The Corsair Demographic, Part 5: With Ruthless but with Open Hand

"Seyd is mine enemy: had swept my band
From earth with ruthless but with open hand,
And therefore came I, in my bark of war,
To smite the smiter with the scimitar;
Such is my weapon—not the secret knife"

Lord Byron - The Corsair

 

 

The second and insurmountable impediment to the establishment of a persistent virtual world game is fairness. One might easily find escapists enthusiastic about homesteading, production and all the interstices of a fully functional constructed landscape, provided one markets MMOs not only to FPS gamers but to fans of managerial, survival or simulation genres. Implementing the interface tools for practical leadership is largely a matter of development time investment. It would be a lot harder, though not unthinkable, to assemble enough daring pirates capable of laying down life and several sets of limbs for their vessels instead of merely "farming" for self-aggrandizement. Finally, though it seems highly improbable, it would not be out of the question to cater to both the wider mass of social gamers and the more dedicated core of antiheroic corsairs.

But, from every quality or lack thereof observable in the naked ape, you simply will not be able to sell fair play. Game companies discovered decades ago that selling games rakes in nowhere near as much profit as selling cheats. MMOs were from the start plagued by gold farmers, a practice long subsumed into companies' own marketing practices. Even companies which shunned the microtransaction trend found other ways to capitalize on human dishonesty, like selling multiple accounts. For the past generation of online gamers, cheating has always been an unquestioned core feature. Outside electronic games, real world sports are so rife with steroid abuse and bought referees than only the dumbest (a.k.a. the majority) could imagine any contest to have been carried out fairly. It becomes obvious at a glance that while justice may be a fundamental, universal ethical principle, so's cheatin'.

The magnitude of the problem scales with risk and investment. In single-player games, most of us can tolerate blatant imbalance so long as it's not forced upon us. Just don't use it. Half-hour multiplayer matches can still be mitigated by the prospect of moving on to another, hopefully more balanced encounter. But what's the point of devoting a thousand hours of character advancement in a persistent world only to lose all your effort or even just be out-shone by some dipshit who simply bribed the developers? Is it any wonder that only the lowest human detritus bother buying into MMOs anymore?

I suppose there is simply no way around it: MMOs require a hefty critical mass of participants to remain functional, and the vast majority of humans will eschew any activity in which they're judged by the quality of their thought. They demand cheats, and more than any other genre, a persistent world is invalidated by unfairness with every passing virtual day.

For all we fantasize about imaginary lives as Romantic Age corsairs, Byron knew well enough that Conrad's chivalry would stand out in a crowd.