When the "system" screws up....

[DrFaroohk]

...and they can somehow blame it on you. It's any type of authority really, be it the police or a teacher or your parents or even your favorite video game.

Couple of examples - say you get a letter from the court. It says "You are hereby ordered to appear before the honorable Judge Douchebag on October..."

But then it's blank. They never gave you a date! So how the hell do I know when to go? Oh, I could call. But why is that my job? It's the courts job to give me the right info. Why do they get to just pass of responsibility? I try to do it all the time but I'm told it's my responsibility. Why do they get to make excuses but I can't.

Or even, with a game. World of Warcraft. Let's say the programmers screw up, don't do their jobs and they let a bug through that enables you to mine the same place over and over again with no delay. Awesome! Again...why is that my fault? Oh, it's an exploit? Fuck off, it's your job to take care of this. It is not my job.

So do I get to do that? Do you? Hell no. Do I get to blame the town for not sending me a reminder that I need to get my registration renewed? Of course not! No matter how many excuses I pull out of the air about how busy and overloaded I am, I do not ever get to use that excuse to get out of trouble. And yet somehow, the big guys do.

It's no wonder people go crazy...you ever see those guys who like firebomb the post office or something? Yeah, they're misguided, but really, who's to blame here? Oh wait, that guy is? You mean you can't blame the government when someone else screws up? Well gee whiz.

[HYHYBT]

The first example... assuming you got the notice before October, *you know* you're supposed to show up for court. You don't know exactly when, but you know you are supposed to be there. And you know how to find out when. So you cannot legitimately claim ignorance. It's a nuisance, but the alternative is worse. And after all, the last chance to avoid the problem was YOURS. Because you knew you should have been there and how to find out the information you were missing. (Though this does remind me of the jury duty summons I got for Clarke County. How that happened, I don't know, as I live in, and have always been registered to vote in, *Jackson* County. Since it was also well past the date when I got it, I figured it was best to let sleeping dogs lie, and never heard another thing about it.)

On the game: I've never played World of Warcraft. But I will assume, first, that there are not supposed to be such places, and therefore any that you find are an error; second, that you as a player know this (or at least, if you don't the first time you run into something like that, you will know from then on); and third, that your benefiting from the bug has a negative effect on other players. The last is most important; if your taking advantage of what you know you shouldn't be able to do is only a curiosity, or lets you get ahead in some other type of game where others are not involved, that's different. But if the game works as I understand it, keeping things fair for everybody outweighs letting a few feel good about finding ways to cheat. Even if you didn't realize it was cheating at the time.... which, again, is an excuse that only works once.

On the third one: a reminder is a courtesy. You know your registration expires. If it's like it is here, they even make it easy to remember because it expires on your birthday. You forgot your birthday was coming up? Yeah, right. Pay the fine and move on.

[Andara Bledin]

So, basically, because people are human, you want to use that as an excuse to be an SC. Got it.



^-.-^

[DrFaroohk]

Not at all. I just don't see the difference between me screwing up and blaming other people (bad) and them screwing up and blaming me (somehow that's ok).

[jackfaire]

Couple of examples - say you get a letter from the court. It says "You are hereby ordered to appear before the honorable Judge Douchebag on October..."

But then it's blank. They never gave you a date! So how the hell do I know when to go? Oh, I could call. But why is that my job? It's the courts job to give me the right info. Why do they get to just pass of responsibility? I try to do it all the time but I'm told it's my responsibility. Why do they get to make excuses but I can't.

In that example your basically saying they sent you a letter with the date blank on purpose.

Yes they made the mistake of the date being blank but they obviously don't' know that they made the mistake and the best way for them to correct that mistake is for you to contact them and get the information they mistakenly didn't give you.

It's no more passing the buck then pointing out your friend is trailing toilet paper on his shoe. Just because you point it out doesn't mean your accepting responsibility for the mistake.

If you never show up and they were never made aware before that time that they made a mistake and didn't tell you when to show up then you look like your one of many people who are just making excuses.

[DrFaroohk]

^ But that's what all of that sounds like. We didn't know, we're too busy, there's so much to do, do you have any idea how many court cases we have to handle, do you know how many letters we send out, we're so short handed there's only 3 deputies on duty blah blah blah....that just all sounds like lame excuses.

Honestly, I'm all for it. They screwed up, they're busy. Not their fault. But switch it around, and man, I'm sorry I forgot I had court today, do you have any idea how much I have going on? I work 60 hours a week and never have a full day off and am managing my divorce and ex-wife and child support and alimony and fighting for a promotion and praying this lump in my head isnt anything serious and hoping my check made it to the electric company on time.....

Oh, but those are lame excuses! Wait a second here...it was perfectly valid when party A started pulling shit out of their asses...but not ok for party B...simply because Party A is bigger and stronger, they get to pick and choose which piles of crap to sling on people....yeah, that's fair.

[bara]

Despite the astounding stupidity of our legal system.. a quick phone call is not a bad thing but then take the letter to the local paper to show how stupid the district is.

As for WoW, its in the EULA to not use exploits known or unknown.

[MrsEclipse]

It's bad when they do it, but they don't admit it. Why do you want to be as bad as they are?

[lordlundar]

Or even, with a game. World of Warcraft. Let's say the programmers screw up, don't do their jobs and they let a bug through that enables you to mine the same place over and over again with no delay. Awesome! Again...why is that my fault? Oh, it's an exploit? Fuck off, it's your job to take care of this. It is not my job.

I will put this as simply as I can: Just because an error was made in the programming IS NOT, repeat IS. NOT. justification to blatantly take advantage of the situation and not report it. Yes, the programming error was on their end, but using the exploit to your gain and not reporting it is ENTIRELY your fault.

Did you not pay attention to several of the top guilds working in collusion to not report a bug during beta testing just so they could exploit it when the patch went live and got hit with an up to an 8 day ban?

[Amanita]

We had this happen in City of Heroes too, when various exploits in Mission Architect (a feature which lets players make their own missions) went live, which allowed people to powerlevel unbelievably fast. Some people abused the hell out of this, filling their accounts with "AE Babies", characters levelled from 1-50 solely through this exploit. The devs were pretty ticked, threatening to remove access to the characters made in such fashion. I am not sure if they followed through, but they definitely made it clear that abuse of the exploit would not be tolerated, until such time as they could fix it.

[DrFaroohk]

And again I'm fine with that...I don't see much difference in specifics. I see "If Party A screws up, it is the responsibility of Party B to point out the mistake." Whether it's a game and it's players, the court and it's subjects, parents and kids, alpha lion and other beta lions, don't care. Don't see a difference. The rest is all fluff. So I feel that for it to be a valid policy, it must be applies universally, or not at all.

I'm fine being responsible for pointing out other people's mistakes. Just as they are responsible for pointing out mine. OR we can just worry about our own shit and not be responsible for other people's stuff. Either way, it needs to be consistent or it's just wrong.

[lordlundar]

So let's see if I have this straight. You have no problems with someone informing an official body of a mistake they made, but you yourself feel you don't have to? Honestly, a lot of your rants I've read so far basically boil down to "I don't want to change to fit in society! Society should change to accommodate me!"

[DrFaroohk]

I think you missed something somewhere.

I want one of two things. Either A) I'm required to remind someone of their mistakes, and someone else is required to remind me of my mistakes. Or B) I am not required to tell anyone of their mistakes, and neither is anyone else.

Not too complicated. Most of my rants are NOT about "I don't want to change", it's more like "I have zero tolerance for your bullshit that you've fooled the rest of the population into believing".

And I happen to see through the inconsistencies better than most, and because I'm better at understanding people a little better than most. I can usually tell when someone's lying to me, or when they're screwing me, or when they honestly believe in the rules they are enforcing because they really think it's fair.

[Fezzik]

Sometimes an "unfair" solution is the lesser of evils.

If all WoW players were allowed to freely exploit any game bugs they found, a few players could exploit their way to tons of gathered material or sneak through dungeons to get server first achievements and/or super powerful items. Would it be fair for them to use their ill gotten gain to corner the market on ore or pummel people in PvP zones with their uber gear? Is that a better outcome than punishing players that use game bugs for their own gain?

The court thing would lead to a similar problem. If you could get out of a court date if you received an incomplete form, what's going to stop someone from using a solvent to remove some of the ink on their form and delay/cancel their trial because "the court screwed up"? Is making a phone call worse than letting defendants slide on a technicality?

[HYHYBT]

You're creating your own common basis (reminding others of their mistakes) when that is not the basis the rules were made on in the first place. A system built around your foundation might work, but it's not the one we have, and it doesn't make sense to demand that everything be rebuilt around your own pet criterium.