On pluking

(EDIT: After some discussion, it has become clear that a CoC change is not the best solution to this problem. Make sure to read the thread and my summary post before responding: http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/11324#114070 )

(Note: Some specific players are implicated in my complaint here. I think these are genuinely good people in real life who behave poorly under the guise of a pseudonym. I don't mean to attack anybody personally.)

Hi, I wanted to bring up the issue of "pluking". What I'm referring to is high-skill (or at least high-elo) players intentionally playing suboptimally to the thwart their own team. Common examples are rushing singu/nux, early striders, or knowingly suiciding large units.

From most players, these strategies would just be considered high-risk-high-reward ploys or rookie mistakes. However, I think it is different in character when done by a player who "pluks" i.e. who expresses deliberate intent to lower his own elo, troll, or grief his team. I know that this behavior generally abides by the "letter" of the CoC, given that they are not verbally abusive or TKing. But, I think it goes against the "spirit" of the CoC (cf. rule 0, "Don't make the game better off without your presence").

It's often pointed out that these players generally still have high elo, so their strategies must not be as bad as we think. My response is that there is a high reward component to these. Empirically, pluking tends to hit an equilibrium around 1800-1900 for a player who hits 2000+ when "actually trying". This is low enough to get balanced with a another skilled player who can sometimes cover for the early deficiency and carry through to the "reward" phase. I do not think this offsets the high risk of an 1800+ playing like a 1300 at large.

The main problem with this behavior is that it hurts new players the most. Obviously, they tend to be balanced with higher elo players. When a high elo player (sometimes the highest elo player) chooses not to pull his own weight and instead tries a hailmary gimmick, an unfair amount of the burden is placed on less skilled players.

In specific cases, it's worse than insta-resigning. For instance, rushing a nux drains a whole player's share of income, ties up the commander, leaves the fac idle (or reclaimed), and won't have any effect until maybe 15 minutes into the game. And that's assuming it isn't scouted or destroyed, and that the team hasn't already lost at that point.

Specific cases aside, I think we should generally discuss the issue of skilled players intentionally playing poor strategies that diminish the fun and chance for victory of their teammates. I know this has been discussed often as a sub-topic, but I'd like to see once and for all: do we as a community believe we are better off with this behavior than without it?

answer is simple in my eyes and it was implented some months (years) ago.
seperate them to troll host. There they can do anything they want. :-)
And all will see... a lot of players will join troll host, because they like to get trolled.

play 1v1 or small teams, face worthy opponents, dont drown in others errors but in your own. show some dignity.

Issue is large games, allow these players the safety to do these kind of rushes. The only real counter is to increase the risk.

quote: Do we as a community believe we are better off with this behavior than without it?

I do not believe that this particular problem can be solved from an administrative standpoint. We cannot force a player to play optimally, as a community we shouldn't ask for someone to always play optimally. Dictating how someone should play, regardless of skill, leads into bad things.

We cannot discourage this "pluking" through administrative means because there is a large grey area that we cannot overcome. Active attempts to teamkill a person are easy to spot and prove intent, however, what about building a singu in an allied base? Arguably the singu can do much more damage than skuttling a friendly commander, but we cannot prove that the strategy was an active attempt to teamkill. Do you really want to start dictating how someone has to play or what a punishable offense is by elo? In that case aren't we just encouraging people to play terribly so they aren't forced to play a specific way?

I understand that this behavior can be frustrating, however, it must be solved in the battle room within a team. One teammate can ask another to do something specific or to play a certain way, but we cannot make an enforced "optimal" way that players of a certain skill have to play. I believe that a good portion of the issue currently is that we already have a sort of "social" enforcement of how a high-skilled player needs to act which causes significant amounts of stress for a given player.

Long story short, regardless of how the community feels about the issue, it really can only be solved by genuine communication between teammates. If such communication occurs, not only will you be able to possibly solve or account for "pluking," but you can appropriately coordinate with your team which often results in victory.

Some people are just assholes. The best way to deal with assholes is to not give them an opportunity for gratification.

@Shamanpluk: Suck it up, princess. "Woe is me, I have high ELO"? That argument is and has always been rubbish. Do you see Klon trolling games because he has 2300 elo?

We ban players for deliberately dicking around, building Terra towers, using Newtons to launch battleships onto the front line, as fun as that actually is to do. There is a clause in the CoC about communicating with your team and their desires.

We can't ban players for building nukes or singus, partly because it works. We cant ban people for experimenting or playing a favourite sub optimal strat, because that would mean banning more newbies than plukers.

What we need is not punitive policing of play style, but the proper incentive structure to encourage people to play well, gain elo, and have confidence in the skill level of their allies.

What we need is more, smaller games where as you gain elo, you get higher skill allies, not lower skill allies.

If you play in big 10v10 games... just expect it to be a clusterfuck of newbie first timers, raging vets shouting at their team trying to coordinate them all, frustrated people saying "just play your game ill play mine" because they take criticism and advice as a personal affront, and people who have just given up and are playing some fun kooky strategy that will frustrate their teammates.

And support our numerous efforts to encourage smaller games.

Pretty much team games in general. The issue behind communication is that typing something out is not optimal and not everyone has mic. The steam implementation we have at the moment should be expanded upon, automatically joining other teammates into a room or something. Let 'em sort them out. VOIP is a necessity in communication. It would human-ify other people and let them see that oh gods there's people behind that monitor. The day I see a whole team communicating I'll start playing seriously for a change.

quote: people who have just given up and are playing some fun kooky strategy that will frustrate their teammates.

Yay where's my fellow kooky strategy-ers?

"Pluking" or as it is called in every other game "trolling". Its misguiding though as trolling might refer to griefing wich is purposly spoiling somebody's gameplay.
For the sake of this post and not to confuse you too much i will use "pluking" as a reference to playing in unusuall and weird way while not explicityl and straightforwardly spoiling a game for other players.
So basically: Trolling = Pluking + Griefing

Let's analyse the situation:

First we need to find the source of so called trolling in online games.
Of course the closest that come to mind is general assholery, quarells with some certain players and just to spoil somebody else's day but these are not reformable so they are not that important to this discussion as they are not avoidable in any way (at least not game design wise). These people grief and they will continue to do so.
However the source of what I call "pluking" is a whole another story.
When a player first discovers a game he has a lot of areas to explore within the game. I remember my first experience with ZK and I was just overthrown by the number of units, their utilities and diffrent strategies. Some of the players leave here because they dont like the game/athmosphere/engine/GUI/support or whatever.
Then player slowly accomodates and learns how the game works. Most of these players learn basics and some strategies and don't improve much later on or they do it slowly. They are still decent players though (1500-1650 elo) and they still enjoy the game itself as it still pose a challenge wich makes the game engaging and fun for them. They are the majority of actual ZK playerbase and they often look after better players and bait the meta (more on that later).

Next some players enter a veteran phase. These players know the game well and their elo usually ranges from 1650-1850 but that doesnt apply sometimes as veteran players can have lower elo and know many strategies and tricks while not having enough apm or ecoing skill (like @[ffc]killer). They might develop meta strategies and tactics for the game. Trollcoms are good example of this as a weaker player sees it is masterly used by @Xieviender they will also follow that strategy trying to recreate it. But these people are also slowly reaching the equibrium of gameplay. As they know the game very well and more and slightly less obvious tricks are known alaredy they feel like there is not much left to learn. But they still are not quite at the tipping point yet. They still take fun from playing the hard way and improving but less so and most don't try too much anymore.

Then come a phase I would describe as "old veteran". These are basically your veteran players but with one distinction they - they are also the most attached group to the game having spent lots on hours into it. They have played so much of the game that they think they know all ins and outs of the game. This also means that there is veeeeery little room to improve without taking apm to account and some players just don't want to do so because they don't feel like playing hard (look at @ShamanPluk). This aging process is the key to pluking. The old veterans will start to do odd/risky/weird/silly things just to break the boring usuall playstyle in favour of one diffrent but still in frames of their beloved game. This happens or will happen to all of us at some point propably, for some people sooner for some later.

I should also mention, that the process is reversable but not quite: look at Sfireman and imagine that he will just start playing normally all the time again. It can be prevented or slowed down at least. So here are the methods i could have thought of:

1. In theory this can be entirely avoided by making just enough (or faster) content at the rate that players are learning the game. In practice it is impossible to make because even with enormous amount of work to do in short period of time it would be hard to keep everything in one peace so it would create good experience.
However delivering new content overtime is overall a good idea. It brings new interaction between other gameplay elements and this effect stacks with itself when there is more content (because of more combination possibilities). Also changing units from each other brings up a new interactions and force players to rethink their way of playing (like Wolverine meta lately made a lot of players use Firewalker a lot more recently).

2. Forbiding pluking by CoC. This is the worst solution of all. The game would lose not only most dedicated players but it would also create a deadly spiral of game community: noob -> decent -> good -> troll -> ban -> troll -> ban and so on and so on. This would be basically saying that you cant have fun the way that person wants to have fun.

3. Reducing game size. Honestly I don't think its the best idea ever as you don't avoid the problem you just scale it down. If clusterfuck 10v10s would get reduced to merely 6v6 at max there would be 1 pluk annoying 5 more players instead of 9. Its not of much help tbh.

4. One way is to social engineer the ZK community to totally condemn this kind of behaviour as bad for fun. as what ArchShaman refers to as "tryharding". Because it IS the only way to play ZK properly, wich also kind of dimishes the casual side of ZK and all of the changes that make ZK more accessable to slightly more casual players (automation, formations, fight command and stuff alike). This would make the game more hardcore and serious (like higher level LoL). This solution has too many problems and it would require too much effort to accomplish with possible little effect (as it is not easy to play with other people's minds :P).

5. The easiest solution to all of this is... just to play less ZK games. This might seem trivial but playing less games you slow down the "eldering" process as you don't get used to the game as fast (because you play less) and thus game wont get boring as much for you. You might even forget some of the stuff while taking a slightly longer break or mayby some things would be added or changed or perhaps meta would shift.
The problem is that this cannot be controlled from administrative point of view. The player decides when s/he wants to play the game or how much they want to do it. However this kind of splitting can also be encouraged in online gaming in a shape of boosts or some sort of logging lottery. In many F2P games there are experience boost for first match or item lottery or some sort of daily challenge wich yields rewards. All of these not only encourage frequent logging in but also encourage splitting playtime into couple smaller sessions. Because lets face it. The facts are that people that play the most Firepluk Svatopluk @Shamanpluk (@Failer but not recently) "pluk" the most!

The bottom point is: pluking is normal thing. People will do odd things whether you want it or not. If you don' want ANY pluking play only with organised teams or 1v1s. That is the only real solution.