EarthWyrm

Other things that might be worth reporting:

What AT character is being used? I got numbers close to standard when testing with my fire/psi dom, but numbers WAY below expected when using my SS/EA brute.

If you test on a single map, use /whereami to be able to provide the precise map name.

Have you adjusted any of the "new" settings in your control panel (e.g., how many levels will you allow the game to auto-adjust you?)?

I'll hop on in a bit to test the map-specific theory, but given that comparable (low) drop rates have no been observed in open-zone Cimerora testing, I kind of suspect I was following another red herring there as well.

Very curious about ATs, though. I suspect that at least one person who reported results from a Liberate TV map that were close to Live drop rates was using a dominator. It'd be weird if some ATs had normal drop rates and some were low, but given the complexity of the code base, I doubt it's impossible.

Synapse just posted to the CB forums (about 20 minutes ago) to say that there have been no adjustments to recipe or salvage drop rates. He also said he's going to run around on the test server and test them out in-play.

So while my data may be six-sigmas out, they're obviously not impossible.

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According to CoD's entry on the proc, it only works on other players.

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So it was the first PVP IO then?

Annoying

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Not always. I have that set in boxing on my /EA brute, set to auto-fire. I know it used to go off.

If it's not firing and is not a bug, I'll be dismayed and have to figure out how to get the other piece from the set I didn't use to replace it, next time I get a freespec.

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According to CoD's entry on the proc, it only works on other players.

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That absolutely sounds like a /bug candidate.

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Indeed. I know that it used to work, since I have it on a number of characters where their proc firing is visible to me. I'll have to log one of them and see if I can replicate.

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PMing Synapse with this info now...

EDIT: Synapse is having pohsyb look into it. He mentioned that he couldn't reproduce the behavior. There may be something more complex going on than just the team position - maybe the specifics of these particular characters matter somehow.

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I'm full of baseless speculation absent any knowledge of the code base. For instance, I've also considered the possibility that part of the seed value for the drop RNG is derived from the character's name, in addition to the position in the lineup. For this idea, I have ABSOLUTELY no data, anecdotal or otherwise. It's just one of those things that I've wondered about, given pseudo-random streakiness in observations since the drop system was implemented.

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As an update, I may have discovered something. The person in my 3-box trio who gets 3x trio has always been the second person in the team of 3, due to the order I always invite. By chance, that account client had a rare crash to desktop and when he rejoined, he was person #3 on the team. Now, the new second person on the team is getting the triple tickets. They have been getting triple since they have become #2 on the team, and the old #2 is at #3 now and to normal tickets. I've done 2 or 3 missions this way.

So it could be team position.

Lewis

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While I've never made an exhaustive study of it, I have noticed my drops change as my team position shifted, and suspected that team position was part of the RNG seed that determines who gets any given drop. I'd generally written it off as "random drops are random," but this does offer a bit more evidence that this might not be completely true.

I daresay this could have something to do with why folks reported their sidekicks getting disproportionate drops for a while - not because they were sidekicked, but because being sidekicked forced them into position 2 behind the main account.

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If Task Force storylines were more accessible to everyone, rather than solely to the team leader...

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It would be great if the whole team received a pop-up window with the text that the team leader sees, in which they can read it and click ok when done. This applies to MA stories also, the whole team rates an MA arc, when only the leader had a chance to actually read the story.

A team-wide text window is needed for both TFs and MA arcs.

~MM

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As it currently stands, the only text team members don't get access to (but leaders do) is the return-to-contact text. All mission briefings and send-off text boxes can be read by anyone if they click the red starburst up in the nav window once the mission is set. This is true for TF/MA/regular missions.

It's not widely known, but folks who want to follow what's going on can definitely do so.

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So what do you think prices will be at once we can set the missions for 8 people even solo? More people farming. I am thinking some might actually leave the AE to go back to regular critter farms.

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I'd love to think so, but my gut instinct tells me there will be some type of limit or throttling of drops implemented to go along with this.

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I'd been thinking the same. "It's a challenge setting, not a reward setting, so rewards are at [x]% of normal" was the first thing that came to mind.

Much as I'd like to be wrong, these settings seem to fall into the category of, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

I'm excited about I16, don't get me wrong. This just sounds a tich too good.

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What about consent from NCsoft? While I don't think there's anything in the EULA expressly forbidding the use of the game servers for research purposes, I would think that if you're using their service and publishing a paper after your findings that there's a reasonable expectation to inform the owners of the servers.

Admittedly, it's possible that he had gotten the go-ahead, since I haven't seen anything about it one way or the other.

Also, how does this paper relate to the member created content portion of the EULA?

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I'm not a legal scholar, so am not sure, but I would suspect that the reason no redname has had an opinion on this (other than Castle stating that Fansy > Twixt) is that their legal department has asked them to step back while legal investigates exactly the questions you raised.

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However, my example regarding the study in the library fits within the realm of TWIXTs study (regarding, specifically, the misinterpretation prior to the explanation/debriefing). There was no waiver prior to the administering of the experiment (which is why the one lady ran out of the library...she didn't know she was a part of a study and came to different, more frightening, conclusion). In this way the misrepresentation is the failure to mention that an experiment is taking place, most people assume they are not participating in experiments during everyday life.

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The other quote to which I was responding is germane here. If there was no reasonable expectation of harm (and harm gets defined VERY broadly by IRBs), then this would be approvable research. If there was predictable harm, it becomes more difficult to approve.

I think that what Myers proposed (and he had to propose something; even if he proposed it as exempt research, it had to go through a separate board who had to review it and make sure it qualified as exempt status, based on what's been posted to these forums) would have predictably led to a stress response on the part of those he targeted. I've been at other universities where studies evoking stress responses received heightened scrutiny (I saw one bounced because the person used 42-degree water instead of 45-degree water to create physiological stress...).

If, on the other hand, he never submitted any type of proposal to his IRB, then conducted his research while in their employment and allowed himself to be identified as a faculty member at Loyola while presenting research the university had never reviewed or sanctioned, that strikes me as a pretty big problem. I will act on the assumption that he did submit something, and go from there.

The reality, unfortunately, is that I don't know what Myers proposed/submitted.

With only what's been made public knowledge, I have the following opinions:

I think he made questionable decisions. I do not think the failure to obtain informed consent was one of them that will ultimately be actionable. Naturalistic observation/ethnographic research cannot be conducted if you ask the population, "Will you be in my study?"

It is unclear whether Myers ended his research when he received his "death threat", which should have been a clear indication that things had gone too far and that even if harm had not been anticipated, he was creating more stress and frustration than was healthy. If he stopped at that point, then I put him in the same general camp as Zimbardo, who pulled the plug on his Prison studies when it became clear the reactions were more than anticipated - harm should have been predicted, but at least was acted upon when it became impossible to ignore. It is worth noting that Zimbardo was "too close" to his research to recognize the harm it was causing himself, and had to have it pointed out to him by an assistant. This may be another parallel between Myers and Zimbardo - both may have been too close to their research to recognize the human harm that potentially went along with the situation they created, instead focusing on the study itself. It's possible for scientists to get tunnel vision, after all. Additionally, Zimbardo did at least have group discussions after he was done, to help participants deal with what they'd experienced. If Myers did not stop his research after it became clear that his methods could lead to death threats (and it doesn't sound like he did, since the threat came 2 years ago, and his "quit" blog was November of last year), I think that's a problem.

His descriptions of his/Twixt's activities do not make it sound like he remained objective as he engaged in his data collection. Narrative information from others suggest that he was far from it. I point to iltat's posts, and those of others, as references.

I believe that utilizing his manipulation with a population that would predictably include minors was very ill-advised.

I believe that inducing stress and making people angry when he has no way to know whether any of the individuals with whom he is interacting are naturally aggressive (I'm sure that's not true of anyone who PvPs in this or any other game, of course...) or have anger management issues would be a questionable decision.

I think that, despite what he seems to say (the academic in me keeps wanting to cite, but I'm too tired to go searching through all the websites I've read related to this topic in the past few days), systematic norm violation could predictably have led to frustration, anger, and stress responses, particularly in a population where aggression against other players is rewarded, all of which in the eyes of many IRBs constitute "harm" and which may have other unforeseeable side effects.

I think that an internal review at Loyola (which has been reported somewhere around here - was it in the Champion thread?) is the proper response, and trust that the individuals who have full information on precisely what he proposed, and Myers' public behavior since, will be able to reach a satisfactory judgment of his culpability, if there is any.

I think that if Myers submitted a proposal in which he did not specify that the population would include minors, that the population in PvP zones may be more aggressive/competitive than the population average, and otherwise did not adequately describe the group to be targeted with his manipulation, some of the blame must fall on the responsible reviewers for not requesting more detail. An IRB that approves research it does not understand cannot possibly be protecting the interests of participants. I'm not saying this is what happened; I'm just saying that Myers may not be the only one who needs to be held responsible.

If the study were proposed at "face value" - that is, if a professor submitted something that said he intended to repeatedly violate social norms in an online community in order to observe the results - I would like to think that I would not approve it on the grounds that it might result in psychological harm, however minor. Without knowing exactly what Myers proposed, though, it's hard for me to say.

I hope the concerns that I outlined above are sufficient to answer your question.


tl;dr version: Without knowing precisely what he proposed to do, I'm not sure of the ethics, but have an awful lot of opinions based on the partial information available to those of us outside the study.

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For the aggresion/testosterone one did you sign a new consent at the end? I would think that they would have to allow you to opt out once you knew the true nature of the study.


I understand the need for "blinding" but in your examples there was no harm or stress. IMO it isn't really like what Myers did at all, he purposly stressed these people.

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The other problem is that there can be no "misrepresentation" of the purpose of a study when there is no knowledge of being part of a study. So the entire parallel to the taste bud study fails to hold up.

Speaking purely as someone who teaches psychology in a university setting, and who has taught graduate research methods, and is awaiting an appointment to my university's institutional review board, of course.

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I DID bug it, and I DID post on the forums about it. I don't know what else was expected.

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And we're very appreciative that you took the time to do so. I don't want you guys to infer that bugging things in game is useless, just that it's only one avenue to bring things to our attention. We get bugs from many sources. Sometimes they come from QA, sometimes they're pulled from the forums, other times they come from PMs or even personal experiences.

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That's fair. I know that with really game-breaking stuff (the crash that happened every time you accessed the black market a couple of months back) it got fixed almost immediately after somebody sent Ghost Falcon a pm. I wouldn't bother with that route for anything else, since most of the time /bug is fine. It's just a matter of us prioritizing, too.

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So lemme see if I got this right...

OPTICAL_ILLUSION = Twixt?



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Nah. More likely one of his students.

"The accusation is interesting mainly because Myers's definition of griefing is interesting. Like most people, he agrees that the effect of griefing is to make its victims feel "stupid/clueless/lame/ineffectual," but for him the essence lies in the grief player's invention of new rules for himself -- a metagame that trumps the game the victims think they're playing and effectively rubs their noses in the message that "your rules are not as real/true/powerful as my rules." "

From link

I'm sure Twixt and O_I would claim that it's not "inventing new rules" to do things that are within the designed parameters of the game but that are frowned upon by the majority. That presupposes a primacy of what can be done above all else, and also argues based on consequence (i.e., "He was never banned, so he never did anything wrong"). Others would suggest that violating accepted norms in a zone is a form of inventing new rules for that zone. It devolves into semantics, which I'm not interested in arguing.

I'm curious how they would respond to the rest of the offered paragraph, though. Droning and fear/mob/fear/debt both seem to be designed to make other players feel "lame/ineffectual", and certainly the crowing about "never violated the EULA" and "played within the rules" speaks to a rubbing of the nose in the message that the socially consensual rules are not as real or powerful as those utilized by Twixt.

Seems rather like Myers' own definition makes him a griefer, despite what he and his acolyte would claim.