 Calico_Jack wrote:
I got warned by my Alliance after i Called you names HonoredMule :P a few months back in the improvements thread, they didnt want me to make you angry :P i didnt know who you were back then |
We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Well, almost nothing.
I have been playing Illy for about eleven months now, and one phenomenon I observe is similar to Seligman's description of learned helplessness. In this well-known experiment, some dogs were submitted to random shocks from which they could not escape. Others were provided a means of avoiding the shocks. Dogs who could escape quickly learned to do so. However, if a dog was first subjected to the condition of inescapable shocks, that dog had trouble learning to escape if the escape subsequently became available.
How does this relate to Illy? As we have seen recently, Illy affords the opportunity for those with power to administer relatively random*, severe punishments from which there is no opportunity to escape.
Under this condition, many players have seemingly forgotten the many options they have to respond flexibly and cooperatively in similar situations. Many seem to be resigned to their fate and mostly respond by complaining about how warlike Illy isn't or some such similar theme.
I sincerely doubt even those nefarious villains at H? (
) have deliberately concocted this as a strategy intended to maintain a docile "populace." It is rather a snapshot of a natural human response as it appears at this point in time.
At any rate, I believe it is more the exaggerated fear response in other players, rather than specific likely actions of H? or other powerful alliances that cause reactions like the one Calico Jack described. This is one we cannot lay at the feet of H? It's all us, as it were.
*The punishments are not entirely random, since they do relate to a predecessor action on the part of the player being punished. However, different players might be treated differently depending on established relationships in the game, and the magnitude of the punishment is quite severe in relationship to the offense, so while this is not entirely random it is at minimum unpredictable and arbitrary, or appear so to those not involved in inventing them. There is some logic at work, we just do not know what it is.
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