Is ganking girl gamers a bad thing?

[BloatedGuppy]

The appeal is randomness and the chance of getting ganked to break up the monotonous nature of leveling/questing.

WoW world PvP didn't fall out because of excessive ganking (again, that's the whole APPEAL, you either like it or you don't)...it fell out thanks to flying mounts.

After getting ganked enough times, you would begin to develop a genuine HATRED of your opposing faction and truly see them as the enemy - nothing was really more immersive than that, Blizzard genuinely intended it. I would sit there, as a low level, looking at my corpse after getting killed by the same max-level rogue for the 5th time and start saying "seriously FUCK HORDE, why are they such assholes? When I level up I'm going to kill every single one of them on sight, those fuckers will pay..." and before I knew it, I was a max level picking on horde newbies with a genuine satisfactory feeling of "this is payback for what happened to me".

An endless circle of hate became known as the Horde vs Alliance, and till date I haven't come across any MMORPG that encouraged such an intense sense of rivalry and pride in your faction, the urge to kill the other faction out of sheer hatred. Fucking AWESOME!

But those were the old days of WoW before shit like flying mounts, server transfers and faction transfers. Thanks to all that happening, those days are now behind us.

I at least hope you see how it could appeal to some people.

Well, I should probably make it clear that WoW was my 6th MMO, and compared to at least one of its predecessors (Ultima Online) the PvP and consequences were decidedly tame. It's hard to get that "tension" feeling when dying costs you a quick trip back on your mount, versus losing everything you had on you. I had a fear and inchoate terror of PK's in old school (pre Trammel) UO. They didn't just annoy you and crack up your leveling, they could leave you penniless and destitute and broken. Seeing a red name come charging onto the screen was genuinely horrifying. God forbid you were enough of a dumbass to be carrying, say, a house key, and a recall stone leading right to the front door. Not that *I* would ever be so stupid (cough, cough).

After UO there was DAOC, and while the PvP was entirely consensual it was a haven for hardcores. We had one guild called Rel Por (reference to a UO spell, no less) that could wipe out an entire zerg all by themselves. Seeing them hove into view was, again, legitimately terrifying.

And of course there was just regular old PvE in EQ, wherein a single death could set you back days or even WEEKS worth of experience, not to mention every single piece of loot you'd ever acquired if you were lucky enough to die in a place where you couldn't recover your body (since the game respawned you completely naked).

So while I understand the principle behind "it breaks up the monotony" just fine, I really don't find ganking in the modern MMO (and I include WoW as a modern MMO) to be particularly riveting. It's always a silly one sided fight, which results in absolutely no long term consequences beyond temporary annoyance. In most games you don't even take the basic death penalty you'd suffer for dying in PvE. It's about as engaging (and rewarding in terms of game play) as accidentally crashing to desktop and having to spend a couple minutes loading back in. I suppose I can see why you'd hate a ganker, but I hate them in the same way I hate bugs, or stupid design features. They're a needless hindrance and annoyance.

I much, much prefer an environment where the fights are primarily between equals and the other guy is at least "fight ready" if not necessarily standing there staring you down. You can take people off guard in consensual world PvP or battlegrounds, but it's not you on your level cap Rogue against some flower picking newbie. It's a genuine test of skill and mettle. Assuming the game has the mechanics to support a skill based competition, but you get my drift. I was sort of under the impression that was the point of PvP in the first place. Like any competitive sport, or contest. You wouldn't gank someone in chess, come flying out of the darkness to flip the board over and declare victory. You wouldn't gank someone in boxing...jump someone multiple weight classes below you from behind and decimate them with a single blow. This why these games and sports are enduring. Because they're genuine contests between relative equals, not one sided routs.

Meh, I'm rambling. You get my point.

And holy SHIT this is off topic. I'm sorry thread.

 

[Dragonbums]

The issue I see here is that your killing players because of their SUPPOSED gender. I put this on a lower level of killing noobs that literally just entered the playing field.

I find it similar in killing players for the sole purpose that they might happen to be of a certain ethnic color. Or they are part of a certain religious group.

I wouldn't call it rape though. That's ridiculous.

It is, however very creepy, and not all people male nor female follow a set of guidelines on how each gender "acts" online.

The fact that some people actually spend enormous amounts of time to identify players that are females in real life just so they can harass them is something that shouldn't be tolerated by the general staff in my opinion.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

The very first Google search result for that headline is a reddit thread explaining that it's a fake.

Yep, that was my experience. 10 seconds with Google.

Really, the burden for separating satire from reality is on the reader, not the satirist. While this can be made moderately more difficult in a constantly shifting medium like the internet, it's certainly not impossible. And it was comically easy in this particular instance.

Anyone reflexively endorsing that article as fact is doing so because of confirmation bias, not because it's a particularly cunning or deceptive piece of satire.

 

[Eve Charm]

The thing is, gender issues in gaming need to stop now.

As a female I don't need to be coddled, I don't need to be protected, I don't need to be treated differently. I understand that if the idiots I'm playing games with weren't making fun of gender, they'd be making fun of sexually, race, age, nationally and even the of fashion your mother. And they'd attack that just as hard as they would attack our gender, nothing more, nothing less.

If anyone thinks we cry in the corner when someone tells us to go in the kitchen, obviously hasn't heard what we're going to cut off with our rusty kitchen knife from said kitchen.

There is no superior gender in gaming. It's nothing more then IQ and twitch reflexes. The term " Girl Gamer " needs to die in a fire. Keeping that term and referring to ourselves is that is just saying we're weaker and need to be treated differently. Your either a gamer or something else that needs to be sheltered from the reality of the internet, casuals?

 

[psijac]

Hmmm looks like I've been hoodwinked! I didn't fact check this article because I didn't want to generate traffic revenue for someone with an inflammatory opinion. No sense in rewarding bad behavior. Of course that does not excuse my forming an opinion without all available information. My faux pas