Guess they need to make the pumpkin quest steal proof

first of all, the hearts and candy canes and other events were not something we had to purchase. they were free. so throwing them cost us nothing but time. there were no achievements or shinies attached to them, so we had no reason to keep them to ourselves.

secondly, the definition of stealing: To take (the property of another) without right or permission.

definition of property of another: that which was bought by or gifted to an individual for the purpose of personal use.

The people complaining bought the said property for personal use. they didn't want to throw it at someone else, they wanted them for themselves. as purchaser, that option should be theirs to decide, not anyone else. if they want to share, that should also be their choice, not someone else. no one in the world has the right to decide how i spend my money, plat, or candy corn, nor should they have the right to tell me what to do with anything i purchase. that is my decision. to take such a choice away from me is stealing. there is no other way to describe it.

to say that something was intended to be shared is not the same as saying you absolutely have to share it and have no control over it. if it is mine and i bought it, i have control over it.

if i am on a street corner and someone comes by, then it is safe to assume they don't know. however, if i am in a private corner beneath the platforms of Faydark completely out of the way, then to come by and take them is not acceptable. moreover, you have to be in an open area or you will do like i did and get some stuck in a wall or tree and be unable to get them.

as for feeling uncharitable, how do you think it makes me feel if i am told i absolutely have no right to control something i paid for? do you really think that makes me feel more like sharing them? and yes, there are plenty of rude people on the game. luckily, up until now, i had a choice whether or not to engage with them. if someone is rude to me, or does not do the right thing, i can put them on ignore and refuse to have anything to do with them. and i usually do. but the way this is done makes it possible for those very rude people to totally disregard my ignores and come take my stuff anyhow. pray tell, what name would you call that? if not stealing?

you talk as though this were your decision to make.

luckily for us, if the devs decide to make some compromises, you nor anyone else on this thread will be part of the decision making. you are not the one we are asking this of- the devs are.

Everquest had a lot of weird things players put up with (like no market). The other popular MMO's of the time, like Final Fantasy XI and Lineage (both 1 and 2 absolutely dwarfed anything before WoW) were very competitive in everything that you did.

Competition in gaming is a Good Thing(tm). Not playing because all the "camps" are taken is not.

Edit: you could argue that Instancing is a result of the 'entitlement generation' (you'd be wrong, but you could make that case), but fighting over a contested spawn is anything but entitlement. Thinking it's yours because you got there first is.

As do you, Suka.

The devs have said it's not stealing. End of story. Their pumpkins (everything in the game is owned by SOE, remember?), their festival, their rules. You don't like it? Either find a way to live with it or go do something else. The game does not force you to buy any pumpkins any more than it forces me to become a raider because there are raiding achievements.

But that is exactly what you are doing. You have to be out in a public space to use them, and by using them you are throwing them away at somebody. Your "compromise" would defeat the whole purpose of creating the item in the first place - if you could do it in your house, nobody would share them, and the public quest idea never gets off the ground.

I agree with the poster who said it should have been left as it was in test where you couldn't pick up your own pumpkins. That way there would be no question about what was intended. About the best they could do now (which they obviously won't since NotD is almost over) is put in something in the item description, but the description is deliberately vague to let you find out what happens when you throw one away.

iif it were left like that i can almost guarantee very few would have bought them. if it is supposed to be a public quest, then why do we have to buy them with our personal loot? public quests have never been anything we had to pay for before. that's why it makes no sense to expect us to pay for them now. the only place i every had to pay for a quest was in LOTRO - and i don't play that much anymore.

and no, a compromise would not defeat any purposes because you would still be able to throw them at people if you wanted to. you really think that by giving options people would choose not to share them? what does that tell you about the quest? we are not sharing them now. we simply refuse to. so what is anyone accomplishing other than causing hard feelings? believe me, i have plenty of other things to do with my candy corn. i didn't need a sink to spend them in the guise of a public quest.

what i am reading in your words is this:

"if we give people choices, and allow them to choose how to play a game, they will play it the way that they want and not the way that we want them to. if we don't make it so they have no choice but to share or group, then they won't. therefore we have to force the issue by creating ways to make them play the game the way we want them to play it."

is that what you really call entertainment and fun? i don't i call it control issues.

hmm, so i guess you would be making an argument kind of like someone who carefully waited for another car to pull out so they could safely take the spot only to have someone else zoom in at the last minute to take the spot. in my mind, that is very irritating. and rude.

as for spawning the mob, last time i checked if i have something in my inventory like a quest bauble that spawns the mob, then it is mine and will even get a lock on it. if i killed every mob in the zone to get it to pop, that is contested. but if by killing my mob i then have to knock the quest off and go back for another bauble, then you have just interfered with my quest and violated the soe play nice policy. the way i see it, the pumpkin bombs are encouraging people to violate that policy and the devs are having a laugh at our expense watching it. since when did soe ever say it was ok not to play nice?

And here is where we see real world analogies don't apply to games. (+1 for the car analogy though)

In the real world, killing people to take their stuff is generally frowned upon.
In a game, it's the path of success.

Yes, if you had something that specifically spawned a mob, that mob could be considered "yours", though still iffy - I don't know how many times I had to run the bear form quest in WoW because people kept killing my quest mob. I didn't complain though, just reran the quest until I got it.

If a mob spawns once every two days, and one player has been waiting 12 hours, and another 2 minutes, neither of them have any claim to the mob. First to tag wins. If one group has been sitting in a room 'camping' for four hours killing mobs, and another group shows up, neither group has any claim to the mobs. Again, first to tag wins.

The devs are trying to change what players see as "normal". In this case they're introducing a concept called "sharing". You may not agree with how they are doing it, but they're doing it all the same. Fortunately, NotD will be over soon and we can forget about this until next year, when some people will undoubtedly complain about the same things all over again.

And for the record, yes, I hate "play nice" policies enforced in games. The players have all the tools they need at their disposal to solve 99.99% of all problems - slam the ban hammer on the few "true griefers". CS costs money, and the less you burden them with stuff that should never have been brought to their attention, the more money there is to develop and test new content for the game.

I don't know how the game is today, but I loved the way Final Fantasy XI was set up. From the very first newbie zone there weren't enough mobs and resources to go around, so you had to be better, faster, stronger than the guys around you if you wanted to advance your character. It made for a very strong community.

although i understand why soe doesn't recognize camps (like in eq1 the dragons are permacamped and no one else has a chance) i do like their play nice policies: http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/EverQuest_II_Play_Nice_Policies

I especially like their concept concerning people who want to camp the same mobs. i also realize that the reason for those policies is that a lot of people are too immature to recognize the fact that this is still a social environment and that social ethics apply. some simply don't care. give a person a small amount of anonymity and often their true colors surface.

The "It has always been done this way therefore it must always be done this way" fallacy. Used a lot by industries who find their cheese moved to legislate their outdated business models, so it's a common 'belief', at least when it's convenient.

The new dev team is trying to make some basic changes to the way the game is being played. Honestly, since you're all about 'play nice' and that I would think you would welcome this. Granted, it could have been explained better in game, but Caith did a pretty good job of explaining the intent of the pumpkins here in this thread.

Since they went over pretty well in game (a few upset posters on dead forums doesn't really count for much), I expect we'll see similar items in the next festivals, especially Frostfell - another season of 'sharing'.

play nice isn't always about sharing. it is also about respecting others and understanding that some people don't want to share what they have rightfully acquired. sharing is something that shouldn't be forced. if someone doesn't want to share, they shouldn't have to. this is not the same thing as camping a mob and needing to let others have a turn at it. it is about having the right to look at something you have purchased or looted and being able to say "this is mine, no one can take it from me".

The acquisition of possessions is taken for granted in the free world. most of us wouldn't welcome any school of thought or government that denied us that basic need. so when someone comes along and says no, you can't keep what you earned or bought, it rubs most of us the wrong way.

you know, i remember a time when i played eq1 and i had worked very hard to acquire all i needed to max my tradeskills. I had only been playing about 2 years at the time. I did a lot of looting and often also bought the items off people who looted them and were willing to sell them. it was a lot of hard work, but i had a lot. of course, it also took a lot. the one i was working on at the time was jewelry. i needed a particular ore to max my skills. this same ore was needed to make orbs for augs and to max pottery. it was a long hard road. along the way, i was made an officer in the guild i was in.

a guy joined our guild who asked if i had the particular ore. i told him yes, but i needed it. he began to spout off that all our stuff should be put in houses where the entire guild would have access and all of our resources should be shared equally. note that this guy had just joined and so far had not shown any inclination to share anything, but he wanted my ore. i politely told him i would be glad to tell him where he could harvest the ore for himself. (it involved killing some relatively mid-level mobs). That didn't make him happy at all.

Later he took it up with the guild leader that i wouldn't share my hard earned ore and that everyone in the guild should share whatever they had with everyone else in the guild. know what she did? she laughed at him. you see, in eq1 there are no harvest depots and the tradeskill items are not harvested from nodes. they have to be looted from mobs you kill.

No, i don't agree that if i have it, then you have it. one of the things i most appreciate about this game is the fact that i can acquire possessions and not have to share them with anyone. that is why a lot of people go do quests and loot items- because they want it. if they were forced to share whatever they had and not allowed to keep, use, and enjoy what they worked for, the game wouldn't last long.

Folks, this deceased equine is being flogged so brutally that bits and pieces are splattering the pumpkins I've been bombing around Qeynos.

Call it a draw, agree to disagree, TKO, whatever. Please let the remains be disposed of and retreat to your corners.

Enough is enough. I humbly request this thread be closed.

umm- i can understand that you might not want to read more. however, there is a discussion going on and as long as the participants agree to discuss, i suggest you click unwatch thread at the top and then ignore us. i am very opposed to closing threads just because someone else doesn't want to read it. so don't read it. not for you to decide, thankfully. please ignore his request until all participants agree that we no longer are discussing anything here.

i have seen threads last for months just because people still want to discuss it. i actually thought it had ended days ago, only to find people were still talking on it. discussions and never one-sided. part of what i have been trying to impress on people is that no one person should be able to decide what is best for someone else, not should they be able to make others do what they want them to do. including ending discussions that are still alive. i could see when moderators find that nothing is really being said or discussed, but i don't think that is really the case here.

it especially should not be closed jsut because someone who isn't even a participant decides it should be.

Woah, I actually agree 100% with Suka on this. We've been having a pretty civil discussion here. No reason to go closing a thread because someone thinks we're beating a dead horse. Forums are the biggest glue factories around

@ Suka - what you're doing is metagaming.

Your character in the game world is picking up one of those pumpkin bombs and throwing it at somebody else, probably expecting it to turn into a pumpkin head, and Wow! all these little pumpkins come out. Even after your character knows about the little pumpkin's, she's still throwing them away at other people.

If somebody threw a balloon filled with candy at me during a festival, or even at someone next to me, the candy would be fair game. You can't get away from this being an obvious festival - every character in the game world got a personal mail telling them that Nights of the Dead was starting.

Anyway, I've got one more questline to try and finish, probably not going to make it (didn't the day/night cycle used to be faster?), so I'm off to Norrath.

in the words of that certain great patriot "I may not agree with all of the things you say, but i will fight to the death for your right to say them"

This is exactly why I don't like contested mobs and contested dungeons. I don't feel I should have to compete with others for them...which is why I rarely do them and if I do happen to do them, I just leave and come back later if I see there are others there for me to compete against. I am not a social person and do not play the game for the social aspects of the game. I am a solo player through and through, and have stated time and time again, if I can't solo it, it simply won't get done.

No amount of coercing, pleading, forcing, etc will make me want to play with others. Try and force me to do so, and I'll just state my opinion on the matter and walk away, possibly to never look back again. If SOE wants to FORCE me to play their way, they will simply lose another customer, but can they really afford that? How many others have already left because they didn't listen to what the players wanted?

I use the candy corns for crafting and do not want to have to spend any more than necessary to complete this achievement, and therefore I do NOT want to share my pumpkin bombs with others, so that I do not have to spend additional candy corns to do so. Public event or not, I paid for those pumpkin bombs, and I earned the candy corns to pay for them. Real money or not, it's mine to do with as I see fit. If they wanted this to be a public event and the pumpkin bombs shared, they should have made an unending supply of them, free for the taking.

I personally would love to see the city requirement be removed and allow us to use these pumpkin bombs anywhere we should choose.

I just don't get why people don't see the point Suka was trying to make, and keep turning it around on her, when everything she has stated is true. She has made it a point over and over again to note that she is defending the rights of others to complain without being made to feel their arguments are invalid. She did not enter this debate to complain about her own personal experiences in regards to these pumpkin bombs. How difficult is this to understand?

I keep seeing analogy's thrown about, but what I don't see is any analogy's that really touch the heart of what Suka was trying to say in the first place.

(I am actually referring here to something that happened to me personally, when I was growing up, so this analogy really hits home on a personal level.)

3rd grader enters math class as a new student to the school. Has only learned addition and subtraction, never been exposed yet to multiplication or division. The rest of the students have already begun learning their multiplications. Teacher calls on the new student and asks the student what the answer to 3x3 is. This new student has no idea what the answer is, so just adds and replies that the answer is 6. The other students all laugh at her, and the teacher tells the student she is incorrect but does not explain how to get the correct answer. Student tries to explain to the teacher that she has never been taught multiplications but the teacher refuses to hear her out. Lunchtime rolls around and the teacher walks the student to the 2nd grade classroom, tells the student to sit, plops a page down in front of the student and tells her to complete the problems on the page. Student looks at the page, sits there and cries throughout the lunch period, because she has no idea how to work these problems.

With total disregard to the students lack of knowledge, which was in no way the students fault, the teacher has not only humiliated the student, but totally ignored the student's feelings and explanation. Does this make the student's personal feelings and opinions inconsequential and invalid?

There is an old quip that says something along the lines of "the only dumb question is the question never asked". Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and they should not be put down for expressing that opinion, regardless of how dumb or stupid you may feel that opinion is. Instead of condemning that person for expressing their personal feelings about a subject, be constructive, and try to work with them to come up with a solution. This is about the gist of what Suka has been trying to say in this thread, or at least to my understanding, and seeing Caith's response to what she had to say, was at the very least, very unprofessional. But then, for those of you who disagree with me, my opinion has no place in this debate.

thank you. well said and you hit the nail exactly on the head. and your opinion has as much place here as anyone else's - another point i was trying to make. i for one, value all opinions.

Hehe yes, that last statement about my opinion was dripping with sarcasm.