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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?

Good to finally know the official Bandit side of the story.
I think most people wont care about why this was done and more about what was done thou. It was fun to see the reaction of the people as an outsider, specially how she won the elections even thou she already had a reputation from being the "evil PvP devil from Maya bay", or how people were so slow to try to do something about it, and most didnt figure out about the down voting system until the last few days of her first mandate. Lack of union was a problem from thje beginning, even before the elections people were too scared or dumb to fight Sabotage when she used Maya bay as her pvp arena, i saw cases of groups of 5 or 6 players lvl 50 run away when she tried to aggro 1 single guy in their group, because they couldnt figure out that they had pretty good chances of winning on a 5 vs 1. I mean seriously, it was borderline pathethic.
Then Bonta went into chaos and expected sympathy from non-bontarians because they couldnt do anything without losing cp, but as soon Brakmar was released most of Bonta population went there to aggro the new players in brakmar just because they felt like it. And they expected to look like innocent angels and asked other nations to donate for sadida kingdom and forgive them for aggroing anyone whenever they had a chance.
It was an event where i wanted to keep a neutral opinion, both because i wasnt Bontarian and a lot of people would just dismiss my opinion becuase i wasnt affected by it, and because i didnt know back then the reasons nor the plans that Sabotage and the Bandits had for Bonta.

Now, good things that came out of this: Now we have a community Embasador and the english community will be more involved in a lot of events thanks to that. A lot of players now will take politics more seriously, or at least understand better how it works. players will be more united, and Ankama will try to fix the popularity bar and rethink the way elections work. And a lot of players will hopefully grow some balls next time they want to defende themselves instead of hoping someone else will magically fix everything for them.

Bad things: I dont need to mention them, im sure anyone can list a million of these without me listing them. But for some reason i cant take the "A lot of players quitted" line seriously since people threaten to leave or just leave whenever there is an update they dont like, like a nerf or fix for a pretty obvious bug that needed to be fixed but they decided to build their characters around it to abuse it as much as possible. Its a line that has been said so many times on this forum...

Now that this is all over people will stop bashing each other and continue playing, the bad things that happened were really annoying during that month, but the goond ones hopefully will last a lot longer. Was it worth it? The good things are heavier than the bad ones? thats up to everyone to decide and to have their own opinion. Was interesting while it lasted, kinda curious if the bandits have any plans for the future...


This post has been edited by DashxAngel - October 19, 2011, 16:22:20.

An interesting read, especially the quoted part. In mmo games outside of ankama realm, i very often notice the ever ongoing battle between 'carebear' and 'hardcore' (no offense meant, this is the jargon i see most often used) players and the battle is especially hot in games which feature at least partial 'drop on death' system.
Ankama realm being dofus and wakfu (and majority of mmo games), is completely on the 'carebear' side and i think it reflects greatly on the community mentality, or if you will, does not draw 'hardcore' side of playerbase at all. Do you think with the current government system it is possible at all to shift players' mentality in any way? I mean, make noone feel really 'safe' as opposed to what you experienced so far.
Myself i am very anxious to see what devs have in store for people who reach 10k 100k and more of citizenship points - with the reward good enough, i think it would be very easy to set laws so that nation you govern will rush abroad seeking blood.

Is there any chance you guys are familiar with Fonline:2238 game? I believe this is the most 'hardcore' game that currently exists, with full drop on death (you loose everything you wear when you die, leaving it to be looted by anyone), tracking system to follow players to their 'safe' havens, mass suicide bombings in the cities, killing randomly encountered people fighting monsters etc. It is the kind of game that really does not make you feel safe at all, looking behind your back at all times - and it feels fresh.

I think Ankama wants to be hardcore for the "roleplay". But their attempts at implementing the systems which support that ideology fall very flat. They put too much "game" into it.

It's very much a mix of the victims being very vulnerable to random attacks, and a basic "immortality" for the attackers. This is very much by the level 200 max, etc.

Stuff like Friendly Fire is supposed to make the game tactical, but opens up to your own team members attacking you on purpose, etc. The "arena"-style combat-mode means the weak cannot escape once attacked, they cannot run away.

In reality, even the most basic action can accidentally kill you. You try and run at someone with a knife, even if you have a bigger sword, and it's not 100% that you wont get stabbed yourself.

As with the politics system, there's no "overthrowing" the government, you can only "down vote" them. Assassinating the president just means he respawns. The law-makers won't throw out a bad government... because they're the same people.


What? No perma-death? What babies!


This post has been edited by GoldfishGod - October 19, 2011, 17:08:59.

I applaud you Bandits. You made the game just that much more fun.

As Dash said, you've raised political issues in a game which is not based on it, you've inspired people to no longer take the status of 'mindless sheep' and have turned them into 'killer sheep'. Some things just don't change.

And Goldfish is right, there is too much game. I could say Ankama attempted to rectify it in Dofus by implementing the Heroic server, but everyone was then just too engrossed in PVP to really roleplay.

Lol, spot on, but i find it hard to imagine a perma death system that would actually work in mmo, can you give any example?

What an utterly ridiculous babble. Personally, I DON'T applaud you, BanditsAreUs. Really not at all. And I'll tell you why.

First of all, there is no way you could have predicted everything like you say you did. You could never have predicted that Ankama wouldn't take measures against you. You could never have predicted to get elected in the first place. You could never have predicted that the first opposition would fail. Also note how you skillfully omit how you shared Sabotage's account and how the character was elected, taking profit from elements in the game that are still unfinished.

Second of all, there is nothing good or intelligent about bullying people, even if it's just to prove a point. Your point could have been proven otherwise. By being an exceptionally good governor for example. Or by creating the first international peace treaty. Or whatever else comes to mind. You on the other hand chose to make players loose all the fun in the game, you chose to bully newbies, you chose laws that destroyed your nation.

Third of all. If Remington's communities are more united now, if Bonta's citizens are stronger and if players worked together, that's not because you are so incredibly intelligent. It's because the players are! It was the players who formed an alliance and it was the players who fought for their rights and it was the players who ultimately made you leave the stage. And if you come back, they will do it again and again, until you loose all interest in this kind of experiment.

Saying that it is thanks to you that Bonta is stronger is like saying that war is good because it breeds science. If Bonta is stronger now, it is only thanks to the players who worked against you. And I sincerely hope that the players too, understand this eventually instead of applauding you.

Never knew Wakfu had Aliens in it.

This is just open beta, it would be a mess if it had happened in the official game. At least now they can do something to make it a fair voting system.

Dofus heroic only obviously, which even has the tagline "Roleplay is more powerful than the sword"
Realm of the Mad God (no PvP lol)

Salem is supposedly doing it (actually a lot of Salem sounds like a Wakfu in terms of "player run")

Couple of games do the "generational" thing, where your character dies, but then you play their descendants (so it's more like a modified respawn/rebirth system).

As an aside, I don't think this whole thing has had any real impact on Bonta right now. Just like being killed in PvP is functionally meaningless, you can "get over it" very easily, and people will just continue playing the game as they would've in the first place.


This post has been edited by GoldfishGod - October 19, 2011, 19:48:52.

Thats exactly the point. If people had a problem before they would run away, if they were aggroed they would run and hide instead of trying to fight back, it wasnt until they were cornered into a nothing to lose position that they decided to do something about this. And saying that the same things would have happened if she had done the exact same thing that other people have been doing in the government since forever and keeping peace... well, then tell me why it didnt happen until now? The point was people were granted anything they wanted and they wouldnt even bother to try to fight back if they didnt like something. A common enemy appeared and gave everyone plenty of reasons to fight against her, and the community was divided between those who wanted to do something about it, and those who just cried on the forum and quitted because they didnt bother to look for a way to fix it.
Things were kinda predictable because it was pretty obvious which was the only way to fix things, it was only a matter of time to see if people would realize it soon enough to do something about it or not. And it didnt happen until the 2 or 3 last days before the elections that people realized "uh, we should downvote her and decide to vote on one single person!" but it was too late and vote spread all over the place, and whenver someone mentioned the idea 3 or 4 people would pop up yelling VOTE FOR ME!
Ankama didnt really had a reason to do anything about it to begin with because no rules were broken. Most of the if not all of the situations had 2 ways to continue, either people doing something about it the only way that could have worked, or people not doing anything about it. I even predicted before the second elections that votes would be too spread out because everyone wanted to be that hero governor, and it happened exactly like that. You can go search those threads and check the dates, its not impossible to predict the possible outcomes of a situation.

The whole reason why players united is to fight back, if you really thing they would have become closer if this hadnt happened... then i just dont understand the logic you are following.

Don't be absurd it's a beta game. These are beta testers and you just cost them 4 week's worth of beta testing Bonta's quests and features. Also caused a lot of players to leave the game ensuring they will be turned off by Wakfu's official release whenever that is.

Any other mainstream company would have removed the account after the second week or found a fix that prevented this from happening again.

Stop taking credit for being a troll its embarrassing.

What this is, is a comedy but nobody's laughing.

There may be nothing intelligent in bullying people, but everyones more likely to remember this. Bad things have a tendancy to stick with you more than good things ever will.

And the point is, Bonta was only strong because of Sabotage. I also don't understand the logic behind your points, because there is barely any which is feasible.

And ptxnogear, don't 'blame' Ankama (Not that I'm saying you are). They wanted to make the game more 'realistic' and 'roleplay' like, and Sabotage played the system, even admitted to it!

Isn't it strange how anything Bandits talks about starts a huge debate? What are we, children who want to argue for the sake of arguing?

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

Not that strange. There's not much else to talk about. No recent patch, no events, small population so everyone roughly knows what's going with the game.

If this wasn't a result of the politics system, the whole subject probably would've been shut down by the mods for bad language etc.


This post has been edited by GoldfishGod - October 19, 2011, 19:50:34.

Nice. Honestly I find it very interesting to read and very truthfull. And come on it was a nice experiment, there are alot of worse experiments. And it is a beta all thing considered, we have to test all of this, the game is not in the state of going by the whims of the majority. IT is in BETA. And actually everyone will say "Troll,trolololol", but come on imagine if you had that much of an impact on the society, weren't you going to feel great?
Sabotage did her thing, without her we weren't going to bother chekcing the politics tab, without her 500+ bontarians weren't going to bother clicking two things to try and make things better. How many of you could say for a fact, that they were paying any atention to the politics of the country before she came into power to do a litle chaos, I didn't, many of my friends didn't. My first time voting was when I was 3-4 weeks with a char and my guild told me to vote for someone. And again to the altar of honesty...
All of you are going to remember "SABOTAGE"... and all of you are going to get preatty carefull next time we see her name in elections, I kinda hope we do...

tl;dr

A last, desperate attempt to get some attention, heh? Trolling is over, bonta is playable again. You can stop pretending that you're important, it's not like you were anyway.  

Does anyone remember the name of the guy who caused the previous politics controversy? 'cause I don't. (There was one in case you think there wasn't)


This post has been edited by GoldfishGod - October 19, 2011, 23:37:24.

waw most intelegent people on earth

Fireman and time-to-die in Amakna? i never forget. I think i still have the screenshot of the "VOTE RIGHT, VOTE FIREMAN" thing he did. Aint letting those names show up again, not on my watch. Those chars are probably long gone anyway so no point on keeping that screenshot other than using it as a wall of shame trophy or something.
Or maybe you are talking about the monopoly on resources and jobs that the English guild had long ago, where the gobernors of Botna and Amakna where from that guild and they drove species to extintion on purpose so only they could obtain the resources, and they would aggro people if they tried to collect their stuff. That guild is long dead anyway, really went down when it changed leaders...

@Siilk
What a valuable insight on the subject you have given to us, sure changes everything.

@agilty-PWN
Its not arguing, its just a conversation. A debate. You know, where people with different opinions talk about a subject and try to find a middle ground? Well, its a conversation until people starts to jumping spouting "LOL TROLL, SHUT UP NOONE LIKES YOU". Example, Siilk

But yeah, there are different perspectives and many things happened, accept that. Accepting that a few small good things happened wont kill you guys, neither will it erase the bad ones.

You guys seem to be misunderstanding Kurkula's points. This is not about deficits and profits, social sciences don't work like that.

I'm sure what I'm going to say will be dismissed by many as black-and-white thinking, but I'll tell you this is bullshit. Not only our primary perception from the world comes from dualism of realities, but to just weight the rights and wrongs on a balance won't do it to find the essence of this political scandal.

The first thing is that is not about prediction of future but an assurance of continuity, you could have never assured you wouldn't be kicked by an Ankama's "divine intervention", your perception that “they won't do it” or “most likely won't” comes from a guess, which in its own sake can assure nothing. You could say “they won't do it because of that” but you don't really know what the lead designers thought about it, its just a guess and it's as vague as a personal opinion like, “my guess is that sabotage got really close from getting kicked”. A personal opinion has a valuable weight on a discussions because the subjects are only treated in a hypothetical way, but on a field experiment? This lack of epistemological understanding over the forces that might make the experiment impossible is clearly a hint that this was no experiment at all, it implies it is just child play, “let´s do shit and see what happens”.

Second, people seem to be suffering from a Machiavellic Syndrome here. I'm sorry but no, the ends don't justify the means. The good Sabotage caused (by colateral effect) has really no substance on its judgement because the means weren't morally right. Saying otherwise is like saying the “experiments” on live subjects in the Sino-japanese War were alright since it brought “neat knowledge” over the human body. No, I'll say it again, the ends don't justify the means, what matters is not what was achieved and when, but how it was achieved and why. Because everything that could possibly be achieved certainly wouldn't need a specific way to do it. This is like the truth paradoxe.

Do you really believe that if let's say, Newton have never existed, mankind would never discover the quantification of gravity? Bullshit! If Newton have never existed guess what? Someone else would do it, because Newton doesn't have the truth, he just was the first to discover it. The truth of something already exists in a abstract level of space, what we do when we think about the truth is just to find it. How many times you haven't thought about an idea that was awesome, only to later to find that someone else had already thought about it? How many inventions like the airplane weren't discovered almost at the same time by completely different people? You guys can't be seriously thinking that if Sabotage have never done what he did people in Bonta, the players would be weak, disorganized and disinterested in politics forever and that the weak points of Wakfu´s voting system would have never been discovered. If Sabotage have never done the things he did guess what? Bonta would probably be in the same disorganized and weak state it has been, but that doesn't mean it was condemned to forever be weak, disorganized and disinterested in politics. There a lot of other ways do achieve these things that do not infer to ruin the gameplay experience from hundreds of people for a month. If it truly is the only way to achieve this, does it means Amakna is going to get it´s own version of Sabotage soon, to make Amanakians “more united and interested in politcs”? Or Brakmar? Does that means that without Sabotage, Yechnagoth would have never do that awesome Borda Count suggestion and the voting system was forever bound to be weak? Hell, no. It means that the Borda Count suggestion probably wouldn't have a first paragraph talking about Sabotage, and all the calculations and dissertations would remain the same way. If people are taking lightly on Sabotage because he ”achieved such things in a fast way” those people have a very short perception of time.

And I put on to question the validity of some of those achievements, like making people of bonta interested in politics... Sure, for now people will be swarming the forums in the next elections, but mind one thing, this game is on beta and because of that doesn't have a large number of people in each nation to begin with, that means that the “number of affected” by Sabotage's “lesson” was small when compared to an hypothetical live post-release date official server, which means those people surely won't carry this lesson with them when the game goes gold, many of them will play in different servers, with different communities with a lot of people who never knew Wakfu's beta existed and never knew a guy called Sabotage in the beta Remington server pissed the hell out of everyone. Sabotage won´t become history, it will become fun fact, won't be a thing every player will know of and will most likely be a knowledge only the oldest players will have, making the point of to force unity and interest on a nation totally vague because the nation is not formed to begin with! Sabotage is the hot topic for now, but in a few months it will be old news (unless another one like him manages to do the same thing). Sabotage's action interfere too little on Bonta's community state after the game goes gold.

I'm not saying there weren't good things with the Sabotage scandal, I'm sure there were, what I'm saying is that those things doesn't make him a “good guy”, those good things doesn't have any substance to make him good because of the way they were achieved, and even though people that point those good things might not see him as a good guy, they sure make look like it. This is the concept of Ying and Yang. Yes, there will be bad things on good things and there will be good things on bad things, but what matters is not if there is a white spot on a black area or a black spot on a white area, but if the area is black or white. What was achieved doesn't justify the means and therefore doesn't change Sabotage. A dictator does not become good because of progress.

And just read carefully between the lines: “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. “

“These players were always the kind of people who exploited any loopholes, gray zones or imbalances in the system.“

“Therefore although unintentional ...”

“As a byproduct of our entertainment...”

“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?”

Basically what they're saying is that the focus of their actions wasn't on the prospects of knowledge, but actually done with the primary perceptions of a Troll. If you can piss people off, why not do it?

For me, this is the essence of Sabotage and Banditsareus. Sure good things came out of it, but that was the right way to do it? Certainly not. To make a little case out of these points is just to ignore the playing experience that was largely ruined to a lot of people. It's a troll, is not something you should take lightly as a joke. It's like Anonymous and Lulzsec, that try to prove a point by griefing a lot of people and companies. It's just bad.


This post has been edited by Cronqvyst - October 20, 2011, 03:19:05.