Loyola Professor and CoHFollow

Insight from someone who studies nerd culture and online sociology, Dr. Allison: "How the heck did this guy get his study past the IRB??? And basically, he was an utter ******* to people online, and he's surprised that other people got annoyed?"

I really just wanna say thanks much for both replies.

I'm really just tryin' to figure out, well, to be blunt, how the hell he managed to survive zergs--that's not looking for fault, I'm just really amazed a single toon could survive, what I'm sure were a fair number of players rallying together with really irate attitudes bent on his destruction. I can't name a single class in EQ1 that could pull that off. I played WoW for a bit, no expert, but there's no class I can think of there. Played LotRo for quite a while, not a single class there I can think of, that solo, could survive an entire group beating on it without help from comrades.

Part of my head wrapping about this is not completely understanding how porting works in CoH, but I'm also amazed someone couldn't get a drop on him with a stun lock or a mezz or a daze or interrupt or some such to get in a decent hit or five. And, if they could, what kind HP would it take to survive long enough to get the ability to recast?

I'm just perplexed such a class could pull it off without say, other folks mimicing it--at that point, why aren't there tonnes of porters running about?

If it's anything like Ragnarok Online the player only has to go to an area and "memorize" the spot they are standing in to be able to teleport back to that location. He probably picked a spot in front of a static location of enemy npcs and saved it as the teleport location.

CoH has "drones" -- purple-con police robot-thingies which auto-kill enemies. As in *zap!* you're dead. They look like policecar lights on a couple headlights with a laser. And they float. They appear in the game guarding "safe spots" such as hospitals, trainers, zone tunnels, etc where players become unaware because they're zoning, in a power selection screen, etc. You'd think a city that can afford flying death-bots and giant laser-walls would have had its petty gang crime problems taken care of but anyway.

So this guy (from what I've read) would use a power called "Teleport Foe" (usually used to TP mobs) to pull Villian characters to him within range of the drones. I assume this guy had his TP Foe power enhanced as much as possible with "To Hit" and "Range" enhancements to maximize his ability to pull people to the drones.

A couple thoughts:
- From what I understand, this guy did die. A lot. But deaths in CoX are pretty meaningless especially if you just want to grief people and don't care how often you die doing it. When you die, you respawn in a hospital area with some xp debt. If you don't care about leveling, why care about debt? But he was no indestructible machine.

- Droning people is a cheap move with no risk on your part. All you need is a successful "hit" and they're dead. It's a griefer move where the player gets no experience or rewards for causing the death and the other guy gets debt. By the way, "legitimate" deaths in PvP contests don't cause debt. So if the guy was actually interested in PvPing in the zone, his opponents wouldn't really suffer for it even if they did just want to chat. It was his abuse of the game mechanics which made this a problem.

- Player convention in this zone was to not drone-kill people. While there's an argument to be made for the whole "It's a PvP zone, suck it up!" bit, players made social rules not to do this because drone-killing is griefing and griefing leads to player complaints and player complaints lead to power nerfs. How much nicer if people can just act like civil folk and not have to rely on the heavy hammer of dev nerfs.

- Twixt's notoriety is a bit inflated in the article. I doubt most people had heard of him before that article came out. I suppose "Professor acting like a **** causes minor stir in video game" isn't much of an article.

- The updates in Issue 13 (major developments/patches in the game are "Issues" like comic books.. get it?) "rebalanced" PvP powers, including teleportation, and made Twixt's preferred method of killing people unworkable. He coincidentally dropped out of the game once he couldn't easily drone people to death any more.

Edited, Jul 9th 2009 12:03pm by Jophiel

I'm glad at least someone played city of heroes so that he could clarify the exact means by which Professor MPK was a douchebag.