Guild Wars 2 and making a better community

So after finishing winds of change and reading a lot of zen, buddhism and tao teh ching i realized the gap between player perceptions.

Elitism= Fanaticism
Scrubbery=Lethargy

The middle way= show compassion towards all players and try to find new ways to reach them and help them, no matter how rude, obscene, stupid, lazy or ignorant, and improving your own play and taking your own actions. Look I know a lot of you may not play guild wars and go on with your lives, but this post is aimed at you who will join us in guild wars 2.

If you want a better community, its up to you and you alone, the individual. I shouldn't be telling anyone what to do but I just want to speak my mind about this after playing this game for so long and seeing so much strife between players and the cause of that strife and drama. The cause is simply, its ignorance. The result is widespread suffering.

im not saying dont swear. Swear if you want
im not saying dont be rude, be rude if you want,
im not saying dont be a complete elitist, use elitism to get better pugs if u want
im not saying dont play like a casual scrub without any drive to improve your play and yourself, play how you want

all i am saying is be mindful of your actions in game and how they affect other players.

you could be that guy who calls the WoH warrior a total noob, you could be that guy who acts unreasonably nice and the WoH warrior becomes suspicious (im suspicious of insurance salesmen), or you can relate to people in game and they will listen to you and its not hard, and perhaps have an effect on their play and their perception, no one is too ignorant to see the truth if u show it in the right light. i always found in RA teaching newbies is fun once u know how to do it. it involves master of healing and some gold offered as bait/dare to try kill it when u know they cant.

We have all been in this together for the last 7 years whether we like it or not, and we may not all like each other and we might think there are too many immature kids on the internet, well, is it the kids fault they are immature or society's? the point is the change comes from within you and your own beliefs. if you believe you are better then everyone else online then you will come off as an asshole just as i did myself when i was a raging 14 year old elitist many years ago.

instead of hating show some respect and respect will follow.

probably didnt need to post this and people will criticize me about sh it whatever i dont care

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

This is why your logic does not work. You can't solve the problem alone, and it's therefore stupid to try.

The only functioning solution is to put together a smaller community and only admit people that adhere to the social code. That way, you can socialize with pleasant, skilled people and minimize your dealings with irritants.

The broader community will always be terrible due to the one-time-purchase model. ANet is never going to dedicate the resources to police community behavior, because they don't derive enough revenue from doing so to cover the costs. The result is that you have to do it yourself, and the only way to make that work is to make the community you're policing small enough to be manageable.

look like i got more reading to do, thanks for the link,

however, i still cling to the belief that the individual has an effect, not because I want to change anything, but because I believe I alone have power and choice in my own life.

My point is this. You form selective groups, and you exclude those of which you could have helped. Sociology is good if its maintained well, and turns into tyranny and oppression if not because you emphasize so much on policing and so little on individual merit.

Where does it say that an individual can go out of their way to relate to people who are hateful, ignorant and lost, perhaps i need to read more and its there, but in my experience you can relate to everyone any anyone as long as you have the courage and the compassion to do so.

and it is never stupid to try, people can change, you jsut have to relate to them well, if talking to a 15 year old kid talk about booze and tits and they will relate. Stop hiding in the ivory towers of university and excluding the 'bums' and 'street kids' of society (metaphorical for GW community).

Well ain't that depressing?

There's also some tertium quid here -- the rules of the game are going to regulate social behavior. (Or, as Lawrence Lessig puts it, "code is law.") A-net has some power to weed out anti-social behavior structurally by removing the incentives to be a jerk or by making it impossible, or at least impractical, to be a jerk.

Examples:
1. Removing the incentive for anti-social behavior -- In one of the early GW2 dev interviews, the dev stated that the idea behind world battles is to eliminate rank discrimination by making even bad players have a net positive impact for their teams. (So at least they understand the idea; we'll see how the implementation turns out.)
2. Making anti-social behavior impossible -- adding a confirm button for all party members before leaving pre-searing made it impossible to drag an unwilling perma-pre to post.
3. Making anti-social behavior impractical -- taken together, an auction-house with a price tracking feature and a trade interface with unique names and icons for every item and always-visible text display for every item would make trade scamming so impractical few people would bother.

I believe GW, or any other online community, is just like a real world community. I have a circle of friends in real life, and I have that in game as well. I go about my usual way when pugging, and try to be nice (I have never used the word "noob" to make fun of anyone), and through that I may encounter more nice people and they might become friends as well... as in real life.
There are also people that act like Aholes... Do you try to be understanding for every Ahole you see in real life? I do not, so I don't do that in game either.
Guilds/Alliances/Friendlists exist to form your own ingame community, and I find that enough.

Since you seem to like reading stuff, I found "Coming of Age in Second Life" by Tom Boellstorff pretty interesting. It's about virtual vs physical reality. His conclusion I believe was that a 'virtual' reality is a reality nonetheless and should be treated like that.

The difference that I see is that way more people act like assholes ingame than they do in real life. In my opinion, it is a problem with the GW community (and any online community where lots of players interact with each other I guess), but there isn't really anything one can do about it. Sometimes you just have to ignore elitists, and hope that one day they'll realize how sad and pathetic it is to act like a jerk to newbs or casuals in an online game.

so now where introducing the 10 commandments of online community to GW2

uh hu

We have those, they are called guilds and alliances.

This is called the EULA which has codes of conduct.

I definitely agree.

I don't think we can change the people behaving this way, but we can promote better behaviour. Being in the cross hairs, of those in question, can make game enjoyment arduous. This is often the case for me, as a new player.

I can say the way I deal with it is by assessing exactly why I was targeted and realising the absurdity of what happened. This does become tough, though, when it seems that every player conducts themselves unsociably.

Personally, I believe invdividual effort matters. Rome wasn't built in a day. If there is a noticable improvement in the community's behaviour we can make it easier for people to dismiss hurtful comments.

Just like in Kama dist 2 the other day, some guy was spamming in local chat what he wanted to buy/sell and I told them that there was a "Trade" chat for that, but he continued anyway, just like we have people in life that take everything for granted and treat others like the gum stuck to their shoe.

I understand what OP wants, but realistically, not everyone is going to be all "nice and fluffy and happy" all the time. I myself am generally a nice person, but catch me on a bad day....

This is like asking the entire world's inhabitants to stop being aholes and be fluffy to everyone. Not gonna happen, unfortunately.

There is no cost involved.

You can not 'police' plain rude behaviour and you can not 'police' people into cooperation.

First of all I want to speak out, I hate rudeness in the game, though occasionally I reply kinda rude to someone who acts rude him/herself.

But I want to make a point of the uniqueness of the community of online games. We all come from all over the world, from different cultures and country's. though for the most time we all get along. What is considered rude behaviour in one country/culture can be totally polite in other cultures.

Thinking one can change the community is imo not worth the effort. Though you have a bit of influence, trying too hard to change the world will result in dissapointment. But more important is that I could ask you the question "Who are you to decide what is right or wrong?" That may sound harsh, but by saying you want to change the community, you say there is something wrong with the community, therefore your saying there is something wrong with me (as I'm part of that community) so your judging me. In my culture it is very rude to judge someone and I could be offended (though I understand you did this with the best intentions).

My point is, saying there is something wrong doesn't change anything. Don't lecture, don't preach. When someone is trolling, just ignore. There is a saying "Don't feed the troll". The best way to get rid of troll's is to ignore them. local chat has an off-button.

Here is the thing, I used to think like that, and yes i completely agree its wrong to judge people and its wrong to gossip about crap and attach yourself to anything and be needy.

The thing is, when i act real, not 'fluffy, but real, like 'cool', everyone seems to just relate, let it out, and i know im not the crazy one.

You get on the bus in the morning and no one talks to each other, they all just stare out the window with headphones in. Yes its understandable, they dont know you, and its rude to go around talking to people u dont know... or is it?

There is a fine line between anything, that includes brown nosing vs compassion.

Brown nosing is like 'i like your armor it looks like my favorite manga do u want to add me so we can cyber' (wtf someone actually said this to me)

be real is like 'my armor is manlier then urs, lets duel in ur guild hall loser forks over 10k gold'.

shooting the shit is fun if u do it right

Also about telling people what they can and cant do... i said in the first post people can do what they want just be mindful of all the consequences of any action and any repercussions.

This is patently false on two levels:

1) If it weren't costly to be nice to other people, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
2) Personal experience should tell you that it's costly to be nice to other people when they are jerks to you.

Sure you can. You kick them out of your community. Being in the community has value, and so the threat of getting kicked out creates leverage. Basic deterrence, per Schelling.

@Swingline: Yes, we call these communities guilds and alliances. The point is that your choices are to invest the time and effort in building a community to suit, find an existing one that fits your needs well enough, or deal with those sufficiently rude and unpleasant that no one will take them into a community.

A healthy attitude, but it helps to start with attainable goals. You're not Atlas, and so you can't carry the world on your shoulders no matter how hard you try.

Social choice theory often is. There's a reason economics is still called the "dismal science". It's often much easier to demonstrate the impossible than the possible with mathematics once you start dealing with complex phenomena.

Martin I disagree the idea that being humble and letting go of my ego is costly.

I think it nourishes the soul when you truly help someone who is lost. I feel nourished at least, I hope you do too.

Economics is a dismal science because we do not understand the human condition.

Life is suffering
The origin of this suffering is attachment
let go of attachment
??????
no more suffering

This all comes down to one thing; Stereotype Ragenerds

I know alot of elite players who are cool and helpful, anlot of noobs that are cool and willing to help. I consider myself a casual gamer in terms of playstyle, but I'm dedicated to my Guild and the community. While I may not be able to clear out areas/dungeons with ease solo, I will definately try to help someone do quests/vanq/whatever even if it comes at a cost to myself (cons/survivor etc).

I'm a Warrior.
I use Gust.
I use Endure Pain.
I run a FoWsc build with Balanced Stance instead of I Am Unstoppable.
I Use the Bison Cup.
I am sometimes seen with a Melandru's Stalker, with 3 Beastmastery.

Get over it. Anybody who get's legit MAD over stuff like this is a plain loser. Straigh up. Loooooseerrrr. Go outside and lrn2socialskillz.
This stuff cracks me up, it's brutal.

It's sort of insane that you actually have to tell people not to be retarded apeshit.

"OMFGFFFF!!!NOOB SCRUB WTFWTWFWTF!???? Y U HAV GUST?!
Vs.
"Hey Omar, I do this dung all the time, you should totally bring (insert skill here) instead"

Me: "Okay!"

You're reasoning in circles.

Being nice doesn't cost anything, but it generally does benefit those involved. I can only pity those for whom being nice somehow costs something.




You mean you believe the only incentive for being friendly is not getting
kicked?

He didn't intend to carry the world, just himself, as in 'my own life'. If that is not attainable, then what is?

It's not a science. It fails miserably. It fails because it doesn't understand people.

No, it's a sufficiently elementary proof that I didn't see the need to spell it out. But, given that:

- We have a population. In that population, for each individual "being nice" either has c > 0, c < 0, or c = 0
- We agree that being nice has social benefits for oneself
- We observe people not being nice

It follows that for at least some people in that population, c > 0. If c < 0 or c = 0 and being nice confers social benefits, we would always observe people being nice. We don't, so for some people it must be costly.

That's not a circular argument. It simply infers something that must be true about preferences given behavior.

As far as the second claim (being nice to jerks is costly) is concerned, I'm willing to bet that if I hit you in the face, your initial impulse will be to hit back. Suppressing that urge is costly; you have to exert mental effort to do it. The amount of negative stimulus necessary to provoke a fight/flight response may differ across people, but scratch any of us hard enough and there's a barbarian lurking.

No, but getting kicked (or the threat thereof) is generally the enforcement mechanism for whatever set of social rules a guild or alliance imposes. You made the claim that you can't 'police' people to be nice. But that's demonstrably false, since you can potentially outweigh a c > 0 for being nice with social benefits directly contingent upon being nice using the kick mechanism.

In other words, you can make jerks not be jerks if you have enough of a hold over them, and if you must engage them it's sensible to do so only on those terms.

He's arguing that making a better community is up to each individual player. It isn't. Since we can infer from the proof above that anyone that prefers to be nice already is, he's preaching to those where c > 0. But the community is too large for any individual player to reasonably expect to have an impact on community behavior simply by being nice. The result is that we have a collective action problem since c > 0 for those players.

You solve those problems by contracting around them, not by telling people to change their preferences. Denying reality isn't going to get us anywhere.

By this logic, you never should have cared enough to make the OP.

Martin Alvido, are you a Vogon? Do you pass on problems to others, do you have the ability to think for yourself or do you just want to feed this massive ego that must always be official and following the regulations?

I am humble enough to admit when I am wrong. I always try to doubt my opinions then use the scientific method to understand how my actions affect the lives of others.

If my actions improve the lives of others I stick to them. If they only feed my selfish ego then I let go of it.

Its not hard

In any free to play format it's always going to be an uphill battle.

Not saying such things don't occur in subscription games but it's far less frequent and the maturity levels are far higher in my experience.

In Guild Wars it's automatic for me to switch off everything but Guild and Alliance chat and I think it's easier this way.I'm there to play a game, not try and change the communities definition of acceptable behavior.

I also think that such behavior is actually fun for others.They enjoy the immature tanties and insults and hey....I'm not their parents.At times I was often the same when younger, stupid, rude and arrogant.If we are given the tools to exclude such behavior from our personal experience I say let the kids be kids and rage all day if they want.

Heck I even find it entertaining at times and they will grow out of it on their own, out in the real world.Trying to attempt such change in an MMO is futile at best.

Have to disagree.

One word: Repercussions.

You can get away with pretty much anything online in terms of rude behavior as long as your within the rules of the given format which is symbiotic with how effectively those rules are policed.

Do you think those same people walk up to complete strangers in the street and scream obscenities like they do in MMO.

Not a chance.

I could be mistaken, but that post didn't much look like admitting you were wrong.

Martin's point should be well taken:

People like you and Amy Awien are not the problem. By all indications, you're already perfectly nice to people in-game. You don't need obnoxious preachy pseudo-Buddhist guru threads to convince you to do it because you're already doing it.

The problem is people who are not like you. You aren't going to convince them to change their behavior with obnoxious preachy pseudo-Buddhist guru threads. And, Martin is correct, the only effective way of changing their behavior is compulsion. A-net has plenty of leverage to compel, but no incentive to exercise it. Players have very little leverage to compel -- basically social compulsion, "behave or be ostracized."

(Or, since we are talking about GW2, a-net still has time to rig the structure of the world to remove incentives and add costs to jerk-like actions. See my prior post.)

Sometimes, when playing GW, I randomly help people, and sometimes they want to thank me by paying old or giving me things.

Since I never had any use for gold, and I like to get everything by myself, I just told them to help others in turn instead.

In many cases, they just used me like they use everyone, to leech and get things done while they don't even think about what they are doing and c-space around, but in some cases they do bright up and try to "act cool" themselves and help others without asking anything in exchange.

It's just a game, so all you can do is stay true to yourself, and stay away from those that will cause you trouble...
...and report when they won't stay away from you.

Anonymity and one-off interactions are the enemies of civility. MMOs are full of both. It's much like driving, which is another activity where you'll see the worst in human nature.

I'm cynical about this because the reality is that ANet wants to sell games to the jerks, too. Marketing to them implies providing opportunities to behave in that manner for fun and profit. And let's face it, the game's likely largest demographic (adolescent males) just so happens to be the demographic most likely to engage in this sort of behavior.

While I'm not a fan of the subscription model, it does give the developer a much larger incentive to deal with social irritants and ensure that the game experience remains pleasant. I think that fireflyry is spot on there.

I have to admit, the irony makes me laugh.

It is a circular argument, you postulate cost/benefit as (only) factor, juggle some pseudo maths with them, ignoring anything else, and arrive at the conclusion that it's all about cost and benefit. That is circular reasoning.

The argument doesn't conclude that cost/benefit is the only factor. It assumes that the decision is driven by cost/benefit and arrives at other conclusions about the shape of preferences, given utility maximization.

If you disagree with the assumptions of expected utility analysis, it's on you to demonstrate a set of assumptions with greater explanatory power. You also need to provide a logically consistent and distinct explanation for the undesirable behavior, which you haven't yet done.

Pretty extreme and given the involvement of a physical threat and injury, not applicable.

I'd see a more common situation, like someone not paying attention in traffic, making you stop or something. You can go in a rage about it, or let it pass and wave them by. The latter costs nothing.

It might be different if you'd have the impression they were deliberate, or trying to take advantage. But then the motivation for a, possibly, not so friendly reaction would still not be cost/benefit based, but rather from a sense of self-preservation, or territorial.
People may respond differently to similar events one day then another, due to other factors (mood, fatigue, stress) and recent events. A nice response may positively influence others and likewise shift them towards a tendency to respond nice during future events.

You may not be able to 'carry' the world but you certainly do influence the world directly around you.

And without cost.

Social threat is also very real, and can provoke even stronger responses on an imaging scan. There's some good psychological research on the subject out there.

I won't disagree with your contention that preferences vary in time as a result of other factors. It does not follow that you can move the community by being nice yourself. At best you can alter your own preferences in time, although that's going to lead to dragging beliefs about nature/nurture into the discussion. Since that's still an unsettled question, any disagreement there will lead to impasse.

Like?

On me alone? Where's your proof? I was working on that by the way, but long posts tend to take long and eventually get trashed by the call of real life.

Cost/benefit does not carry sufficient explanatory power. It does not explain why people would respond differently to similar situations, at different times.

Sure it does. The assumption that preferences are static at the moment of the decision in no way requires the assumption that preferences are static in time.

Zaller's widely accepted theory on political behavior suggests that people's inconsistent political attitudes can be explained by variations in recent, salient stimuli. But for you to be able to affect the community by being nice, your niceness would have to comprise a sufficiently large share of stimuli that others are being exposed to. That's not going to happen in the broader community, which is why you can't move the community alone. This just provides an even stronger argument for creating smaller communities: not only can you acquire the deterrent effects from the threat of being ostracized, but you can comprise a larger share of the stimuli that others in the community are being exposed to.

That people who are being nice experience a lower cost for doing so than those who are not being nice? That's distinct from the assumptions, which specified nothing about the shape of individuals' preferences.

Would you disagree with the contention that politeness in our society generally involves the expenditure of more time than telling people to shove it? If not, then you have arrived at an ironclad argument that being nice is costly. Your time has value greater than zero, because it's finite and non-renewable.

Absolutely - and even more so. You need no MRI scans for that.



Not so much preferences, as those sound generally more stable then just influences from recent events. I just think cost/benefit, is not quite sufficient to explain behaviour, though it certainly doesn't hurt to explore that path.

As to the nurture/nature debate (which is relevant to the discussion), we didn't get the impressive machinery between to serve as massive counterweight, the least it does is provide a way to adapt swiftly to changing conditions, where genetic evolution takes too long. That's +1 for nurture. On the other hand, if past evolution didn't have some influence over our decisions and actions we would have perished long ago (like who'd want to have sex and make babies?). That's +1 for nature.

Looks like a draw to me

On the question of affecting your own preferences in time, sure. That question is relevant to the argument, but I don't see a way to settle it.

That still leaves the question of affecting others' preferences on the table.

That debate will not soon be 'settled', I think, it is a complex mix of nurture/nature at work in us.

The suggestion of smaller communities is interesting, especially for a MMO, individual actions could have more influence, but it also carries a greater risk of abuse and communities going astray themselves. And how would you create small but viable communities in an online game?

Right. Settling that debate would require a theory capable of explaining the conditions when nature trumps nurture and vice versa. Then we could just apply that theory to the case and have done with it.

Unfortunately, that theory seems to be a long way off.

As Swingline correctly pointed out, we already have a weak form of those communities in guilds and alliances. The physical constraints of server capacity offers a natural focal point for community activity, although leveraging that limit would be inefficient and therefore costly from the developer's point of view.

If I were the one responsible for the design, I'd want to create revocable licenses for being a guild leader which come with certain conduct expectations, give the guild leaders more power by making at least some desirable content accessible only to a guild group, and monitor the guild leaders via an anonymous reporting mechanism that can trigger investigation. That way, you get the prospective benefits of everyone watching everyone else.

If the guild leader does something sufficiently stupid to get the license revoked, the community dissolves. Community members don't want that, so they'll be incentivized to remind the guild leader to stay on the reservation. The guild leader has the power to set expectations and give people the heave ho if they don't live up to them, but abuse of that power will eventually result in removal. Members/ex-members can always burn the guild leader in retaliation for abuses. Finally, the community gets held responsible for the actions of its members outside the community.

As for the question, "why would you agree to be a guild leader", I'd say that the answer is "bribe them". Give them a small fraction of every trade made by a member, or a glowing aura and a name under their avatar five times as large as anyone else's, or access to exclusive content, or whatever it takes to get people to sign on the line which is dotted and do a good job.

That's not a perfect system, but it's a start. If you couldn't, say, trade with other players without being a member of a guild, and you'd get kicked out of a guild for regularly being a jerk to members or non-members, I'm betting people would be a lot nicer to one another.

I also bet that a lot of issues could be worked out via negotiations with guild leaders rather than using the reporting system, which would make Support's life a lot easier. If using /report resulted in some mild hassles such as not being able to log in if you receive a Support's e-mail until after you answer it, the developer would only have to sift through the more serious complaints. Between that and punishing spurious /report usage, you could probably sort out a sizable fraction of the behavioral issues we have now and cut the developer's workload.

Everyone likes a good vent every now and then, though. That's usually why people play vidya. Blow off RL steam. And this is why we have trolls. There is no perfect social system, unless you want to be so protected you will one day become infected with trollivitis because you weren't exposed to enough of it at a young age.

There is one thing the OP is overlooking and that is WvWvW's power to bring a community together. The whole point of WvWvW is not just large scale combat, its other intended goal is to give servers incentive to become a more tightly nit community. This wont solve the problem of people being jerks but it should help direct some of it towards others on the server your fighting. The same theory has been shown in many works of science fiction such as Star Trek. There are still a few bad apples but the earth as a whole has become united because they are not alone in the universe. Same thing can happen in reality once that day comes.

Instead of trying to stop the problem outright Anet chose to redirect a lot of it through WvWvW.

GW1 became a shitfest because everyone inside the game is conglomerated through free and unlimited server switching. I sincerely hope this isnt the case with GW2 otherwise it would defeat the entire purpose.

Let me explain something to you. I was an assshole most of my life untill i started reading buddhism then i understood the meaning of compassion.

Zen Buddhism is the reason, not the action to take. The action to take is to be a role model.

Be the guy who can go to a bar, chug 5 beers in front of 5 sexy btiches, and say, 'which one of you wants to fcuk me'. This is called confidence, and people love it.

Since we are all intellectuals and can think for ourselves, let me pitch this out there. Can you act for yourself based upon your beliefs or are you too weak and afraid to make the world a better place by being a better person and being a role model and a leader.

No one is stopping you from being a role model but you shouldn't try to force or insult people into your way of thinking. They have the basic human right to think for themselves. People can be inspired through the actions of others though and that's why being a role model is the best choice. Its what Jesus and Buddha did, they didn't insult people to try to and harness their fears into their way of thinking. They have to make the choice themselves to be a better person, that's what being a human being is all about.

I admire your efforts to try, but ultimately what Martin said rings true - as many of us try and play this way, without the ability to police it it will fail. Part of why it will fail is because the game is not an R-18 rating, so we have to realise sometimes that we are actually dealing with children (well, teenagers) and they don't have the life experience and maturity through past learnings that we do. A 14 year old doesn't have the tact and reasoning to approach things calmly and rationally the way a 40 year old should be able to.

In the end, all we can do is police our own turf via selective guild recruitment. We can't force everyone to try and be good to each other and not be "dickish" or trolls, but we can make sure that kind of behaviour doesn't happen in our own little pieces of the game world.

And sometime those of us a bit (ok, a lot) older just like to be a*seholes. And let's face it, when people screw up, get called on it and are showed how to do better, only to continue to screw up because they either don't care or are deliberately being stupid, there is only so much one can reasonably be expected to take before being a total dick towards them.

Isn't that exactly what I was talking about?

Er... I think you still might have some work to do in that respect...

Hint: Referring to women as "sexy btiches" and propositioning them for sex en mass upon your first meeting is not exactly "compassionate" -- or appropriate -- behavior.

Hint: Insulting people who do not agree with you is not "compassionate" behavior either.

Uh... yeah.... Thanks for pointing out a trivial distinction on an issue that no one else has mentioned or seems to care about.

I'd rather not. You shouldn't. People who love when you do that are either (a) selling beer, or (b) moronic.

1. Who said we are all intellectuals? More to the point, who said you are an intellectual? I seem to recall something about beer and bitches....

2. Your insulting accusation makes no sense: Because I refuse to do what you tell me to, I am not thinking for myself?

3. I'm not failing to act upon my beliefs; I'm failing to act upon your beliefs. Which is OK, since (1) they're not my beliefs, and (2) they're stupid beliefs not worth acting upon.

4. It's not a matter of being weak and afraid. It's a matter of recognizing the impossible and not being so dumb as to try it anyway.

5. Well, since you insist that I should be a "role model and a leader," I hereby nominate myself to lead those who wish to mock you and your stupid beliefs. Membership is open to all.

-----

Seriously, are you trolling? Combining "i started reading buddhism then i understood the meaning of compassion" in the same breath with "chug 5 beers in front of 5 sexy btiches, and say, 'which one of you wants to fcuk me'" is a pretty epic troll.

I don't even want to think about the possibility that you're not trolling...

-----

Note to mods: Even though everything OP says seems destined to become flame-bait (and I am certainly obliging him), Martin and Amy are having a civil, rational, intelligent, informative discussion that might warrant keeping an otherwise worthless thread open.