I mentioned living in a society so I'll just get that out of the way first :joker-dancing:
Frank talked at length about PVP in Ultima Online and its consequences, and instead of making some massive quotes of that (good and entertaining) effortpost, I will instead summarize: cruel assholes that get off on suffering and power trips over other people can be controlled in small numbers in small tight-knit communities, but when they get large enough, society itself has adapt by putting rails up and stripping away meaningful choice to stop the game from choking on the glut of griefer bullshit going on.
There's been plenty of attempts to "bring back the good old days" for griefers, in places like Darkfall, 2Moons, Mortal Online, Shadowbane, and many more, and a consistent pattern emerges in those: the griefers want to grief the "sheep" but without the "sheep" wanting to stay around, the game typically dies or goes on maintenance mode because there's too many griefers and they don't have much fun with each other unless there's "sheep" to grief.
The calls for "full pvp" and especially "full pvp, full looting" and sometimes even "full pvp, full looting, and permadeath" are a lot like :libertarian-approaching: demands made, constantly, to take the rails out of society :society: that were put there in the first place, fun denying as they might be, because of :libertarian-approaching: style assholery in the first place.
As a former EVE Online enjoyer, I can say that almost all of the fun I had in that game was either "full loot pvp" in 0.0 space or reading news about how the server-wide wars were going, so it's not like I was a full time "sheep" before someone makes that accusation. A weird mutated version of the "fun blocking rails" happened in EVE because of the particularly corrupt devs in that game and their favoritism, however: over time, they started patching the game specifically to protect their favorite group of people. Not "sheep:" the country club Epic G!mer assholes that they buddied up with years ago (and often patched the game specifically to help them, even dialing back losses of capital ships with emergency patches and other ratfuckery. Fuck BoB and its many reincarnations, forever). They redesigned the game's PVP systems so that the moon goo barons could burn money until invaders got tired and left instead of even really having to fight them. They also made it so sanctioned "PVP" griefing in so-called lawful space was perfectly legal just by paying enough money to the space police. To summarize, it can make things less fun when "sheep" are protected from griefers, but it can be worse and specific griefers can be given special privileges and protections because they have enough money and the favor of the government.
Over and over again those safety rails are decried by griefers, under any pretense but "we want to grief and want lots of sheep around to grief," yet when they get their way too much the internal contradictions of their holy full pvp full loot sometimes permadeath systems doom such systems to tiny populations and shutdowns because those "sheep" were overexploited and gave up.
Sound familiar to contemporary western politics? :libertarian-approaching:
full pvp is fun in theory, gives some fun roleplaying opportunities and immersion
but what actually happens is you get dedicated pvpers who only play the game to gank people called XxX_MurderFace_XxX who whispers you slurs
and unsurprisingly, most people don't want to play with sweaty try-hards who only play to make other people miserablefull pvp is fun in theory, gives some fun roleplaying opportunities and immersion
I think it really does have parallels with lived life in the offline world: small communities really can have that sort of "anything goes" danger at their margins because any :libertarian-approaching: that show up can face the community's retaliation and be put down before they do too much harm.
But as soon as it gets bigger than a BBS population, you get :heated-gamer-moment: that want to :hypersus:
When full PvP came to racing games like need for speed and they allowed players to play as cops it was so annoying. Some arsehole would make it their sole mission to hunt you down
racing games
I've been watching a lot of sim stuff recently, and one funny thing I've noticed is that the top sim racing games right now all have essentially griefer detection, where if the game thinks you're intentionally causing crashes you'll "phase out" and not be able to effect other racers. I find it funny.
Ghosting yeah.
Usually once you get into the higher safety rating lobbies the ghosting gets less aggressive, or is fully off.
hot pursuit?
i liked playing that local, i imagine online was horrificRivals (basically a finished open world hot pursuit) so even worse.
You could be cruising on the map between races, not actually racing anyone and some arse would turn their sirens on to chase you. And this was integrated into the campaign mode by default and there was no way to pause the game. I turned off the online play so quickly.
god damn, that had to suck
i will say, the hot pursuit i was talking about was the ancient one from 98 lmaoYeah they made a hot pursuit reboot in 2010 that was pretty good, just unfinished, so the open world aspects of the game didn't fully work, you could explore the map but it was empty, you had to select races from a menu. Rivals was basically that reboot but finished with all the features. The map was technically new in terms of the road layout, but there were so many reused assets.
As another former EVE player, I've always been of the opinion that the only way an MMO works is if you can properly compete with other players per the mechanics of the game. Theme park MMOs never appealed to me because you're not playing a multiplayer game for 99% of it, you're just playing a single player RPG in the general vicinity of other people's avatars and/or having your experience ruined because the devs decided you all needed to kill the same mob that they've made respawn once per half hour and there's only ever 5 of them in total.
That said, the downfall of a game like EVE has little to do with the devs and more to do with the tendency of players in that environment to reinvent society from first principles. The death of EVE and why I stopped playing is that it became safer to live in 0.0 space (which should be the lawless frontier where anything goes) than it did in high-sec space (where you can kill other players, but you will guaranteed be killed by NPC cops in response) because every group consolidated into two giant blobs of alliances where you could AFK in space and know you had a 99% chance of still being alive and well when you came back an hour later because the nearest enemy faction is an hour's travel time away. When you're unironically calculating how much you owe in taxes based on your mining activity, the idea of being an ancap god kinda loses its appeal.
This exactly.
Even in a hardcore full PvP vibeo gane, we can't overcome our nature of generally liking safety, so people will gather in safe places. If there are no safe places, we will band together to create them and will collectively act against outsiders trying to make them unsafe.
Gamers who fantasize about "hardcore full loot PvP" imagine a game where it's just a bunch of individual characters ganking each other, and the most skilled gamer with the most epic gear will reign supreme, but that's not what happens because, as it turns out, "apes together strong." People form groups, alliances, clans, whatever, and then they'll create rules because that's literally what we have done since the dawn of our species.
Another major L for individualism :big-cool:
Gamers who fantasize about “hardcore full loot PvP” imagine a game where it’s just a bunch of individual characters ganking each other, and the most skilled gamer with the most epic gear will reign supreme, but that’s not what happens because, as it turns out, “apes together strong.” People form groups, alliances, clans, whatever, and then they’ll create rules because that’s literally what we have done since the dawn of our species.
The Randroids that ran EVE Online's development company kept trying to make that fantasy come true but from the start they had to do command economy style practices so the economy would function at all, such as setting "NPC prices" as the floor for key resources. Also, they kept trying to patch and fudge the game's own rules to favor their predetermined "winners" no matter how many times their more collectivist enemies fucked them up. Almost no serious alliance in EVE uses "shares" or the pretenses of the corporate systems hard coded into the game, and alliances that tried to, such as "Interstellar Starbase Syndicate" got dunked on hard until they ceased to exist. Space communists kept beating them in 0.0 space because hoarding resources wasn't as successful as sharing them with comrades, though the devs kept trying to make that not so. :billionaire-tears:
That said, the downfall of a game like EVE has little to do with the devs and more to do with the tendency of players in that environment to reinvent society from first principles.
I disagree because of how many times the company actively "saved" their pet alliances from their enemies, up to and including resurrecting key capital ships, and did patches around mitigating or preventing tactics that threatened those pet alliances. "Tyrannus" was an appropriately named patch.
It's an understandable thing to be mad about, but everything you're mentioning happened in like 2006/2007 and CCP did a pretty good job of preventing it again.
Furthermore that era of history was one of the healthiest when it came to organic, continuous content. It was only when the nullsec blocs started going ham on rental empires that the issues started really popping up, as it was suddenly very incentivized to protect every inch of space so you could print infinite ISK so you could buy more supercapitals so you could expand to more space to print more ISK, etc. Call it an inherent contradiction of game mechanics if we want to be Marxist about it, but it was doomed to result in static crabbing, which it did.
I want a full pvp MMO so so bad, but I haven't found one that clicks (EVE: I'm not into space or spreadsheets. Darkfall: very clunky gameplay).
To me, the draw to full pvp games is that there's always a dynamic conflict. I'd like players to be able to build their own cities with their guilds and fight over resources and conquest and stuff. I'm just not at all interested in the Disneyland tour of constantly escalating threats that is PvE gameplay. MMOs are social games. Let me both cooperate and come into conflict with other players in a way that is more significant than a closed battleground.
Ganking can be fun. Even trying to avoid getting ganked can be fun. If it gets out of hand, it's obviously torturous. But the real intrigue to me comes when groups of players come into conflict. The most fun I had was when my guild had beef with another pvp guild.
Time has proven in game after game that the magical allure of "full pvp everywhere" tends to drive most people away until only griefers remain with not enough "sheep" to grief.
I enjoy PVP a whole lot, but I prefer PVP against other PVPers and I get nothing out of griefing noncombatants. That's why I enjoy PVP campaigns such as Cyrodiil in Elder Scrolls Online, where the entire map and all the fortresses and such in it are intended for PVP and everyone knows what they're getting into. Yeah yeah there's the mystique and allure of "danger everywhere" when griefing is allowed but in practice it's proven over and over again that people in large numbers griefing in places like that drive away other people until even the griefers run out of people to grief.
MMOs are social games.
Yeah, and a lot of griefers are fundamentally antisocial which is thus the problem that makes just about all "full pvp everywhere" experiences repulsive to most people, which leads to small populations in such games.
I'm not too hung up on the whole everywhere all the time aspect.
What I'm saying is I want to fight for something. I want to do something against other players to achieve something in the world.
Some things have worked. For example, Ragnarok online had War of Emperium, which gave guilds fortresses. Once a week, PvP opened up and everyone would siege the fortresses. This was fine, but it was pretty contrived, and if your schedule didn't allow for the 2 hours of weekly pvp, then too bad. Final fantasy 11 also had an AWFUL scheduled PvP system that gave you're faction "control" over an area.
These things feel really contrived and contained for me, and I don't get a real dynamic world feeling from it. I don't want to just grind in PvP zones and instances to raise my own pvp points either.
So, if a dynamic player-driven conflict based world can be created without PvP everywhere, then that's great. I'm no purist, and I think protection from griefers is great. Otherwise, MMOs are just boring content treadmills with lackluster gameplay to me.
What I’m saying is I want to fight for something. I want to do something against other players to achieve something in the world.
Yeah, that's why I like Elder Scrolls Online's Cyrodiil campaigns. Castles build up, get torn down, get defended and captured, Elder Scrolls get seized, Volendrung smashes down walls until someone tackles the wielder, and once a month a winner is determined that gets extra rewards and it resets, and someone gets crowned emperor for as long as that lasts after a particularly good offensive.
That sounds neat.
Have you looked at Crowfall or Camelot: Unchained at all?
They have some pretty interesting approaches to full pvp. In particular, Crowfall emphasizes resetting the resetting things in regular intervals like you describe.
I think Camelot says players can build structures which is a huge seller for me.
The track record of the Camelot Unchained guy is very sketchy to me, so for the moment I'm quite happy in Elder Scrolls Online and it helps that there's yet another expansion releasing in a month with a new class.
You should check out Planetside 2. It's free to play, so you can get started with no buy in. It's a massive scale mmofps. Three factions fight for control of bases across large maps with the goal being to capture as much territory as possible.
During peak hours you can usually find platoons (up to 48 players) that are working together in a coordinated way to achieve captures and defenses. Back in the day there was a lot of coordination between clans on the high level command channel, too, but idk if that's still the case. The game has infantry, armor, aircraft, giant flying aircraft carriers, siege tanks, base building, jet-pack infantry, and plenty of variety.
I would say the critical thing is finding a teamwork oriented group that focuses on objectives to play with. I can't give much advice on that but if you end up playing with squad or platoon leaders you like add them to your friends list so you can join their platoons when they're on.
It bothers me how many dedicated PvP players are just fucking assholes. And in MMOs they are so fucking blatant about how they don't actually like skill based gameplay and that they think that their sweat should be what wins/loses fights. Like, it's so blatantly anti-fun just to give a tiny fraction of the population the pleasure of winning without any of the drama that makes actual winning fun.
idk everything in your post is very yes. I hate how toxic (most) bideo game communities are but the leap in toxicity above the norm with MMOs is genuinely insane.
I've yet to personally meet a "hardcore" pvper with all the "hardcore pvp" views and beliefs that wasn't also an asshole in offline life. Just my subjective experience, and of course I don't include casual pvpers, especially not ones in sanctioned environments like "battleground" instances or other consensual pvp zones, but when it comes to the "full pvp everywhere full loot maybe permadeath or else you're a (slur)" types, what I saw was generally what I got. :frothingfash:
Generally yeah. There are some in the sanctioned spaces who suck too. The I grinded more so I should beat you even if you are better than me crowd is super annoying. Games like WoW, especially classic, with players like Asmongold are super toxic. Back in the day Raiders, top PvE players, could beat top PvP players because high end PvE gear was better than PvP gear. And there were people who deadass defended that.
Not as bad as the griefers obviously but still annoying. It's the same mentality of enjoying hunting sheep and it just makes everyone else not want to play. MMO communities are almost universally anime-game tier toxic
If anyone ever rants about "welfare epics" that's a big glowing red flag saying that I'm not interested in spending any more time with that person. :heated-gamer-moment:
This is why we need to make america the dark souls of countries and turn the poor into hamburger meat to feed epic G*mers.
"Oh, you didn't already know you're supposed to go this way instead of that way! YOU DIED lololol git gud stupid noob!" :capitalist-laugh:
I remember some Youtube video about how Dark Souls has mimic chests, and if you tried to open one it caused an unavoidable instant kill. You never get any warning about mimics before you encounter the first one. According to the video this is apparently "good game design" because it shows how BRUTAL and UNFAIR the world is, rather than functionally being "you lose because you're new, now have fun replaying that chunk of the game asshole"
The video achieved the opposite of its goal in my case, reinforcing my desire to never play the game if these are the design decisions that draw fans to it
It's just hazing for smug :freeze-gamer: to condescend to people that made the mistake of opening that chest when it's their turn to be elitist douchebags.
I like the mimics. One thing to remember about Dark Souls; there's almost no penalty for dying. If you get nommed by a mimic you maybe lose some unspent xp and go to the last checkpoint which is usually no more than five minutes back.
Once you get ambushed by a mimic you tend to get a little paranoid about chests and test them by whacking them once before opening them. Mimics also have a distinctive model with a couple of subtle differences so once you know the tell you can spot them. They also tend to reward unique gear and don't respawn.
For me it's just a funny thing that breaks up normal gameplay. Dying a lot is a very normal part of dark souls, and getting unexpectedly chomped by a mimic is, at least for me, more of an absurd comedy moment than a setback. And it can only surprise you once - they always spawn in the same place so when you go back you know it's their.
I think one of the hardest things people who don't like souls games struggle to understand is that death isn't a punishment like it is in other games. The game isn't "brutal" and "unfair", though it is often quite challenging. It's more that each segment between checkpoints is a puzzle, and as you progress through, die, and try again you're essentially solving that puzzle. If something surprised you on the first try you'll be ready for it the next time. A new mosnter with an unknown moveset might kill you a few times, but each time you'll have a better grasp on it's moveset, timing, and weaknesses.
One of the core themes of Dark Souls is persevering in the face of adversity. Dying, experiencing setbacks, and choosing to carry on isn't just core to the game loop, it's also a core to the story and the cycle of linking the fire to try to renew the world.
A lot of what's so beautiful in the series is when you encounter someone who resisted despair and kept fighting to the absolute bitter end. Artorias' tragedy is his choice to save Sif knowing that the cost would be his own humanity. When you finally encounter him you know that the monster he's become was a choice to save someone he loved. The various Onion Knights are so charming because they maintain a positive, upbeat attitude even in a devastated world. They have no illusions about the state of things, but they choose joy over despair, finding pleasure and comradery where they can and pursuing goals that they have decided are important. Many of your enemies are people who have given themselves over to despair and obsession and been ruined in the process. It's widely considered that the ultimate " good" ending to the series is refusing to link the fire, letting go of the fear of an uncertain future, and allowing the age of fire to give way to the age of dark. In doing so you go beyond all the fallen kings and heroes who clung so desperately to the flame that it destroyed them, and the world along with them. For all the dark imagery, tragedy, and horror that pervades the series the ultimate message is about the boundless potential of the human spirit and the ultimate triumph of hope.
Life in america is friggin' hardcore like dark souls, you could get shot anywhere and medicine isn't free :felix-trash:
The privileged assholes that already know where stuff is and have organized gank squads jerk off about how it's sooo hardcore when they're not the ones suffering from it anymore. In IRL plenty of impoverished chuds dream of surviving their lifelong hazing long enough to be the griefer. :porky-happy:
I think it was a Folding Ideas vid that I remember this from but its probably not a localized sentiment, but I recall hearing the decline of stuff like this as basically just being a result of the novelty of MMOs diminishing combined with the normalization of datamining, optimization spreadsheets and metagame content creators.
You can't really replicate the excitement and tension of uncertainty and risk and all that due to how well understood MMO design in general is now and how accessible game specific information can become, or if its not publicly accessible thats probably even worse cause someone will have that information and be able to fuck you up with it and you cant do shit about it. Even if you don't know anything, you can be certain that someone out there knows basically everything, and will use all of that information as an advantage against you, so self imposed ignorance is just making your experience worse.
Reminds me of hearing about those exploits on that infamous minecraft server where a team of dedicated griefers figured out a way to set up a grid of bot accounts that would detect lightning strikes, which only spawn within a certain distance of players, and then triangulate those lightning strikes to find hidden player bases to destroy. If you're just some guy you dont have the resources to do anything about that, and you probably dont have many resources to just war of attrition rebuild your shit, so your recourse is to suck it up or quit.
I think it was a Folding Ideas vid that I remember this from but its probably not a localized sentiment, but I recall hearing the decline of stuff like this as basically just being a result of the novelty of MMOs diminishing combined with the normalization of datamining, optimization spreadsheets and metagame content creators.
That may be some part of it, but "FULL PVP EVERYWHERE FULL LOOT" MMOs that keep getting tried once in a while simply don't retain a thriving playerbase compared to other leading MMOs that have lasted all this time with much healthier population numbers that didn't do that.
I think thats because those full pvp/loot MMOs are more fundamentally reliant on that old timey environment where you have no centralized information regarding the game itself along with optimized ways to play, alongside the form of the game itself being novel enough to make people want to play even if they are accomplishing little.
"Theme park" MMOs or whatever might have started in that environment but they could adapt to it even if it caused toxicity and friction in specific areas.
The point remains that unless you count EVE Online (which may not count because of the way wardecs and security systems work) there really isn't "full pvp almost everywhere with full looting totally hardcore guys" MMO with a significantly large playerbase out there. Theories can be suggested for why that is, but until one such "full pvp almost everywhere with full looting totally hardcore guys" actually keeps the "sheep" around to grief, those theories haven't yet lead to a different outcome.
i read a comment somewhere that some EVE players tried to form a coop and the devs dropped the banhammer? is that correct? is there, like, a ten minutes you-tube video detailing what happened?
There was a lot of documentation of that and many other episodes of dev corruption, favoritism, and outright meddling with their own game over years, but just about all of it is now gone. Tears in the rain. :doomer:
Back about 15 years ago I had a lot of fun playing a private pirate UO server with full PvP, but the reason it worked was that the faction-based PvP was established as the core focus of the game from the get go. Everyone went in understanding that large scale faction-vs-faction warfare was going to happen so people were already prepared for getting killed, looted, etc. And there was relatively little griefing bc most of the people there wanted challenging combat and battles between large groups of coordinated players. While the rules were the "old days" pvp and full loot the differing emphasis left no real place for griefers, and an overall fairly polite environment outside some friendly smack talk.
The difference between players who want interesting, challenging conflict and players who want to wield power over others and cause suffering is night and day.
Planetside 2 is notable for being a unique mmofps on a vast scale.battles regularly involve hundreds of players from each of the three factions, and that's after the player population has dropped dramatically over the last ten years.
The difference between players who want interesting, challenging conflict and players who want to wield power over others and cause suffering is night and day.
Planetside 2 is notable for being a unique mmofps on a vast scale.battles regularly involve hundreds of players from each of the three factions, and that’s after the player population has dropped dramatically over the last ten years.
I enjoy PVP. I strongly dislike griefing and ganking noncombatants under whatever :freeze-gamer: pretenses try to justify it. I wish that was a more common point of view. :doomer:
The game Foxhole is I think a interesting twist on the mmo formula, though I haven't played the game in quite some time (it became too grindy to get to anything fun, and the game devs seemed to cater heavily towards clan gameplay).
Pretty much, the game is an MMO war between two factions, the Wardens and the Colonials. The crux of things is that every weapon in the game has to be made by a player (no random drops and no NPCs anywhere). Players will pick one side to play for each "war", where once one side is winning enough (I forget the requirements, I think it used to just be decided by the devs but it's semi automated now) the map will be reset for another "war."
The game does have an institutionalized place for 'sheep' in the game, since both sides need weapons, equipment, and bases in order to fight. So you could actually end up with some players ('partisans') sneaking through the lines in order to kill logistic players who have to transport raw materials to the factories and then finished weapons from the factories to the frontlines. So the next logical step was indeed to have players on your side gather up forces in order to quash a group of partisans, and the mechanics of the game make it pretty much impossible to set up bases behind enemy lines you can respawn from. You could technically set up respawn points behind enemy lines but they require you to run through a lot of hoops: you need a slow and vulnerable construction vehicle with a bunch of building materials (impossible to transport in bulk without another vulnerable vehicle), soldier supplies (which you need in order to respawn at bases, also hard to procure and transport in bulk behind enemy lines), etc etc which means that they only really happened when the anti-partisan guys were really off their game (read:non-existant) anyways.
At the end of the day you could always set up structures that broadcast whether or not there are any enemies nearby as well, which would guarantee certain roads' safety so long as they were present, so the traditionally assymetrical battles between 'sheep' and 'griefers' (in quotes because they almost transcend the role) could definetly be made equal within the mechanics of the game.
Of course foxhole isn't a full pvp game where you can do anything. You can't set up rival factions (though the clans do try!), and it's against the rules to be a spy (there are no mechanics for it, but there are still people who make alternate accounts to sabotage efforts on the other team and view their team chat).
I don't really know what the state of all of this is like now, especially since they added :train-shining: to the game. By far the best thing to come out of foxhole was the logistics strike though. I think the developers recently announced a new game, set as like an 18th century mmo war game? But I really don't know anything about it.
I just found this video and it looks like yeah the logi union is pretty much dead and a lot of veterans have just burnt out of the game, which is a shame, and the progression towards needing larger, more cohesive groups of players (clans) in order to actually run things is still happening. Bummer, but I'm not too surprised.
That's too bad, but I understand why. It's an extremely demanding game. All the logistics players going on strike until the devs made changes to the logistics systems is definitely one of the coolest moments in gaming to date.
I don't have much to add, but I think long "effortposts" are good and create space for discussion (especially when injected with some levity). I hope to see more of these, just good to see c/games talking about games in an interesting way.
I doubt it, but I do wonder if somebody will "figure out" or "take the time to" set up an AI system to watch a MMO player base and use the collected data to have a permanent almost realistic AI controlled bot base of players that could be plugged into PVP MMO's to keep the "wolves" happy.
I'm not sure griefers would enjoy it unless they weren't aware they weren't actually making other living beings miserable. :heated-gamer-moment:
Now I'm curious how much shifting along the sliding scale between, "doing it to win" and "doing it to cause misery", changes over time for a full time PvP player. :thinking-about-it:
I'd imagine that at first the high might come from just having "got gud" and after that high wears off things sliding into :joker-gaming: territory.
Now I’m curious how much shifting along the sliding scale between, “doing it to win” and “doing it to cause misery”, changes over time for a full time PvP player.
There's plenty of hard games out there that don't involve PVP (necessarily). Soulslike alone may fill that niche (and often have griefing potential baked right in anyway). I doubt they actually want NPCs to do crafting/gathering tasks, waiting to be griefed to simulate human frustration, despair, or misery when they'd rather have the real thing.
Depends on the playerbase :shrug-outta-hecks: , I guess.
If the whales are the PvPers and the cost of AI'ing bots into convincing 'players' as cannon fodder stays low I could see some MMO's that are nearing their normal "people move on to the next thing" phase trying to keep them engaged longer for that sweet sweet milk money.
Idk, but most serious pvp players I know aren't interested in easy fights or easy wins. They want a challenge that gets their blood pumping. That's probably partially bc of the people I choose to hang out with.
Even in CoD DMZ, which is played by CoD players, you'll run in to a reasonable number of people who will let you join their team and revive you after they kill you, or people who will let you share their extract helicopter. There's a huge potential for being a shithead in that game, but most people just want clean pvp, and a reasonable number, not a majority but a reasonable number, are happy to cooperate with strangers.
Idk, but most serious pvp players I know aren’t interested in easy fights or easy wins.
In that case, we're talking about different scenarios. A greifer isn't looking for an honest fight they're getting their kicks off of thinking that they're making somebody else miserable.
