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So many things to reply there that i keep losing my train of thought thinking about all of it at once. And not even gonna quote it because that would be way too big so let see...

About the first point,, ist true nothing can be predicted, but considering the possibilities and finding out which route has more chances of happening, that the clsoer to that we can get to something. There is still a chance of being wrong, but i guess thats a risk that people take when trying to guess what other people will do. Yeah, there was no way to know if Ankama would have done somethign or not other than that. Trying to guess what players were doing isnt as impossible mainly because in the forums it was easy to see what they were thinking, and not trying to put everyone on the same bag, but many people had very simple perspectives and the fact that they just threated to quit instead of asking for ways to help fix it hints a bit on how close or far away they were from doing something about it. And after all, no experiment is perfect, thats why its a experiment, to find out if theories are right or wrong, and how right or wrong they were.

Second point: I agree that the colateral damage is no justification about it, gonna give you this one.

About the next 2 , im not saying that they would have never become united if it wasnt because of this but the exact opposite. Something like this was bound to happen eventually, and its better for it to happen right now during the beta while Ankama has time to think and test alternatives than later, closer to release or after the release. Of course this is only relevant from the betatester perspective and a lot of people dont really care about that and are just playing for... well, playing. its true that the players that experimented this now wont be the same or will be a huge minority when the game is released, but there were some things that are really important that happened as colateral damage. Getting an Embassador and pointing out the huge flaws early is one, but since they are colateral damage they dont really justify it, i admit that. But still, sometimes a problem needs to happen for people to take it seriously.

Next one, im not trying to say she/he/they are good guys. Maybe i sound like that because im trying to get more people into a gray perspective into the subject and the only way to counter all the negative ones is to highlight the good sides hoping that the gray area becomes more obvious.

Lastly, about their intentions. I dont know whats my position about this one. Even if they have had good intentions, a lot of people would still want to stone them because they care more about what happened and less or not at all about the why behind it. So this point becomes more or less valid depending on the person, i dont know if i wanna go that deep into this to figure out how relevant the original intentions. Thinking about it makes me think of many hypothetical examples of people with bad intentions doing good things, or people with good intentions doing bad things and all the possible combinations and i dont wanna think that much into that. That would make this way too complicated.

You seem to be mistaken.

Firstly, it was from the very beginning that Ankama allowed a player to dictate a nation. They didn't add the possibility to use dictator-like laws just to punish whoever used them, that's completely unfair and would make no sense as to why they had implemented them in the first place. Also, as they said, their primary goal was entertainment. Any possibility of an experiment was an interesting byproduct of their main goal.

Secondly, this is a game. Whether something is morally right or wrong is irrelevant. If players did not like it, they could have logged out at any point in time. You are basically calling Ankama's game feature of dictation morally incorrect but as this exists ingame and STILL exists in-game after a month, your argument is invalid here (Again, because this is a game. It's not like lives are at stake or anything.).

Also, judging by what you have said about Newton, it sounds as if you would say the exact same thing to ANYONE who makes a discovery. Someone eventually will, that person who was first just happened to be Newton at the time. In this case, Sabotage was that person. Really, getting an online community to work together is an extremely hard thing to do and without someone like Sabotage to rise up, they would remain disorganized. You expect them to make the same discovery with wanting a "great governor" that is only able to what every other governor has been doing since the political system was introduced in Wakfu? Surely the want for the same-old same-old challenges, war or peace, weather and environmental protection that EVERY governor provides would cause a mass unity of the nation and everyone voting in the governor popularity for the first time. Yes. Right.
On another point, testing things fast is the whole point of an open beta. If not, the game would have remained in closed beta where their few testers would have sufficed.

Again, they have stated this incident was purely for their entertainment and that their achievements were a byproduct. It's not entirely about players learning of this piece of history so they are not doomed to repeat but rather, a chance for Ankama to witness a feature of their game. After all, as this is beta, they'd want every aspect of their game tested. Sure the players may forget after some time but more importantly, Ankama now know if they want to change anything for when the final release happens.

You talk about this being the "wrong way" to do this but really, there is no right or wrong way. There is however, ANOTHER way of doing it. Ruining the playing experience of others is highly irrelevant. After all, you are here to TEST the game, not to play the game and have fun, that's not the goal of a beta.

I will iterate once more. This is a game and they were only using a feature that Ankama themselves implemented. You may as well be saying the same things to "good governors" for using the game's inbuilt features to create a pleasant gaming experience.

Also, Sabotage did not stop anyone from playing the game or using any of the resources. Players simply chose not to. It's not like the button to attack the monster was greyed out. It's just another way of playing the game, you don't have to stay in the positives of citizen points. Heck, the negatives exist for a reason so think of it as another way to play the game. Obviously people don't know how to cope so they just whine on the forums and wait for something to happen instead.

i only have a few point to add here:
1. for those who said the player who quitted or bothered with poaching law is the one who "choose not to do anything" while "they can do anything", you are wrong. sure u wont really get punishment when you have -cp, but when ure outlaw,many ppl are killing you for the sake of +10 cp. if u have -200cp and died,u go to jail,and have to wait there.going offline wont move the timer so u have to afk your char there.
mind you,-200 cp is for killing around 30 gobbal(30 fight).so... how depressed the player would be,waiting 20 minutes-30minutes doing nothing? expecially newbies that know nothing from it?

2. about "beta-testing the laws", yes its still beta,yes its still a right time to do so.. but whats the result?
there is none changed nor the dev gave divine intervention in 4 weeks.
do you really help in beta-testing it this way? if all ppl quitted because of it in remington,yea maybe there will be a divine intervention. does it worth it?
2 weeks of poaching law to beta-test is long enough, 4 weeks? in the future?
if you really care bout beta-testing it and make the devs change their mind,u shouldve go to tiva and prove your point. making it in remington where we dont even have a CM is.....


This post has been edited by XbluZeX - October 20, 2011, 06:16:35.

Trying to guess what players would do isn't a big problem, it's fairly easy I would say. But my point isn't about prediction on social science, but how Ankama would see this. What me and Kurkula are trying to show is a counterpoint to the perception that banditsareus is trying to present us, that "they did those things for science, to prove a point, they weren't really trolling you" but since they can't really predict things like they appear to be doing, they actually aren't "impartial social scientists making tests on gamers". Their base data was too vague to give them something substantial for calculus, therefore they can't really be impartial like scientists on Breaching Experiments (since they didn't even pass through the common standards for those kinda of tests anyway). They just were doing things as they saw fit. That's the point we're trying to prove.


Well, I disagree with the concept that bad things are bound to happen. Sure, you can't totally prevent bad things from happening, that would be paradise, an utopia, but that doesn't mean you should make little of it when it happens. That's like saying "I won't take baths anymore because I'll end getting messed up again anyway". You should care about bad things happening, you can't stop them all but at least the big ones you should try to prevent, because if you don't, then they'll certainly happen. Just think about, for such an exploit to happen, first you need to find the exploit, you need to recognize it first, know how to exploit. But when you do find the exploit what should you do? Warn the developers to fix it and prevent such exploits to happen or to abuse those exploits and cause griefing? Which one of those two options seems the right one to you? Most people would warn the devs and hope them to fix it because that seems to be right option since, well, it cause way less griefing to the people around you. If the devs don't take it seriously they'll warn them again and again till they take seriously, if they don't only THEN they prove such exploit on a field test, a short sample to prove his point. What bad people do? They exploit it for for a large period of time and make a fun of it, because they aren't interested in fixing the exploit, they're interested in exploiting, in getting a feeling of power over it.

Which option do you think Banditareus chose?


I guess these examples are quite meaningless, it's fairly obvious that if their intentions was to troll then no forgiveness should be given even if it did something good by colateral damage, because this colateral damage wasn't needed for them, if it didn't happen it wouldn't make a difference for them, to troll was the objective. If their intentions were good but they acted wrong on it then they should publicly and sincerely apologize for it, which they aren't, and if they do, they'll have to do a lot hell of explaining to be conceivable.

But since their intention seems to be trolling right from the beginning anything good that comes from it is not really valid evidence to judge them. Even if you highlight the good deeds to put people on a grey area, when the end of the day comes things are just black.


Dictatorship is a very relative term. To put on action a radical and extreme law makes you a dictator? For some people maybe, but sometimes radical measures are needed to fix a situation, that doesn't make you a dictator. What makes you a dictator is to impose such radical and extreme laws in times which they aren't needed, causing a suffering which could be avoided, for a period way longer than was actually needed to begin with, that's what makes a dictator. His will is the law, and nothing, not even logic can change his will, his will is above anything else, even rationatility and common sense, and the law should abide to it. Just because there are extreme laws on Ankama's system that doesn't mean that a dictatorship is liable of enforced tolerance by them, that is the reason why you can impeach a governor for crying out loud. This episode actually pointed out that the popularity meter was badly tuned (again, colateral damage), because people tried to impeach him. If Ankama was totally fine with a dictatorship then such system, to impeach a governor, wouldn't be needed.


So, because this is a game, the people's feeling, the gamers sentiments are irrelevant? Morality is inexistent because it's a game? Morality exists on human perception of the world by the simple assumptio that you should not cause sufering on other people because if everyone does it, then you will most likely suffer as well. And the concept of trolling, or griefing (being the word grief a state of sadness, mind you) already implies that there is a victim, which is someone who is damaged in any way by the criminal, which means morality is a possiblity inside a game because injuries and damages are possible. In ANY system in which a human being interacts with another human being, directly or indirectly, morality is an issue. If not, then just think about it, Why does the concept of fairness exist? If morality isn't a issue inside a game why the devs care so much about creating a system in which everyone has the same rights? If morality is not a issue then you shouldn't really care about injustices. But it is, if people are griefed, that is, if people are getting constantly bullied by someone else, making their gaming experience sad, they won't like the game and won't play it anymore, which is bad for everyone, that's why morality is an issue inside a game.

And I'm not calling Ankama system morally incorrect, flawed maybe, but morally wrong no. As I said, sometimes extreme measures are needed, sometimes you'll be forced to put high taxes, but that doesn't make you a dictator.



Yes, I would say the same thing to anyone, it is a principle, it applies to everyone. I'm not trying to diminish Newton's geniality, what I'm saying is that we're not dependent on him. He is a genius not only to have thought and done a good thing about it, but to be first to do so, and that's why we mark him on our history, the other people who thought the same way he did are also genius, but since they came after him it's kinda of irrelevant to mark them as well. And you clearly are misunderstanding the point. You don't become worshiped as a good example when you do something first, you need to do something good to be worship as good deed. People worship the man who thought on the first plane, the first computer, the first theory of quantum physics, the first good thinker, not the first rapist, the first dictator, the first killer. People who did groundbreaking deeds in bad ways are not worshiped, they're frowned upon and used as bad examples to prevent it to happen again. Sabotage was the first dictator, but that does not make him as good as Newton.

Yes, no better way to unify people than by a cataclysmic event, like war, natural disasters or a common enemy, but that doesn't mean you should purposely cause cataclysmic events just for the sake of unity.

I expect them to discover the importance of politcs in a natural way, not by ruining their game experience on purpose. The Amaknians do take politics way more seriously than Bontarians and Brakmarians and they never had a governor as bad as Sabotage. They learned the importance of politcs simply by experience, they saw that when a good governor shows up things gets easier for everyone (like Xylomentalozolin) and when a governor not so good showed up things aren't as easy, so they perceived "politcs are important to make my gaming experience more enjoyable". There's really no secret to it.

Also you're changing the meaning of a open Beta. Beta is just a stage of the game production that comes after the Alpha, which is in itself a very raw and incomplete form of the game. Beta is when all the pieces of Alpha are put together and the project starts to appear more as a game, but incomplete.
The beta testing is the process to test a game in its beta phase. The Open Beta is when a game in beta state allows the entrance of voluntary players to play/test the game. The players, being a voluntary don't really have the obligation to search for bugs and report it, it'll help a lot if they do but aren't forced to do it since they're after all, voluntary. What open beta players really help mandatorily are another kind of tests, that they perform simply by playing the game. Like stress tests on servers, client-server communication, server updates and etc. Have you ever heard about any non-online game that had a Open Beta test phase? Even games that have stand alone portions of the game like Medal of Honor and Battlefield perform open beta tests mainly on its online portion, because there are tests that can only be done with a large number of people. They can help speed up things if they wish to, but they aren't forced to do it. Speed shouldn't come before quality.

And again, as you said it too, Banditareus did that for pleasure, not to show Ankama their weak system, which makes the point about speed even more invalid.


You don't necessarily need to prove a point this way, you don't need to create a blackhole to prove quantum physics. And besides, the time-frame Sabotage used to do his/her things was not nearly even close to a sample, was way higher than actually needed to prove a point. Also, he never discussed the weak points of the system directly so he wasn't trying to prove anything at all.



No wrong way? heh, way too relativistic for me. To ruin the experience of others is irrelevant? Are you serious? You're fine with griefing people? You're fine by people having bad experiences in the game? Then why do you play a game at all? Just to annoy people? Sure, you're here to test the game, but if the game is just unbearable to play then its unbearable to test. The assumption people usually have about a beta is that it will be more or less fun to test the game, if there's no fun at all, just annoyances and grief people will stop playing the open beta, people will stop testing the game, which is no good for a game developer. Since again, for a player to test a game in open beta they don't necessarily need to report anything, they just need to play it, I'm sure the majority of players who have played Wakfu beta never used the bug report button.

And not only because they're using an Ankama's feature it means what they are doing is right. If I use a baseball bat to beat my girlfriend to death does that mean that the company who made the bat is fine with it? Certainly not, what matters here is not if you are using tools which are official or not, but what are you doing with those tools.


This post has been edited by Cronqvyst - October 20, 2011, 06:27:09.

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.

I see nothing wrong with Sabotage's "experiment" here.

They game currently allows it. She was elected by the population. That's legal.

(If only we did the same with the politicians we elect in real life... Oh yeah, we'd be burning the parliaments by now!)

I guess this whole story shows quite well the point of beta testing: there are legal actions in the game that can make the majority of the players unhappy. If the devs don't want their players leaving the game massively, maybe they should tweak the system.

In the 3rd Inside Ankama, Izmar, William and Macha talked about this issue. They showed the way to calculate the mandate rating. Any citizen who voted for this mandate can rate the government. Sabotage got a rating of around -65%, while -70% are needed to depose her. This maybe will show the devs that that threshold is insufficient and they should change it.

HOWEVER, I doubt that all the people complaining have voted. So they obviously couldn't rate the government. I hope we all have learned our lesson now and will try to get enough citizen points to vote and give our opinion. It's the same in most democracies in real life. I see it in my country, where almost 50% of the electorate doesn't vote, but then everyone will complain about how bad the prime minister and his government are.

Anyway, unlike a real dictatorship, here we have elections regularly, so we don't have to fear having a bad governor until the end of our lives. Maybe the mandate is too long, but then again, that's something the devs can fix and this incident may make them change it

I'm not at all worried about this. Do you guys really think Ankama will release a game that will be terribly flawed?

Every time I see someone saying "omg this game sucks ankama youve ruined everything my air iop sucks now and its wyour fault baaawwwwww i'm gonna leave now and all my friends will and our mothers too because bad sabotage made bad laws and aggroed me!!!!!!11111one1eleven!!!" I die a little inside. On the other hand, somebody who cannot realize that this is STILL a TEST should actually wait for the final version on the game, so if they leave, maybe it's for the best, both for them, and for my patience.

(Ok, I have to admit that in the English forum nobody wrote like that, but I've seen worse complaints in the French forum. Obviously not about Sabotage, but at least about the air Iops and Brakmar being incomplete.)

We've already done our (TESTING) job and pointed out to the community managers that most of the players are not happy about this. Obviously, keeping this system and having GMs in the released version kicking "bad" governors is not the right strategy for Ankama, so let's see what the devs will come up with to fix the situation.

Finally, I want to say that I voted for Sabotage and then gave her a positive rating in the mandate poll, after all this drama started. Because somebody had to test abuses in the system. Good job! But I won't vote for you again, I want a nice governor. ;-)

my answer is :yes.

So is mine, lol.

Not just on this issue either.


This post has been edited by GoldfishGod - October 20, 2011, 12:59:17.

I'm not trying to say that PvPing is bad, maybe its something that is frowned upon when there is too much of it, but is not really immoral in itself because it makes part of the fun of the game, it might be an annoyance, but is a minor annoyance since there is always a way to try to avoid it. Many games even offer an option to play on servers where PvP is forbidden for those people that don't like it. I don't recall Dofus with this kind of servers, but in Dofus not only you have a fairly cheap potion to teleport you and flee but as you can be neutral and hide behind a protection from a guard. And you don't need the help of a entire community to back you up, you can do you all of this on your own.

However, even games like World of Warcraft have some basic rules regarding world PvP. PvP is alright, but if you single out some player and keep killing him for longs periods of time non-stop, then he can perfectly report you to the company and the company will take action against you, because that's not PvPing, that's griefing (and believe me, I have seen things like that happen)

And mind you, while you were just PvPing the hell out of everyone in Maya bay you were hated by a large number of players but not necessarily was ruining the experience for everyone, when you became governor you scaled things to a size that was unconceivable, you weren't just killing everyone inside one map, you made the game horrible to play in all areas in control of Bonta, all at the same time, for a entire month. And this is not just killing, it's not just PvPing, players actually couldn't do nothing with the fear of being persecuted for it afterwards. That just went way beyond from the concept of an annoyance and actually started to be mass griefing. And you didn't just mess with your nation, all nations became more or less caotic because of it, the immigration rate to other nations went to the roof and Amaknians were just lost on what the hell they'll do with so many people walking their fields.

This is not just a problem of PvP vs No-PvP, this is actually enters the concept of griefing.



That seems to be very illogical of you for me. The first thing players notice when looking at Wakfu and Dofus is the battle system, no question about it, it's actually one of the few MMORPG which use a Turn Based Tactics as it's battle system, and this is the part of the game that attracts the hardcore demographic. On the other hand, you have to look at the culture Dofus and Wakfu try to appeal with their symbolism. Their artistic style is a very simple, dimorphist with a colorful cartoonish look. There's no gore, there's no sad stories, there's no tragedies, there's no dilemas there's nothing that could hint a high level of abstraction inside the game. You have a bunch of cartoonish characters that prey on steryotipical concepts of modern fantasy characters that fight each other in a funny way, hell, there's not even a true masculine character to play in both games, all the males are just comedy and the females are just cute or sexy. It's fairly obvious to me that the game has an appeal to younger demographics and the gaming community is not that fondle to PvP and gore because there's no real glory in it, it's not like is a Call of Duty or World of Wacraft with a high fantasy settings where you feel the epicness of a fight. So, why the hell do you insist in bullying kids? It doesn't matter how many people you kill to force the concept of PvP, the game has no real prospect for that part. To use PvP as competition inside an Arena maybe, but world PvP is kinda of pointless in these settings. If you're looking down at kids just because they are kids then I would say this game, even MMOG is not really for you. Even if they are kids that doesn't mean you can do whatever the hell you please with them.

And I'll not talk about the prediction issue anymore, you just said yourself that it was not experiment, maybe people will stop calling that.


This post has been edited by Cronqvyst - October 20, 2011, 17:43:48.

They wouldn't be the first. Thinking about that Steam version of a certain game that happened to be the Dev version so every time you pressed Y you went into God Mode and could fly around altering the game itself

come on.how far it will going,its just a game.u cant brought the reality of a political in a game.

What I talk seems to be too over the top for regular players but if you a serious game developer you have to take everything in consideration. You might be a little immature to perceive this, but video games, though are seen as child play for society in general, actually are serious business. Ludology is a growing field in academic circles (I have participated in some Ludology blogs myself), and many gaming events have been used for scientific researches in the real world. As the game industries advances it gets more sophisticated to the point of video games reaching high levels of abstractions as many other main forms of art media like books, movies and paintings have done.

If you do and play a game based on political intrigues how do you expect to not encounter dialectical discussions? These things come togehter with the concepts of politcs, as well as scandals and radical opinions. Have you seen Yechnagoth's suggestion to change the current voting system to Borda Count?
That thing is heavy mathematics and politics, the topic is filled with giant posts discussing the better ways to improve the voting system. For you gaming might be just child play, a kind of media for kids and that alone, but for me is an art form and deserve the same respect as any other subject in the real world.


This post has been edited by Cronqvyst - October 21, 2011, 04:29:53.

yes but make this game over too serious also not a good idea. do u know how many people died because of *game*. what are you trying to say if we think seriously in a politic its gonna be a chaotic politic ever.maybe on your side, ur matured enough to grind the idea,about this politic.

but how about the youngest ones *with lack of the politic knowledge*.

as u say 70% of the game player is almost immature.

its only different point of view.sorry my english is really bad.but this is excited.

after all, we all playing the game called wakfu,and most of player's online game only looking for popularity* its for the serious gamers* ,for example ;
*if i reach the bottom of the level caps, the people will said.hei its public hes lvl 100 man!,amazing*
+1 popularity
*wow sabotage is really a dictator man! he/she makes all the monster locked,tralalal... *breaking news*( u know the podcast)* + 3 million popularity

the developer of this game also know this *gaining popularity thing*,thats why they held some event,some tournament, the best and more skillfull player will win.

so in this case, i think sabotage fullfill his/her goal mostly.and to judge his/her got something disease, or pyhscologic disorder or whatever , its just non sense at all. well its just my opinion,none of my words is offense.


This post has been edited by public4enemies - October 21, 2011, 13:57:48.

Can you two please elaborate on that?

I'd agree that Ankama's games may have some flaws - no piece of software is perfect -, but they're not really disruptive and Ankama tries to fix/balance things AFAIK. I'm sure they will fix this one until release.




That would be great and it's not much more complicated to implement. I hope the devs really consider this.

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.

Well, then all sums up to what you define as too much. For me, too much is when things starts not only to get personal but to get real. For me too much would be if someone started to plot a way to hurt Banditareus physcally, like organizing a hacking attack against him or try to make his personal life a living hell, too much would be when things get really extreme, which isn't the case. What we're doing here is just talking, since this discussion started from my part I didn't offend anyone directly, for what I can remember. No swearing, no tantrums, no sarcastic rants, no nothing, BanditsAreUs is treating each one of us with courtship and vice-versa. Our arguings might be a little complex and reach too far away, but it's not like we're forcing anyone to do anything here. I'm not forcing people to read my posts, to comply with my opinions or demanding answers, nor making emotional blackmails or swearing at everyone. If someone agrees with me in some point, its by pure logical persuasion, we present arguings to each other and Reason does all the rest. If they don't agree with me because they don't, well, it can't be helped then. If they don't like these types of discussion then don't bother reading or answering, I really have no problem with that.

On the other hand there are people who do care and are interested in this discussion, be it a old or young person. That's why I always try to write my posts in a coloquial manner and don't get too technical with lots of references, hard words and complex theories (even though sometimes I can't avoid it), so that everyone who is interested has a chance to read, understand and answer if they want to. I don't even bother if it's a kid or someone who can't write in english very well, I do not dismiss them for these things. Even if they're a kid with no political knowledge at all, they might learn something by tangential learning. Those who don't like those things, then just don't bother with me.

If someone commits suicide over the things I said, though I would be sad I wouldn't really bother, I wouldn' feel guilty because of it. I'm not forcing anyone to do anything, not even getting personnal, if they actually die because of this game/discussion then they are really unstable persons to begin with, they would use anything as excuse to commit such acts.



Me too Yechnagoth is translating the main post to french, to pass it directly to the devs, let's hope they take it seriously.

To BanditsAreUs:

So all boils down to Resentment? Because if it just was lack of respect you wouldn't bother to do so much just to "entertain yourself" (if you entenrtain yourself by pissing someone off you already assume you have something against that person anyways).

I have played World of Warcraft for a long time, (from Burning Crusade to Cataclysm) and I really do understand the feeling of frustration at the cheer of stupidity and ignorance from other players. I know what is to pass 5 hours (for real) trying to down Kael'thas in Magister's Terrace with 4 other players and just kept dying and losing gear, not because it was hard, this happened after this content got old, we were wiping out of stupidity from the other members of the group. I know how frustrating it is to lose every damn Arathi Basin because the teammates are too retarded to just respond to a Incoming call. I know how ridiculous is the whining when a Horde player actually goes through the work to enter in his Alliance character and whisper to you just to complain that you killed his Horde char once in a world PvP Server, Jesus Christ. I know how frustrating is to lose your group while in the Tofu dungeon in Dofus because the bastards didn't mind the holes your warned them to mind. And I have sincerly lost my trust and hope to the players around me, I always try to do my things using the least amount of help possible, so that if something goes wrong it'll be because I did something wrong, and not someone else.

However that does not mean I resent it all. I don't have any joy or pleasure in griefing them, I don't get any sense of entertainement in making their lifes more difficult, or see them complaining. It was the whole reason I got frustrated to begin with. Their ignorance and lack of skill made my road to achieve a given objective harder than it was supposed to be, and that's why I got frustrated in the first place. If I go out of my way just to frustate them back then I'm being no different than them and I would become just as liable of reprimend (actually even more, since it is on purpose). If someone asks for my help I'll try to do the best because that's what I would like to be done if I asked for help. There's really no secret to it, it is that simple.

And what you have done is really griefing, not just an inconvenience . Even though you could argue and logically prove with no doubts that CP is useless and it has no meaning, you have no right to decide what people would do about it, that's why you became a hated figure. In comparison that would be the same if the government of your country tried to control (by means of force) what you eat to only allow you to eat what is healthy, not what you want. This is just a breach of personal space, you're violating their personal choices in a high degree. If they want to farm CP in Bonta for whatever reason they decide to, they can't. And not because of a reasonable problem but simply because someone else said it would be this way. The level of inconvenience surpasses the concept of an annoyance and it becomes just way too ignorant to stand to, it is by no means close to the annoyance of a nerf. You have no right to dictate how a player should play individually. Not even counting the real problems like time wasted in prison when you have limited time to play and not having the freedom to walk at anywhere you should be able to. It's inconvenience? Yes, but you have to look at the scale. It's not just a minor annoyance.

I find truly illogical that all of this happened. It doesn't respond to Reason, it responds directly to your own emotions. It's truly what I would call Trolling. Your sense of shock about regular Wakfu players mindset is just bizarre on its own. What I tried to tell you in my previous post is that it is kinda of obvious, by the demographics Wakfu appeals to, you wouldn't find a truly mature community, to hope for otherwise is just strange. Gaming community in general is not really mature, the industry doesn't have more than 50 years and only in the recent years it started to appeal to a older demographic. The only mature gaming community I found so far in an MMOG was LOTRO community, and that just because the majority of players are Tolkienmaniacs, they read a lot of books and know a lot of his work. And since the game went F2P the level of maturity is going down a little.

I'm sorry, I really can't find any reason in your behavior other than egocentric actions.


This post has been edited by Cronqvyst - October 22, 2011, 13:56:46.

Now I love their actions even more... 

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.

Just one thing.

Really long posts......not enough patience or time to read all of them  

There's no point reading the long posts from TS since the entire purpose of the thread is to explain why they trolled Bonta.

Here's a simplified version of why it's stupid.

1. Unification of Bonta- Bonta before and after Sabotage is fairly the same. The only difference is now, there are fewer people in Bonta. Myself included.

2. Testing the Political System- Testing the political system in a Beta game doesn't serve a purpose because beta games have lower population than most other games. Voting, vox populi (popular opinion) can easily be swayed in lower population games because less people/accounts are needed to get a popular vote. Case in point: Bonta.

3. Ankama's Absentee Landlord Philosophy- There's a clever saying to be seen here, that Amakna is an absentee landlord. They pretty much let players test their game but in the long run but do nothing to intervene, even if it does interfere with player testing. There are bugs out there that haven't even been resolved yet. In Amakna there are a few quests like Boowolves that can't be won or are difficult to win in, just because kills aren't counted 90% of the time. What about Bonta's woes?

4. Playership- Can you seriously argue that playership has increased when 1 of the 3 towns in the game is rendered unhospitable especially to novices who are new to the game, either reading positive reviews from friends, etc. I myself have had tremendous difficulty explaining that Wakfu happens to be one of the better MMO's out there, but when you play don't choose Bonta because their government is unstable. After saying that, they either ask for more information (which is unlikely) or change the topic.

5. So we get to the crux of why they trolled the entire town: They were bored and decided it would be amusing to make Bonta unplayable. It's not an experiment in sociology, anything of the sort. I look forward to them doing it again, since Ankama has not taken any steps to prevent this from happening. So go ahead, make up stories, I'll probably pen one myself, and they'll all sound plausible. Don't try to romanticize it when it's nothing more than a couple of sad people looking for attention.