Cephus' Corner

A Place for my Geeky Side

It’s Only Help if Welcome!

April 21st, 2024

This is going to be a very specific comment that can be also taken generally. Don’t worry, it will make sense in a minute. In the specific, in No Man’s Sky, you can shove whatever you want to into someone else’s inventory without their consent or even knowledge and a lot of people do that. They say “I’m helping!” by taking a new player and suddenly giving them a billion units worth of crap.

What if they don’t want your “help?” Oh, suggest that and the shit will fly!

Granted, this is a game engine problem more than anything. It should be impossible to do what people do, but it isn’t and therefore, people take advantage of it. Online, people get really upset or confused. “Why do I suddenly have these massive stacks of really expensive stuff in my inventory?” Then we have to explain that someone forced it on them without their consent. Usually, it’s not even legitimate. Someone cheated. They used a save editor to gain tons of expensive stuff, then they run around forcing it on others out of some misguided attempt at “helping”.

It’s not helping.

Yet if you point that out, those very same people who are abusing the liberal trade system in the game, they will scream. “If they don’t like it, they can just delete it!” So now it’s on everyone else to fix the mess that you are causing with your stupidity? Hard pass!

Yes, there are some people who would willingly take the freebies. It stops them from having to play the game and earn it for themselves, which I would never do, but to each their own. Yet it seems as if there are far more people saying “stop it!” than “thank you” on social media because most people just don’t want it to happen.

Not like the idiots doing it actually care. Ultimately, this isn’t being done to help anyone, it’s being done so that the morons doing it feel better about themselves and their cheating ways. It’s kind of like a misguided Robin Hood. Steal from… well, nobody, since it is mostly a single player game and there is no cheating in a single player game, but then they take it out into a multi-player game and force their ill-gotten gains on other people against their wishes and without their consent.

Then they get mad when people complain about it. It’s obvious where their concern lies and it isn’t with the people they are supposedly “helping”.

I say this because I’ve seen this happen in a lot of multi-player games. I don’t play multi-player games anymore, for this reason among others, but I used to. I have my multi-player turned off permanently in NMS because I don’t want to deal with the terminally stupid.

However, way back in the day, as an example, I played an MMO called Anarchy Online. No clue if it even exists anymore, I haven’t played in a very long time. However, the game world was really big and walking across it took forever and one of the perks of earning a lot of money was the ability to buy a ground skimmer that let you move a whole lot faster.

It took forever to earn one. It was a ton of grinding to even get close. People would sit around in public and complain that it was so hard to get one. I, and some other people to be fair, who had played for a long time and had more money than we knew what to do with, we would offer to buy ships for people who really wanted one. It didn’t ruin the game experience, it just made the grind a little more tolerable. We asked and if people said yes, we’d take them to the vendor and pay for it and give them one. I must have done that for dozens of people over the years. Never once did I drag anyone over and force it on them. If you want one, sure, I’ll help you out. If not, I don’t bother. I never did anything without consent.

So why do so many people these days have a problem with that? I have no idea. People these days seem to have a lot of problems with basic social graces. It really ruins the fun for everyone else. Don’t push your crap on others without asking first. If they don’t agree, don’t do it. Honestly, it can’t be that hard!

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