before they left their seat, they eventually realized the destructive potential of a governor gone wrong. When it was judged that they had the potential to properly set up the stage, they began work on a plan.

Overcoming troubles here and there, the name of Sabotage began spreading as a combination of Sadida's being buffed and boredom of the person himself. It was eventually decided that we would use Sabotage as our “face” since it had a fair amount of popularity already.

Eventually Sabotage became the governor and the plan went into action. Everything more or less went successfully and the mandate ended peacefully. After it was over however, Sabotage was put up for another mandate just on a whim since it looked as if the efforts of cooperation would fall flat on its face (and it did).

Overall it was a fairly interesting ride, although it was fairly questionable how perfectly the actions of the players and community in general fell into expectations. The issues that came up were mostly unrelated to the expected movements of the community and everything went almost too predictably that it felt odd.

Therefore although unintentional, for us it served as a nice experience of seeing how a community reacts when you make certain changes to their environment. At the end it felt like we were conducting a social experiment really.

To draw an analogy, we set up the stage and came up with predictions of the future movements from the community. While the community served as the actors for our theater. The audience was of course, ourselves and whoever else that could see what our intentions were.

Admittedly, it was a fairly cliché story but it can't be helped, although we had predictions, a script did not exist for the community to follow. We could only leave it to the flow.

Overall we ended up with a generic story of an evil, cruel and sadistic dictator appearing to suppress the citizens. Making unreasonable laws on a whim and causing great hatred from the citizens. The citizens eventually stood up to go against the dictator, just like a hero being sent to slay the demon lord. The hero will eventually slay the demon lord and the world becomes peaceful again and they all will live happily ever after.

As a byproduct of our entertainment, the Bonta government may end up far stronger than previous governors which were basically a mess of people either wanting governor positions for the sake of the hat/icon and people promising the same things every single time but not doing much in the end. You might as well have no governor in that case.

On the off-chance that the Bonta government becomes disorganized again with our weakened presence, the demon lord could always rise once again and the story could be weaved from the beginning. Well that would be purely be on our whim however.

You don't often get a chance to troll an entire game without breaking rules and the chance was offered to us, so why not take it? It even came with the byproducts of being an entertaining observation; seeing how the community changes and potentially could reinforce the government so everything turns out well in the end.

We thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for tagging along with our whimsical play for an entire month, it was entertaining for us and we hope that everyone else enjoyed it as much as we did.

The reign of the demon lord now draws itself to an end. To be continued?

Dear citizens of Bonta I apologize for my long silence as I have been busy with other things.

On request we set everything on default for three days. As the three days are now over we have resumed work on the nation.

In other news we accidentally transferred most of the kama in the treasury into Sadida kingdom and found that we cannot transfer it back. We absolutely did not transfer it there because we felt that if we were going to have locked money anyway, we might as well have a nice amount of money locked.

We thank Bontarian citizens for their tax paying efforts so that we could set protection on everything again (it's a fairly costly thing for us since we lost most of our money).

Please leave feedback, suggestions and report if we missed anything here.

But it's for the sake of Bonta. Governments require money to run, that's what taxes are for.



Why thank you.



It costs 500 kama per person to attempt taking over islands. If you lose, the 500 kamas go with it. If you win, you keep the 500 kamas. Assuming full party, it totals to 3,000 kama per battle put on the line.

We have been entertaining ourselves with other things so for the most part, we haven't done much of interest lately.

New taxes Hello Bontarians! Today we have a small announcement to tell you all.

Some proper adjustments have been done to taxes as previous taxes were fairly whimsical:

• In most areas taxes have been adjusted to 70%
• War has been declared to Amakna and Brakmar because there is no longer a point in keeping alliance after we set protection off on Kraloves. It also prevents people from moving to other nations in order to sell things to a certain level
• Conditions are set

Let's explain the conditions.

Many should already know this but for those who don't: the funds for war and unlocking of Sadida kingdom etc cannot be supplied with tax money. It is necessary for the player themselves to pay the money.

As this is relatively heavy for one person to support at times, we will set the following conditions on taxes:

• For every 1,000 kama paid to Sabotage we will lower taxes to 10% in one territory (depends where the donator wants it to be)
• The changes will not be reversed unless there's a good reason to do so

The money in question will mainly go to war funds but excess money will be donated to Sadida kingdom.

For the record, this is fairly serious. If the kama is paid the taxes will be adjusted accordingly.

From the Bontarian government


This post has been edited by BanditsAreUs - October 04, 2011, 19:38:54.

Don't worry, we don't care about Sadida kingdom enough to encourage players to donate either way (hence why we removed the +cp for donating law for other ones). Personally the only merit I see is the challenges in Sadida kingdom and maybe the convenience of not having to sneak over to Amakna to kill their monsters.


This post has been edited by [Knonaut] - October 04, 2011, 18:30:35.

To clarify something, Sadida kingdom, conquering islands and everything of that sort cannot be paid with taxes. It must come out of individual players. All the government can do in terms of opening Sadida kingdom is encourage other players to donate or earn money themselves.

So no, the reason there isn't any challenges is that we aren't interested in buying challenges at the moment. Most challenges are relatively worthless in our eyes either way.

As for what we'll do with all of the money raised from 70% taxes... Well we have the options of either screwing over all the tax money as Azuma did by transferring into an unreachable zone (ex, Sadida kingdom), spending it all on pointless things or leaving it as it is. We frankly aren't quite interested in where the tax money goes.

Eh, didn't think the reply would get hidden for responding to sarcastic comments with sarcasm.

Ah well can't be helped, it's nice to see that there's supporters for us however. I guess just as it's impossible to gain full support of a nation, the reverse is also true.

Hey, we have normal values of friendship as well! If asked, we usually refrain from attacking someone or change laws accordingly. The laws and such could have been somewhat worse than the current laws otherwise.

With that said, aren't you glad that there's someone who has the will to help Ankama test these things before it leaves open beta despite all of the tearful criticizing from fellow testers? We're very nice testers as we look for loopholes in the system so that they can notice it! Although I'm not sure how much attention they pay to our servers to begin with.

Lastly, I'm the only one who posts on this account as the rest are only interested in reading the posts. A sort of spokesman role for forum side of things I suppose.

We can actually, when someone we knew actually cared about CP we simply temporarily removed the law and then put it back in at a later date. Thanks to the 70% taxes, there's plenty of money to spend anyway. But worry not, arrangements are being made.

It pains my heart to see such cruel comments made about us. But well, to the topic poster:

You can try ignoring CP costs as a fair amount of people have started to. In reality I've been training some new characters without bothering to remove laws due to laziness. Was actually fairly entertaining hiding from guards with -500cp.

I agree. This is an amazing com- I mean dramatic situation.

Now if you don't mind I'll go get myself some more popcorn.