Are there ethics in Wow Bgs?

maraki

Member
This is a twink question, to be clear. Are there ethics to be followed when playing wow, specifically in bgs?

With the new imbalances in the 60 twink bracket and with exploit v. regular content gear, the question has really arisen whether there is a right or wrong way to play. I assume, the consequences for doing it wrong are somewhat academic. Nonetheless, let's look at it.

Is it fair for levelers to get one-shot and be ineffective in a one level (60) bg? This one seems easy. At 50s it was super clear, they needed to buy or work a little at getting gear. At 60s, it's not as easy. Nonetheless, buy 226 gear and at least learn your class before coming in a pvp battle. So, no, don't feel bad as a twink one-shotting levelers.

Should an exploit player see it as fair to one-shot a normal twink? Only in DF is this a question. The divide between exploiters (xfer characters that have pilfered DF gear and transfered their toon back to a previous xpac) and regular twinks ( i think we can just call them twinks: players that use current content to the best of their ability) have brought this question to the front of the debate. Well, and here is the argument, can you blame a player for finding the best possible way to win, even if its clearly exploiting? The answer is no. If given the opportunity, anyone would take it. Does that mean its ethical sound? Well... probably. And I say this from the bottom of my heart. If Blizz leaves the hole open and some clever exploiter jumps through, then it becomes part of the game.

What if the exploiters are grandfathered, like they are, and nobody else can do it? Now it's getting a little gray. The problem here is that you cant ask a 335 ilvl 60 to take off his gear - even though this seems to be what some of them are now doing.

So what is the ethical question? If you want good games, should you try to level the playing field given that Blizz leaves holes open (and then closing them)? I think you should, but giving up gear seems a little ... twink prohibitive.

Let me set something out there that maybe clarifies what position I have. I see a marked difference between agility players and automated players. The first is a player that clicks on the screen to make things happen. They are roughly called clickers. I am one of them. I know it is about my hand/eye coordination because when I die it is because I wan't fast enough. The latter, the automators, for a lack of better words, rely on the computer and their skill of programming, etc, to win. They click very little. The spells are bundled together in macros and the need for clicking is mitigated by faster keyboards (and key binds) and clever ways to set up automatic responses in such a way that the opponent becomes more lifeless than the automator. There is a huge difference here. In the first case, the player is doing the killing. In the second case, the player has enabled the computer to do the work for him. What does this mean? It means, herein, that another scenario, automation, becomes something we can call exploiting. Not that I would ever suggest that.

In the next post I will cover real ethical questions. How important is it to hate the other faction? And what will mixed faction bgs mean for this kind of tribalism. Also, and more importantly, what does it say about a twink that does these things: emotes, teabags, targets repeatedly, farms the gy, and, generally, talks a bunch of nonsense in the spirit of celebrating winning. And I will suggest that these things appear very different from clickers and regular twinks (which is to say are tolerable) than they appear from exploiters and automators (much less tolerable).
 
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Short answer: There are no ethics in PvP get recked or reck.
Long answer: most broken stuff and exploits are called that for basically breaking a mirrored and balanced match between two opponents that should only be tilted via skill, but everybody wants to feel special so they will always abuse at every opportunity (also at some point you are kinda forced into doing the same, if possible: if you dont want to be obliterated, that is) The main motto is exploit early and often. And one more thing: Twinks have been exploiting the system since the beginning of twinking, like c'mon dude, main reason we exist is to abuse the mechanics of the game.
 
Im not familiar enough to speak to any exploits but this sounds exactly how previous expansion capped twinking is done

Bluntly, I’m failing to see the issue here. Without knowing more I can only offer this:

We twink to have the strongest possible gear on a toon of a certain, non endgame level

There’s usually a few camps of people within this general range.
- Casual twinks who just want to get in and play and own the unsuspecting population,

- Hardcore twinks who painstakingly hone their toon and craft

Typically the ones who put in the effort are gonna get the results, and they usually travel in packs.
 
There are no ethics in BGs, its an arms race and the people with the biggest arms win. If things are too unbalanced, too many things are GFed, or if there are too many exploiters, just don't play BGs, and the bracket dies off (e.g. 20s bracket). Twinks don't even have ethics, they overgear lower level toons to destroy levelers and new players
 
TLDR, am I correct summing up that your butthurt you missed the DF exploits and you cant steamroll like you did in BFA? That's what I got from your 3 v similar threads.
 
seriously doubt playing expac capped you will get ethics. like being SL capped but are too late in having never obtained fated mythic raid gear or full end game PVP gear, is it unfairness or ethic issues...perhaps jealousy? imo blizzard made sure of that by removing fated gear upgrades and PVP gear. it takes them 2+ expacs to figure things out and nerf/remove on the third or fourth

ethics or self imposed rules by twinks has happened in various times to preserve or res brackets.
- limited or no GY farming
- limit certain specs
- vote kick players off their own team
- have players sit aside until other team has equal numbers

it's one the reasons 70 bracket lasted into WOD and 19s into Legion despite the bracket and scaling/stat disco blizzard did from patch to patch
 
This is a twink question, to be clear. Are there ethics to be followed when playing wow, specifically in bgs?

A little over a year ago I unsubscribed to WoW and decided to explore the game from the perspective of a trial-toon on a role play server. I've been playing WoW since 2006 just before the TBC expansion so I got to experience vanilla wow and ever expansion since but I had only ever played PvE. My education is in anthropology so when I began my F2P exploration of the RP server Moon Guard I was amazed at how different the server culture was and I began to study and document those differences. I was immediately struck by how many misconceptions PvE players have about RP players, misconceptions I myself had laboured under for the many years I'd been playing the game. It was and continues to be a fascinating subject to study.

Then during a lull I decided to see what PvP random BGs were like from the perspective of a trial toon. This brought me into contact with Twinks. Before that PvP was something I'd do rarely and always in End Game. I remembered Twinks from when I was leveling up my main back in Vanilla and the common misconception most levelers have about Twinks is "Twinks are losers who can't cut it in end game so they pick on low level noobs in the lower brackets". Again I was amazed to find that misconception challenged and discovered there are pretty much as many reasons for twinking as there are twinks.

You have some twinks which I call the Krombopulous Michaels who are indeed only there to stomp anyone and anything in their paths but I was also amazed to discover that there were also twinks with more honourable goals. When I started studying this bracket it was at a time when trial-account toons and levellers were put into the same queues and XP Off twinks had their own queues. An XP Off 29 could get into a queue with the F2Ps and Levellers simply by grouping with one but they weren't all that common and depending on the twinks there were informal rules. Levelers tended to use the word Twink just to refer to anyone who out-geared them but there were really two varieties of Twinks. There were the level 20 F2P Twinks which I call "Baby Twinks" and then the level 29 XP Off Twinks which I call "Daddy Twinks". Many of the Twinks I spoke with would only play their Baby Twink toons but would go to their Daddy Twink toon if they encountered another Daddy Twink in the queues and they would keep that Daddy Twink in check if they felt that Daddy Twink was not following these informal rules of honour.

For example, if a Baby Twink was playing their Horde toon and a Horde Daddy Twink was in the BG acting in a manner they felt was dishonourable they would log onto their Alliance Daddy Twink to hunt the offending Horde Daddy Twink down even though they were previously both playing the same faction. There were a number of times I'd been contacted by Twinks asking me if a specific Daddy Twink had been seen in the BGs. These informal rules of honour were things like as a Daddy Twink you should only fight other Daddy Twinks and only attack a Baby Twink to prevent them from scoring an objective. There was even one Twink who told me he was in a guild that was basically made up of Twink Cops who would jump on their 29s and party with a Baby Twink to hunt down offending Daddy Twinks in the BGs.

Then a few months before Dragon Flight the Blizzard Wizard segregated the queues by moving the Levellers to their own queue and the Daddy Twinks with Baby Twinks into their own queues because Levelers complained that Baby Twinks and Daddy Twinks both were ruining a casual leveling experience. Mind you there's nothing stopping a Leveler from gearing up and curb stomping a Baby Twink but there's no incentive to do so if your goal is End Game. It was not uncommon at all for Levelers to be in 20s BGs with empty gear slots because why would you want to waste a lot of time gearing up your toon when you'll be in End Game in a few days of casual play and all that gear would be useless anyways. The way Blizzard wants the game to be played means everything that isn't End Game is meaningless. Stomping Baby Twinks wasn't something that was important to Levelers they just wanted to play BGs with other semi-geared players on their way to End Game.

This change in the way 20s BG queues are handled completely changed everything. Once Daddy Twinks were seen as guests in the Baby Twink's BGs and there were informal expectations on their behaviour but that's all gone now. The reality is Daddy Twinks and Baby Twinks live in the same bracket now and as a result the 20s bracket has almost completely died in retail WoW. Most of the Baby Twinks quit because they were simply out classed and obsolete and there just aren't enough Daddy Twinks to carry the bracket. It is very rare to get a queue to pop now in this bracket where both sides have full rosters. Usually you get something like 8 or 9 Horde against 6 or 7 Alliance.

Now if Blizzard wanted to they could save this bracket but Blizzard doesn't want Twinks in the game, period. They could make the Trial-Account stop leveling at 29 so there are no more Baby Twinks and everyone is a Daddy Twink, or they could make Veteran Accounts F2P up to level 29 to encourage more Veterans to make Twinks and maybe make Trial-Accounts stop leveling at 25 so they won't be so heavily outclassed by the Daddy Twinks. But as I said, Blizzard has their own idea of how the game should be played and they're actively hostile to the Twinking community.

The one thing that might actually save the 20s bracket is the Twinking community itself. If the community was able to codify the informal rules of honour that some Twinks played by in the pre-segregation days then you could have a situation where 20s Twinks all agree to only play their 20s and only play their 29s to punish a player who is abusing the BGs on a Daddy Twink. I doubt very much that'll happen as it would be very difficult to police and it would be difficult to get the Krombopulous Michaels of the Twinking world to go along with this.

The one thing that the segregation of the queues has shown is as a game World of Warcraft is not attracting new players. While there are still some Baby Twinks doing their best in the BGs not many of the 20s I see in BGs are new players using the Trial Account for its intended purpose, trying before buying. There are not that many noobs in the post-segregation BGs. Before the segregation it was pretty difficult to determine how many 20s were noobs wanting to kick the tires and how many were just ungeared Levelers. It is now very easy to tell who the noobs are and there aren't many. WoW is definitely an MMO in decline.
 

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