TDH Part 4: The Appearance of Impropriety

As I mentioned previously, I had been building up a bit of a PvP reputation on Malygos. One of the PvP events that was popular at the time was Capture the Flag. After good games, I would log onto an Alliance character that I had created for the purpose, and congratulate the Alliance opponents on a job well done. I chatted with many of the players, and when one of the best Alliance PvP players, “Lifeguard”, created a Horde character, I invited him into the guild. This was a disastrous decision for reasons I would soon discover.

Strangely, the disaster had nothing to do with Lifeguard as a personality. He was a really nice guy. The disaster, was that some of the hard core players in my guild seriously objected to the idea of having an “alliance” player in Two Dollar Horde. Specifically, the Everquest crowd of friends took issue with it. They internalized the game-design feature of Horde vs. Alliance and felt that it was unethical to chat with the other side. The game itself does not allow players to communicate with the other faction directly. As far as I was concerned, this division was silly. I enjoyed talking trash with the opposition some times. I also enjoyed growing my social network in the game.

At this point I need to touch briefly on some events that were taking place on Malygos server at the time. Capture the flag in Warcraft has some serious design flaws. These flaws involved ways to make games between two good teams drag out indefinitely. Since the game rewards number of games played, this causes a direct conflict of interest. Further, since players are rewarded on a relative scale versus other players on their same faction (Horde or Alliance) there was an added incentive to collude with the Alliance. In practice, PvP teams would occasionally “trade” the first two flags in a capture the flag game and then fight for the third. Rumors circulated that the top guilds even colluded to trade wins. Since losing is not punished, I have no doubt that some teams did trade wins to pad their scores.

As far as the ethics of all of this are concerned, I did have a problem with outright win trading to gain unjust rewards. I didn’t see the problem however with trading the first two flags in a game to speed things along. You see, a typical game of capture the flag should take less than 20 minutes tops. Games occasionally dragged on for three hours. I drew an ethical distinction between directly cheating other players (win trading) and agreeing to honorable rules of engagement with the opponent. I can see easily that this is a slippery slope. Honestly, I regarded this as a game and hadn’t given too much thought to the idea of ethics being a component.

Shortly after I invited Lifeguard to the guild, I was playing Capture the Flag at 2am. There were only three other Horde players online at the time, so we were playing outnumbered 10 to 4. Lifeguard, who was on the other team, tried to arrange for us to get 1 flag so at the very least we would get some reward out of what was essentially a no-win situation. I agreed to this plan with the proviso that the alliance players would duel in relatively equal numbers midfield instead of just steamrolling us.

The Everquest crowd was furious beyond anything that I could have imagined. Far from a large grey area, they perceived that I had made an ethical violation of principle equivalent to directly cheating or hacking the game. I was very surprised. They also pointed out that as the leader of the guild, my behavior is amplified in significance. This was a good point that I hadn’t really considered until then. I wouldn’t want to play with a cheater any more than I would want to be one. Regardless of whether I thought I had been cheating or not (I really didn’t think so). My guildies *did* think so, and that impression taught me a valuable lesson: namely that the appearance of impropriety is just as damaging as the real thing. I told everyone that I honestly didn’t realize that they would object to what I had done, but as their leader I would never do it again. They accepted this at face value and agreed to stay on. I made Lifeguard aware that the trade the night before (which incidentally hadn’t even worked) had been a one time lapse of judgment on my part and that this would never happen again

The next day, Lifeguard logged on while I wasn’t around and asked in guild chat if anyone wanted to trade flags. 4 of my best guild members quit on the spot. When I logged on later and found them gone, I pieced together what had happened from some others in the guild. I booted Lifeguard’s character from the guild. This made no impact on the recently departed guild members. The damage had been done. This was another huge lesson: you don’t always get second chances. Further, in an online world with no real attachments people will leave at the drop of a hat.

The next brush with guild drama would come as a result of our open recruiting policy. Just because someone is friendly doesn’t mean they are a “good fit”…

(stay tuned for more)