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This time the topic isn't about developers and broken design, but players inventing they own rules and progressively wrecking the community. In the last day I had to go through a personal crusade about the organization of the guilds at the endgame of World of Warcraft, in particular about the system used by the "leet" guilds known as "Dragon Kill Points" (DKP).

Basically this system is a way to "bend" the standard loot rules in the game in order to favor a selected group. This is what happens objectively, it's not an opinion and cannot be discussed. It's not a case that it has been adopted by the more catass guilds because, at its roots, the system is meant to favor that group of peoples. It was built by them to favor themselves. If we translate this to other forms of government and politics (because guilds are a form of government and not much else at this same level) it can be quite obvious how this pattern can be identified as a "conflict of interests". The peoples at the top make rules that favor themselves while discriminating everyone else.

What bothers me and that started an heated debate is that the peoples defending the DKP system justify it as "fair". While the common loot rules the game already has, aren't. Concretely the system allows each member of a guild to gain points by participating to guild events such as raids. These points can then be used to get the dropped loot, replacing the random rolls that are built in the game. Instead of rolling a dice on a item you need and comparing the result with the rolls of the other players, in the DKP system you bet some of the points you have achieved and, in the case your bid is the highest, you win the item. This to offer a direct advantage to the peoples that can be present to many raids and leaving out all those players that cannot afford to compete with the highest bids of the catasses. Who has "more" has the precendence on who has "less" (or nothing) to get even more. Who has nothing will keep having nothing if not the sporadic crumbs despised by those with the privileges.

Now every guild is free to build its organization. It's true that this is just a game and there are no responsibilities to face, so all the possible choices are legitimate. But don't fucking come tell me that this system is "fair". Because this is bullshit. If you make a choice you must have the courage to stand by it and recognize its nature. You cannot go on and justify it telling me it's fair when it's obvious how it's not. At least if "fair" hasn't changed its meaning. In my language fair means also "equality", or even "honesty". If you built rules to advantage yourself over others what you do is NEVER fair, because it's the exact opposite of the concept of equality. It's a discrimination, it's a way to bend the rules to your advantage and to your conditions.

The loot rules built in the system cannot be more "fair" than how they are. If you go in a raid, you can roll for an item. Everyone has equal possibilities to roll and get his chance to win. No system can be more fair than this. It's impossible. If you then change this rule to bend it to your advantage the system is NOT fair. It can be a legitimate choice but you cannot pretend it's fair. It's fair FOR YOU. But way different from the meaning of the word. Even in the real life there is this constant shift in the meaning of the words in order to excuse and justify an egoistic and egocentric behaviour. Rich people thinks they deserved what they "earned". They worked hard and the system will be always fair, for them. And they think (even if they do not explicitly admit) that the people starving next to them deserve that condition. This is the paradox of this world and it comes from excuses and pretensions of our culture. We hide our doubts behind the shield of false principles. Who accumulates deserves to accumulate more, who starves deserve to starve even more.

As I said this is a game and fortunately there are no responsibilities as in the real world, so everyone can choose how to behave. The point is just about being honest and admit that some rules are there because their aim is to give you an advantage over others. Building and maintaining a guild is never easy, in particular it requires a lot of time. While you can manage to play a game casually you surely cannot manage to run a guild casually. The "conflict of interest" comes from that. Only the catasses run the most successful guilds and it'a not odd to see that those who decide the rules are going to make rules favoring themselves. It's typical, come on. I just want that they ADMIT this and do not come telling me that the system is built to be fair, because this stance is inadmissible. It's blatantly false and pretentious.

This isn't an isolated case, on my server I see a repeating pattern of guilds crumbling because all the players progressively leave to fatten the ranks of the bigger catass guilds. Smaller guilds just have no possibilities to survive and they move toward an unavoidable extinction. As you ding 60 you crash against a wall, you cannot progress anymore as before and joining bigger raids is the only possibility. All the accessibility (and the "accessibility" is the key) that characterized the game till level 60 simply vanishes to be replaced by the most painful grind ever. All the good premises of the game crumble like that to reveal what was known as broken in this genre and that the game was able to hide till that point. Catass for the win. The only gameplay that there is available is to catass and catass more. The accessibility of this treadmill is a progressive process of discrimination between those who can afford to go on and those who are left out.

This is the process that triggers the egoistical greed of the players. The whole purpose is to get shoulder penises and make your character stronger and stronger by competing with your friends over that loot. What follows is a comprehensible attitude if the game itself is strongly focused to promote this egocentric behaviour. Both the structure of the gameplay at the endgame and the consequent dynamics in the guilds are shattering directly the community into tight groups of elitists bending the rules for their advantage and discriminating even more the new or casual players. The catasses have more and will have more, while the casual players are progressively excluded, creating an increasing gap that will ultimately be the cause of a slow and painful decline of the whole game.

If the true purpose of a game is about learning, as Raph is trying to convince us, I really wonder what the hell we are teaching.