Yellow Text: The Definitive Discussion

[heartbrand]

Took me a while to find your post Wolfram:

"Yellow text is stupid, Rogean already said it wasn't going in. Every time this is mentioned I make the exact same argument and no one responds except to call me a "fag" or a "pussy". News flash: being opposed to YT doesn't mean I'm afraid of pvp. It just means that I think this server shouldn't be turned into an FPS where the singular goal of everyone playing is to kill everyone you can indiscriminately, regardless of whether there's a good reason. Classic pvp wasn't like that. Some players were anti PK's, some players were PK's, some were elf-slayers, etc. Yellow text encourages people to kill just for the sake of killing."

Here's the issue in my opinion with what you said. This isn't a server with a large pop, with multiple non=pk guilds, non guilded players, etc. The end game is holo/ff/nihilum, that's it. Yellow text will just make PVP at the end game more exciting as you can actually show your accomplishments rather than play ForumQuest. There isn't a large enough pop to have the type of griefing going on that you seem concerned about. Because there's no teams it's basically join one of those three guilds at the end game or do nothing. All three guilds are at war with each other, so every PVP battle is "justified."

[Lazortag]

You can show your "accomplishments" just fine on the forums. One difference is that the forums would require you to post a screenshot showing the context in which the kill occurred, and yellow text does not. So if you zerg someone, kill them naked, etc. then that will be clear from your screenshot, but with yellow text this is not clear. Additionally, posting on the forums means you can add little captions to your kill (like Casey), or add other pictures, or whatever. It's just more fun, and it's also optional. If I don't want to be given attention every time I kill someone, or if I don't want to hear about other people being killed, I can just not read/post on the forums. Yellow text isn't opt-outable in the same way.

Moreover, yellow text has always been seen as an informal leaderboard on every server that it's been implemented on. If someone gets more yellow text, that means they're more skilled; if they get less, it means they're less skilled. Obviously we can all see the issue with this (since you can bind camp someone 20 times and get 20 YT's, but that wouldn't take any skill, for example), but the kind of crowd that plays on pvp servers will still act as if you're shitty if you don't get lots of YT.

Why is this bad? Apart from being a grossly inaccurate measure of someone's skill, it changes how people conduct themselves in pvp and what rules of engagement they impose on themselves. On this server I can walk up to a random unguilded player, /wave at them, have a conversation, and not feel the urge to kill them or vice versa. On a server with YT, that player would have attacked me out of fear that I'd attack first, kill them, and damage their "rep" with a server-wide announcement that they'd been killed. If you think I'm overanalyzing this you haven't been around long; this is a 100% accurate account of what happens on pvp servers with yellow text. Players become more paranoid, act like bigger douches than they already would have, all for the sake of getting more YT in their favor or avoiding being on the wrong side of YT.

I'm not saying no one should be allowed to play this way - I still consider myself anti-pk and I would have no purpose if there were no griefers. I just think that players shouldn't be pressured into playing this way. I know YT doesn't literally force you to want to kill everyone you see as if the game is an FPS, but it creates a social expectation to play like that, for the reasons I mentioned above. There's absolutely nothing classic about that - in classic less people griefed or attacked other players unprovoked. The playerbase was a lot more diverse - some people roleplayed as elf supremacists, anti-pk's, gnome slayers, whatever. While I admit it's unlikely that red99 will have that kind of diversity, it's at least possible without YT. When you have YT there's only one rule: kill everyone you see, run from anyone who might have a chance at humiliating you with YT, and ridicule anyone who doesn't have as much YT as you for being "less skilled".