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Blizzard Punishing Griefing On Warcraft III Ladders
Thanks to RPGDot for pointing to a Battle.net forum post, in which Blizzard indicate they will ban Warcraft III teams for 'griefing'. This requires Blizzard acting on in-game tactics, rather than illicit software mods/hacks - they mention: "We have received reports and observed that certain Warcraft III players have deliberately caused their own teams to lose in team games. This goes against the spirit of fair play on Battle.net, and as such, we will take action on a case-by-case basis. In each case, if we determine that griefing is in fact occurring, the griefer's Battle.net account and access to ladder games will be subject to removal."
Couldn't they just force all the griefers to be on the same team?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Sure, griefers are players with names like [jerk]IWILLDROP who go into random team games. As soon as a game starts they usually say something rude or racist or what not and then immediately drop from the game. I am sure Blizzard gets tons of reports about these jerks and is looking for a way for random team people to not get stuck with them. Thus, they are looking to ban accounts of people who routinely do this. I doubt this is a viable solution, since these people will just create new accounts, but at least Blizzard is trying.
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Called Greifers, these people usually tend to haunt MMORPGs but can be found in just about any game. They get bored with the "standard" gameplay, and so attempt to ruin the game for other players.
In MMOs, this can be anything from following around a newbie and killing anything close to them, preferably after it gets to about 25% health, to building many small cheap buildings in one area to prevent others from building there (a real example from A Tale in the Desert) - the harder it is for the player to get around the greifing tactics, the better it is for the greifer.
In RTS games, Greifing can range from the passive (disconnecting after 30 seconds (or 2 mins or whatever depending on game), sitting on one's ass not doing _anything_ until someone kills your town center and starting workers) to active (building an army, not attacking with the rest of your allies, then when they're armies are away you force-attack their bases with your anti-building troops) and generally ruin the game for everybody else. The winning team is robbed of a challenge, the losing team robbed of a decent chance.
I can see this policy only being exercised on solid cases, ie. multiple complaints for the account, with replays available. Just having a partner that sucks isn't greifing (though some greifers do intentionally play crappily to get under the greif radar) and I can't imagine any of those cases holding up to a blizzard staff member reviewing the evidence.
Even though a lot of people seem to hate Blizzard, this just proves that they may actually care about their customers. I'm glad there's at least one game company looking out for their user-base.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
Try this analogy for size:
Imagine you belong to a tennis club where you can play scratch games of doubles. Sometimes your doubles partner just deliberately throws the game. You'd probably try to avoid playing that person, but if he persistently did that he might well be subject to sanction and perhaps ejection from the tennis club for unsporting behaviour.
Does that mean doubles tennis is a broken game? Or does it just mean that you sometimes need extra social or organisational structures to make games work? On the 'net, those problems can be harder to solve because of the relative anonymity, so your range of solutions is narrower.
First, this is how they are "fixing" it. Rather than patching to record the behavior or altering the gameworld so that griefing is somehow no longer fun, they are going to patrol their own gameworld and punish griefers. It's a fix with a meat space touch, but still a fix.
Second, Blizzard isn't just a game developer in this case. They are also a game host. Here they are not just selling a game, but a game world and a (must control gag reflex) user experience. As a result, it isn't enough for them to merely let their game out into the wild as it were. They have to provide the appropriate environment for most of their clients to enjoy their game.
There's an easy solution to that one, don't make an ally you can't trust.
And here lies the problem: battle.net players are randomly paired with a partner (or 2 or 3 ) for team ladder games.
There is nothing preventing the little griefers from organizing their own games on open or non league servers, so if they want to throw games there is nothing stopping them. But in league games?
Blizzard owns the servers, so you play the way Blizzard wants you to or you can go play by yourself. Getting the boot from battle.net does not make Warcraft unplayable, it just denies access to their matching service which I think is fair. Now is this whole thing going to blow up in their face? It could, we shall have to see.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
You mean like Diablo 2's Open Battle.net which is run largely by hacked characters? Yeah, I tried it before. It sucks. People either cheat or hack... and then they kill you... repeatedly.
I can understand not wanting people to mess up the ladders. So why not have ladder bans? There are systems for this that can work without keeping people off B.net as a whole.
Because its not just the ladders. Have you even played Warcraft III online? All regular melee games are setup so that you're randomly assigned teammates and opponents. YOU DON'T GET TO PICK YOUR TEAMMATES. If you're playing a 4v4 and your teammates decide to be assholes and force attack your base, tough luck you just wasted about 20 minutes of time and lost the game. Its not like Starcraft where everyone gets dropped into a room beforehand and can chat it out before starting.
Banning a huge sum of players on the off chance that other players will have a better time is a flawed business model, and no competent business would ever do it.
It WOULD be a flawed business model if you weren't ignorant. In this case; Step one, YOU buy the game. Step two, YOU go on Battle.net and get yourself banned. Step three, YOU are now screwed. Now where does Blizzard get YOUR money? The answer: Step one.
Battle.net is NOT a pay-to-play model. Once you get past Step one, Blizzard doesn't care if you decide to destroy the CD in a microwave, they already have YOUR money. If it wasn't for the advertisement banners and the low bandwidth necessary to run the servers, Blizzard would be in deep financial trouble considing the fact that people are STILL playing Diablo 1 on Battle.net for FREE.