Psychology of Zero-K

Please note: Feel free to correct anything here.

WARNING: EXTREME TL;DR AHEAD. Read at your own risk! However, it may improve your understanding of human social learning!

Currently a faction of players here present a valid concern over the current gameplay of zero-k's big team game. Their concerns are about a behavior that has been acquired through observational learning and operant conditioning. The 'trolling' as seen by this faction can be explained through psychology. Is it wrong or bad? You must decide.

First off let's identify some behaviors in the game.

Failing - when a plan is countered horribly so. Example: Losing 30 balled up swifts to a leveler.
Trolling - This one is very hard to define because there's no general consensus. It's any not-normal behavior from what I can gather. EG: Playing outside the meta. 'unproven' behavior.
Normal behavior - Anything currently in the meta. 'useful' behavior.

Currently normal behavior only has a single reinforcement: 'winning' which is a variable pay off. In 1v1, this is based on your skill and decisions alone. This leads to high personal responsibility, high risk, high reward. Players play by the meta to reduce the risk of losing (active avoidance). They're not comfortable with losing because it is punished by mocking and other noxious behavior. Guess what? This noxious behavior (EG: By old Firepluk) sets up a role model for the unlearned newbie that this behavior is acceptable. So this behavior is acquired by something called observational learning. You see it happen, you repeat it. There's no punishment (except in extreme cases) for this behavior and others join in on it, leading to a sense of approval/belonging (reinforcement). In short: You bag on people and gang up on them because it is positively reinforced through peer approval. Nobody speaks out against it and those who do (EG: Chesti ) do not change their punishing behavior when the behavior is corrected or attempt to correct all the behavior.

For negative reinforcement (EG: Punishment through application) to be effective, punishment must be:
- Consistent (EG: Don't bag on a particular player only for being negative just because you dislike them)
- Not extreme (This will lead to an avoidance of the punisher / game in general, as seen by many newbies leaving due to veterans being harsh on them)

You can use the negative reinforcement (Through peer pressure) to eliminate certain unwanted behaviors (such as raking people over the coals for not playing to the optimal level). To reinforce the positive behavior (playing with the team) you should reward it consistently or at least more frequently than the negative version of the behavior is rewarded. Let's look at the current situation to get an example.

I don't play with the team every game, often doing my own thing and have more fun (which outweighs the punishment of peer disapproval) so the behavior stays. Even when I do subtly support the team, the behavior goes unrewarded, which doesn't help reinforce the positive behavior. In fact, often times the behavior is punished (through the raking over the coals because it wasn't totally optimal or by the books). You could say 'but the behavior IS rewarded through winning' and be partially correct. But the negative behavior is also rewarded through winning as well. In fact, for both behaviors it is rewarded equally as frequently. If not, the negative behavior is more rewarded (through self-gratification events such as scything an entire armada of swifts).

So let's get down to it. How can you help make zero-k better?
- Praise good behavior. Give 1 (one) or more positive praises to an individual player that has done the good behavior in game. Make sure that those who did the good behavior aren't left out!
- Punish negative behavior through peer disapproval.
- Don't perform the negative behavior yourself.


Problems with social approach:
1.) Good behavior and bad behavior is not agreed upon universally.
2.) EFFORT!
3.) no tokens for a token economy. (Yet...) Outside of peer approval / pressure. Might make a karma widget sort of thing.

You can't social engineer people by telling them you are social engineering them. It just doesn't work.

But overall I agree although your defintion of "trolling" is somewhat weird. Sure trolling is a subset of playing outside of meta but you don't necesserly troll when doing that. You troll when:
1. You have knowledge of the game itself and how it plays.
2. Visibly harm the game.
3. Do stupid shit.

For example: spamming ducks all day by hokomoko is outside the meta but him making 10 berthas would be trolling because he knows exactly that it is not going to work and thus is purposefuly worsening experience of others in favour of his own amusement.

But yeah I agree with most of the things you wrote. It happens and undoubtfully will happen. After all the only way to prevent that is stopping playing with pubbies.

I think the issue is when people place their own amusement over other people's amusement.

IMO trolling can be defined as a way of playing that effectively (and knowingly!) converts your team into an audience w.r. to their influence on the outcome.

Orfelius

I think you are missing the point [or some of it anyway]. I think Shaman want us to exert more pressure toward what we think is correct. Subjective is unavoidable.

that said, I think it'd make thing better if we can show that good behavior is appreciated. Like post game/in game congratulation, thank you, honorable opponent, etc.

In short making a culture of good behaviors getting as much if not more reward from peer compare to trolling.

I think this community has bastardised the term 'troll' even further beyond recognition. IMO it's always been a posturing term for soft claiming meta-social comprehension (or simplifying undesired behaviour under the one term), and by this nature the term is fated to continue to evolve.

Specific to ZK, there are a few things that troll claims have in common:
- does not fill a practical role
- prioritises personal satisfaction over total hedonic utility
- ego whoring
- flashiness
- compromises win rate
- relies on an element of unexpectedness

Not all trolling falls within every one of these categories, but, it's a term born of a social perception of symptoms, so just like how many psychiatric disorders are actually umbrella terms for clusters of symptoms that are causally unrelated, 'trolling' lacks clear definition. It could be argued that if it were ever clearly defined it would grow to encapsulate uncharted territory just to spite the would be definer.

'Trolling' is and always will be ambiguous.

Personally I have no problem with trolling overall, though around here it often feels kinda tired. In some places it's refreshing to see, as it pierces the mold of established tradition and reveals its dusty nature. But here? Well... it is the established tradition. Not much new comes of it, and unlike conversational trolling, where you can leave the discourse at any time, if you want to play ZK you basically have to put up with certain levels at all times.

I think the 'does not fill practical role' is possibly the most important aspect. In teams where you only have so many capable players, and a lot of important roles that need filling, having someone perform a non-essential function is often fatal, and unsatisfying to pretty much everyone else involved. It doesn't matter what your elo is, you can't take air, hold front, and expand all at once in a meaningful capacity. In true clusterfuck, this isn't even really a concern, as there are more than enough players to cover every roll, which is probably why so many frequent trolls bay for it.

I totally agree praising good performance is a good idea! Just to add to that, I think the following is roughly what happens:


1) Newbies and trolls both arrive and do silly stuff that makes it impossible for a team to win, even with the elo system.

2) Others cannot tell difference between trolls and newbies

3) Some people will try to make positive suggestions/advice. Trolls will ignore this, but for newbies it doesn't work very well either, because:
3a) The advice is brief and not explained well "EXPAND NUB!", because its in-game and no-one has time to explain well.
3b) There is too much advice too quickly to understand, because ZK is complex and learning it takes time.
3c) Advice appears offensive, because newbie doesn't want advice, or the advice is brief, or the advice seems uninvited, or the newbie just thinks they are already a good player.
3d) Advice is contradictory, coming from many people, including some who don't know what they are talking about. Because elo is hidden by default, the newbie has no way to tell who they should be listening to.

4) Other people will get angry at the person because they think the person might be a troll.
4a) Trolls drink tears, so this usually encourages them.
4b) Newbies are insulted, and will leave.

In order to reduce false positives (4b), which harms game a lot, it would be necessary to explain better to newbies how to play team game BEFORE they join big games. A manual/documentation will not do this. It's a game, virtually no-one reads the manual. And I don't think advice + reward/punish works very well alone (see above).

Ways this happens or could happen in ZK (including observational learning):
> Learn 1v1 a little first, which gives basics for teams.
> Better tutorial missions to explain team skills
> Lock teams room until beat a good AI (Circuit?)
> Organize mentors (how?)

I also think elo should be visible, even considering downsides of elo=ego. At very least some basic category that gives some useful information to new players about who is good to listen to.

That's my view on the topic anyway. I'm not even sure the topic itself isn't just a masterful trolling by Shaman lol.

Damn crimers.

Goddamn crimers indeed. Malicious crimers are the worst, imo.

An simple advice.

Use mumble, or skype or what ever. I sometimes talk and play there with people i never talked befor. Never even saw them ingame, but most of the time i have alot of fun.

Also like that even when somebody would play a trollcom, you could maybe work a good strategy out so that you are still competitive.

In this case, you wouldnt be so uneffectiv like these Trollcoms who stay shooting for 20 mins on shields...

quote: Someone said smurfing was trolling, this is ridiculous, the terms are clearly defined and they do not overlap.

They might as well can. Smurfing is a behaviour that resolves around making new accounts despite having one already. If you play with this account you have elo that is not accountible to your skill level. As such smurfs skew the balance of teams and makes people angry thus people hate when others do it. Which comes ecactly into the definition of trolling you provided. You aggrivate others by not doing a socially acceptable thing.
1. Consensus is that smurfing is not acceptable if you play with such smurf.
2. Apparently the offender did not agree with the consensus since they chose to disregard it.
3. Depends on the case, but the effect matters more than the motivation itself. For example Anteep does it on a base of aggrivating others but Sfireman done it to get rid of his elo. Effects of both were somewhat comparable.

quote: You can't ban everyone for saying something negative, so lets allow some undesirable social consequences to be directed at the "What you did in that last game was so fucking stupid i hope you die" parade.

Technically they can. Here is an excerpt from the CoC:

quote: 0. Don't make the game better off without your presence

In fact i know one particular instance when saying something negative was punished on that basis.



So you better watch out what you are saying.