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Gamers Don't Want Grief
An article at the Guardian Gamesblog looks at the frustrations of online griefers. They talk about some of the unpleasant activities online gamers engage in, and briefly discuss the future of dealing with griefers. Scott Jennings and Richard Bartle chime in with ideas on how things might be handled. From the article: "'I expect we'll see more and more self-government,' says Scott Jennings, game developer and author of Massively Multiplayer Games For Dummies. 'The reason is fairly obvious if not particularly noble: it's less expensive for game companies to have their customers police themselves than hire people to do it. The trick, and why you don't see it generally, is to construct self-policing schemes in such a way that they don't enable unscrupulous players to use them as tools of grief.'" Darniaq disagrees, on the basis that players just don't care about immersion.
From TFA:
Yeah...we have the same problem in real life.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
All that I ask is that studios give gamers tools to isolate themselves from having to deal with jerks. You are not going to get rid of them and probably the best that you can do is fence them off where they can't cause as much trouble. Otherwise you will spend far too much trouble on an ineffective solution when that time would have been better spent creating a better game.
Dont get me wrong, I hate greivers on my online games as much as the next guy. But sometimes, they are what make things really interesting. What would EQ have been like if I never had to watch out for rolling trains and holding down camps and such? Just wouldnt be the same experience...
You mean like moderation or meta-moderation is?
He's on to us.
I thought that, by the title, this was in response to the article about Jack Thompson's video game bill being passed.
Doesn't he provide more than enough grief for all gamers?
The sky is blue, water is wet, and smoking is bad for you.
And now, the weather...
Any influence must come from lobbying the entity running the servers. The griefer you jack today might be the hall monitor tomorrow (or yesterday, or 30 secs from now). Perhaps a bunch of geewhiz posts will follow lauding the joys of community self-government in MMO. Nevertheless, all you'll create is a bunch of lobbyists. As for Darniaq's argument... The thrill of exploring a open-ended world in order to make real-world financial gain must be tempered by the knowledge that if someone at the top decides they don't like you, out you go with all you've worked for. At least when you're fired from a real job they have trouble taking what you earned six months ago. But that's the default experience when your account gets stuffed because you called the wrong person a tool by accident.
I play eve, and in the sector of space that I hang out in, there's a highly organized, well skilled, tech 2 equiped group of pirates that fly around looking for kills.
They're not there to try and claim territory, they're not there to complete a mission objective. They're there to get easy kills. One guy in particular has been playing since 2003 (meaning, almost all the skills he could ever want are trained to the max, giving him lots of bonuses), and is flying the fastest ship in the game. All he does is look for solo miners and people in shuttles and frigates to gank. He always runs when there's any sort of resistance.
I guess I just don't understand it. I don't get why people would want to do that. Spend all that time in game learning skills and earning money, only to never engage in anything challenging. Only to cause problems for people whom you really have nothing against. It just doesn't make sense, and I can't see how it's fun.
~Wx
sig?
Griefers tend really to fall into two main catragories: Children, and people who want attention.
The first you can get rid of easily enough by putting in age limits. That will get rid of the large majority, but most children aren't very good at griefing unless they have some sort of script they downloaded to help them along. They're really just annoyances.
It's the ones in the later catagory who are the worst cases, and in many instances their anti-social behavior takes place in real life as well (Any one here know about sibe?) These people do these things online because they know they can cause a fuss, and hopefully even hurt people, without themselves being subject to any penalties or pain. And they gain all sorts of attention and notoriety for it.
How do you deal with it? Well communities -can't- deal with it if they have no clear and easy method to kick the person off the system immediately, or at least eject them from the area of play. There are ways of dealing with this beyond having some sort of game master around keeping an eye on things, but lets be honest: We're paying for the game, the company should have some sort of GM around to deal with these people!
It's like real life, we have police and courts for a reason. Grievers can quickly destroy a game and lose you customers. Part of customer service means dealing with them. Yes these people once ejected can come back, but if it's costing money only the most dysfunctional or vicious will keep returning. Then it does become a legal matter, though in many cases those people are going to end up in jail for real life criminal matters unrelated to the game.
But the sad fact is this problem will never go away, crime is as old as society itself. There are always people who want to steal what you have, hurt you, or just muck everything up for everyone else. When I have to ban these people from the system I deal with it is amazing to me that they often have NO IDEA at all of why they're in trouble, they just can't understand why it's not alright for them to do whatever they want and so what if they hurt and abuse other people in the process. Or worse yet, get pissed at me for having the nerve to stop them. I have also found that if you catch trouble makers when they first show up, and give them a taste of the punishments instore if they continue, that many will toe the line from there on. But that usually only works with the younger players who will still respond to discipline.
In short, there is no easy solution and trying to pan it all off on the players will never work satisfactorily unless you have a method for giving some of those players power and making sure they don't abuse it. I think this is probably the hardest part of MMO game design today.
Graph theory has some very interesting applications in controlling griefing. Different companies have used this before, and it's a system maintenance sort of thing... you have to take out griefer networks, not just individuals. But this can be done. Almost everything you do in an MMO is probably tracked -- the people you talk to, the people you trade with, the places you visit. It's all data and it's relatively trivial to run analysis on it that results in a visual network map of connected players. This is fairly similar to what the FBI does to track terrorist networks, only obviously the data is a lot harder to obtain.
Then, in the case of griefers, you can explore varying degrees of ugliness. You can warn them. You can ban them. You can cancel their accounts. And then you can contact their credit card company and report them for harassment and/or online fraud, which can REALLY suck. But the core point is that if you take out key nodes in a network of griefers, the pool settles out remarkably quickly.
Griefing is controllable with the right expert developing the right tools. All the MMO has to do is decide that they want to do something about it. But so long as they keep getting subscriptions, cough, certain large MMOs are not going to make that decision. But some of it has to do with the age of the MMO. Young MMOs will tend to want to play nice with griefers. It never works.
This drove me nuts until I finally realized that I was going to get griefed no matter what, and the answer is to make sure I deserve it. I began griefing non-stop. I'd just hang out in lowbie zones and harrass and grief people. Eventually some 60's would show up and put a stop to it and /spit on me a thousand times.
And then when my alts got griefed or ganked or whatever, I laughed at the dancing night elf who was /spitting on me a thousand times because, quite frankly, I knew that I really really had that coming. I gave better than I got.
The fact that I was der uber Shaman only made griefing more satisfying. Run the boards, little boys! Complain that you can't take a shaman 20 levels above you!
So yeah. Solve griefers with more griefing. The problem doesn't go away I guess but you enjoy the game anyhow. Flame away, I don't care, I cancelled months ago. After PvP grinding to get my elite super dooper PvP set I tried some PvE, but when they announced Necropolis I said fuggit. It's just another treadmill. I think I'm done with on-line gaming of that sort.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Jesus H. Christ. I read the article and these "gamers" take their recreational time way, way, way too seriously. Look at this example:
The players of World of Warcraft were left with a similar conundrum in March, when a group of gamers performed an act whose only purpose was to cause emotional pain. The death of a member of the community inspired her fellow gamers to hold a virtual funeral, which was raided by a malicious mob that made short work of the mourners, all of whom had relinquished their weapons as a sign of respect. Since the funeral was naively held in a zone designed for combat, few could question the legitimacy of the attack within the game's rules. None the less, the mourners were outraged, not at the penalties their characters would have to suffer, but at the brazen attack on their feelings.
You're playing a video game where you can kill and destroy. That's the game. Your virtual character can do anything you want to do in the game that the game allows. Some want to sit around making a political statement, others want to wreck havoc. The only "rules" in a video game is what the programmers write into it. Other than that, anything goes.
Of course, you can't do anything that's already illegal such as a DDOS attack or sending viruses to other players. Or even cheating - i.e. changing the "rules" in a video game than what the programmers put in place. Note, this is different than taking advantage of an exploit, which is perfectly fine since it is in the game. If gamers don't like it, the programmers can put out a patch to fix it.
The point is that this is just a video game and there are no real-world dollar values assigned to the bits of electrons on the servers' hard drives. If there was, then anyone (most likely the parent company or a programmer within the company) could create 10,000 "uber-great-warrior-characters" for $100 each and be an instant millionaire. There is no such thing as "property rights" in a video game since you own nothing. You pay a monthly fee to access the physical property (servers, routers, etc.) of the game company.
Could you imagine the chaos if your video game character's items were considered real property? Could you get sued for theft if you play a thief and steal the items? Could you get sued for sexual harassment if you knock down a character and remove their armor, thus exposing some of its virtual body parts? Could the video game company be sued for not providing adequate virtual security (i.e. unpickable lock on a treasure chest or your house) to protect your virtual items?
The whole point of a video game is to escape from reality into an alternate place. Some think they can take their politics, opinions, etc. with them and shape the alternate place into the same fucked up place as the real world. Others, like myself, who lived in a structured and planned out environment like to wreck havoc and chaos in the alternate world as an escape from real life. I like to inject my bit of "Grand Theft Auto" gameplay in all of the online game I play.
Scott Jennings used to be known as Lum the Mad, correct?
I occasionally grief in online games, but it's more of a roleplaying thing for me. If I go ganking noobs as my undead rogue, it's because she's a freakin' undead rogue. What do you expect, hugs and kisses from the walking corpse who just happens to be a trained and specialized thief/killer?
However, if I play an evil character, I usually have at least a few extremely kind and benevolent alts. I've played MUDs before where I'd strip someone of gear with my evil character but happily re-equip them with better than what they had before as one of my alts. I just don't want to play good characters all the time because it gets boring.
I don't really understand people who'll spend absolutely all their time griefing, however. To me, that's just as boring as spending all your time helping others as a good character, and while it may be fun to gank a lowbie once, I rarely see the point in corpse camping. There's no challenge in it, and one or two kills are enough to convince the guy that you're evil and dangerous.
You want the Pirate dead bad enough, commission a fleet or another bad ass ship to go kill him.
He is just playing the game by the rules. You don't like the rules, don't play!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
There are thousands of gamers just like me who only want to escape. We do not throw hissy fits in blogs and whine about things like "class balancing" and "endgame content". For gamers like me, immersion is the point and purpose. I'm as likely to explore as do anything remotely along the lines of "gaining experience" or "grinding". We seek the Holodeck experience, not robotic slaying that only leads to dissatisfaction when there is nothing left to kill. I submit that a large part of gaming is Immersion, and refute statements to the contrary.
And my dollar is just as good as the uberwarrior level 9 million who does nothing but play the game, and run scripts and macros in game while getting the occasional nap or canned ravioli break. Game companies receive exactly the same amount of revenue from me as from uberwarrior, and I represent a more desirable demographic for the game companies, because I do not endlessly bitch about the imperfections present in every video game ever written.
"The reason is fairly obvious if not particularly noble: it's less expensive for game companies to have their customers police themselves than hire people to do it."
Gee. I said the same thing about slashdot moderation and got a -1: troll for my troubles.*
*I also said it's as good an idea as letting prisoners run the prisons too.
The article overstates it's argument with the hyberloic asssertion that griefing constitutes a "social disease." One gamer's griefing is another gamer's villainous role play.
I do not have much experience with MMORPGs, but from playing Eve Online a bit, I have to wonder sometimes where the "disease" really lies. Do the pirates who go around blowing up miners and new players in low security space have a "social disease"? What about the miners who spend endless hours obsessively and repetitively dragging the same icons from one window to another in complete safety in the high security systems? Does that qualify as a "social disease?
More importantly, since I suspect that "anti-grefing" initiatives put the power in the hands of the latter type, do we really want them making virtual worlds "safe"? It sounds like a script for taking the real world writ small into virtual worlds, creating endless bureaucracy and oppressive governance.
Hey, at least, where's there is power to be had, you can always play the game to get that power... so you can grief people with it.
Griefer's are nothing new. They are every day people and are often just as annoying in real life as in video games. It is easy to avoid them. First, a great way to enjoy MMOs is to get all of your real life friends to play. Then you have a strong alliance. Also, you're always garunteed a group because your friends will run with you even if they have already done whatever quest. Second, just like how you wouldn't click a link that says "virus.exe" in AIM, don't fall for dumb scams.
Have fun while playing video games, but don't take them so seriously. Treat "n00bs" the way you would want to be treated and Karma will look out for you.
Winds light to variable; lighter in the daytime and darker at night.
Back to you, Jim.
I decided to play some planetside since its free now. You get grief when people ram you or run into your field of fire, then your guns lock for 10 minutes. Its frustrating, and not a good solution to grief. Player policing would work better.
God spoke to me.
Good greif....
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
(arg, comment wiping slashdot code...)
again...
My ideal system would be an MMO with a 'Karma' system, where you could rate other players up or down, and the accumulated rating would be visable to other players, but not exactly who rated who up/down. various systems would expire or cancel ratings, with higher rated people getting more votes, along with long term account holders, or people noted by administrator for being helpful to others.
Combined with a set of G-mail like invitation only servers, to prevent bulk accounts all shilling for each other, and a large enough player base that would overwhelm any small group shilling for themselves (but, if you can get enough people to work together to rank each other up, they wouldn't need to be ranked up, they could just play with each other) you may be able to build a community of people who are nice to random strangers for the long term reputation benifit.
NPC's and the game system would be unaware of these ratings, ensuring not only that if someone wants to play alone they can (not denying service to a playing customer) but that the system could be portable across games; imagine if your good player reputation in a Fantasy MMO was visable when you're appling for a spot in an FPS clan... or if your message board Karma helped you get a group in a MMO...
What you're describing is exactly how blood-feuds and racial-type hatred gets started. I play World of Warcraft too, and everyone I've ever talked to has had that same sort of problem. Back before the Honor system at some point some kid playing an Alliance character or a Horde character wanted to feel über-superior, and went and ganked some someone. And since it was so fun they decided to camp them. That level 20 Alliance guy then began to have a hatred, and a desire for revenge. When he turned to 60, he then dished it back; after all, this was what happened to him. And then the Horde victim then harbored a grudge, and so on and so forth.
Griefing is not best served with more griefing: all you're doing is training the next generation of griefers. Or quitters; the people who don't buy into that system are more likely to stop playing.
These grudges still exist, and it's just part of human nature. Think Palestine and Israel, Shiites and Sunnis, Tutsis and Hutus... the list could go on.
yours,
kbs
...is that the rules have no real *teeth*. No company running a game is going to set up self-governing abilities that will have worthwhile punishments for violators - that could lead to the violating player *cancelling his subscription*.
Until game companies are willing to put their money where their mouths are, self-governing in games will always be ineffectual.
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
No, if you have to verify with a credit card the age limits work quite well, and if a parent lets their child use thier card to get on, you can sue them for fraud. Seen it done. And while yes some children will sneak through, you can usually quickly identify them by their behavoir and get them kicked out.
There is a reason society limits the rights of children, and I myself prefer not to deal with someone online who is a child unless I know that upfront. I also do not like to play online games with children in them, mainly because their behavior is often obnoxious and they usually have no social skills. Like I really want to hear some 14 year old trash talking to me.
Is it possible that people are taking these games a little too seriously?
You furries. Don't you realize how hilarious your antics are?
Sibe fucked dogs before he went on to sharing your precious pornography. He's one of your mistakes. Don't try to connect him to gamers or this discourse, you're all a special kind of screwed up.
In America's Army, players who violate the rules are sent to an online prison. "You are in the United States Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas..."
I have never played the game, and Wikipedia's article isn't much to go on, but does that include losing one's account if one performs poorly in the game?
When they did the beta-test of Sims Online, my ex was a griefer - she used to go around killing off Sims, starting fights, and that kind of thing - mostly because IRL she never did any of that, and she wanted to test the limits.
She got quite good at it too, to the point where many would just give her what she wanted in hopes she'd go away.
I think that, if it were like the death experience in Sims - where you just die, but people can mourn over you and you just have to win a fiddle contest with the Grim Reaper or pay him $100 to become alive again - it wouldn't be such a deal. Or if objects were the same as in Animal Crossing, where you can go into someone else's house all you want, you can play with their toys, and open their drawers, but you can't take anything away.
In such worlds where death or destruction becomes less of an issue, griefers are just annoying little boys and girls with butterfly nets that keep wacking you on the head.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Counter-escalation in Hillsbrad is why I joined a RPPvP server. Doing a quest the third, fourth, twentieth time could get boring, except you must stay alert for the really smart enemy.
The problem I see with people's perspectives on gaming and griefing is that they see griefing as a problem which is there to be remedied or prevented. Griefing is not a "problem" to be controlled, per se, it's a logical extension of the ability of people to interact with one another. There are varying levels of interaction, and each one brings with it a certain possibility for grief.
/spits 800 times, that's allowed as long as it's possible. If they're cheating in order to do so, then they're not griefers, they're just cheaters. If you feel the rules would allow things to happen that would destroy your playing experience, find a game with rules better suited to your style.
On the one hand, there's World of Warcraft's non-PvP servers. On these servers, it's basically impossible to grief. If you grab some angry dragons, run over to another player and feign death, the dragons will not attack, but stand around looking confused at their victim's sudden, causeless (apparent) death, then slowly fly back towards their spawn points, where they patiently await the next person who will aggro them. Pretty much the worst you can do to grief in WoW is add a zero to the normal prices in the auction house, and hope somebody doesn't notice, giving you ten times the market price. Or suiciding on that one guy who heals every time someone dies. There are very limited opportunities for what most people call griefing.
To use old school UO as an example (pre-expansions), you were allowed to do almost anything. You could lie, cheat, steal, and kill. The only safety net was that guards would kill anybody who attacked you in town, or tried stealing and got caught. The number of bad things you could do to other players was nearly limitless.
The amount of interaction possible is roughly proportional to the amount of griefing possible. If you would like a completely griefless game, all killing has to be done in instances, so that players are unable to ruin each others' experiences by competing for monsters. Every item that's tradable would have to have a hardcoded price, to prevent players trying to rip each other off. Also, all players will have to be self-sufficient regardless of class, and teamwork may not factor into any sort of encounter. If it did, then players would be able to grief each other by being helpful for a period of time, and then at an important juncture, failing to continue their teamwork, getting others killed in the process. Further, players must not be allowed to communicate with each other, because they could say offensive things. This perfect, griefless game would be a tremendous flop because it's nothing more than a single-player game designed to look like an MMO.
Every online game has a certain set of laws in the scientific sense. I can't PK a fellow Hoard player in WoW any more than I can ignore the law of gravity in real life. It's up to every gamer to know what these laws are, and accept that everything else is permissable. If someone kills you every time you try to get your body, and
To the Guiding Hand Social Club, I have nothing to say but "well played". Same to the raging hoard who attacked the mourners. They did something that was allowed in the rules. Complaining about it is like whining when somebody checkmates you in chess, when you were trying to kill off all the pawns before moving up to bigger pieces. Just because you can do a lot of things in an MMO doesn't mean other people aren't allowed to interfere. Such a line of thought is naive.
This is another symptom of Generation Whine (which I'm regrettably a part of). It's your own responsibility to look out for yourself in the context of the rules. If somebody cheats, that's one thing, but if you get PKed in a PK zone, that's your own fault. Even if you were mourning. Make sure you know what's allowed, what's not, and then accept that anything allowed that happens is part of the game, no matter how much it pisses you off. Even though it's impossible to "lose" an MMO, there're more sore losers than ever. Buck up, mates.
"Jesus H. Christ. I read the article and these "gamers" take their recreational time way, way, way too seriously. Look at this example:"
Much like "open sourcers" take their "open source" way, way, way too seriously.
I used to play Freelancer online...and although it is relatively simplistic compared to MMORPGs, each server is a persistent world.
I'd almost always play a pirate and hunt down random players to give them some excitement. Most of the community was into trading, so I added a little spice to their runs.
Sure, some of them would whine, but most of them realized it made the game more fun, because there was no loss of status associated with death, just cargo loss. Sometimes I would be on the short end of the stick, having taken on a betetr pilot. For those that died, some of them actually recognized that retaliation would make the game even more fun. They organized groups and hunted pirates like me down. Deep down inside, these people craved excitement...if they didn't, they would have signed up to a non-pvp server. Good times.
Of course, there were people who took the concept too far: clans formed for the sole purpose of blowing anybody out of the sky, and camping planets and stations so people couldn't launch. Complete assholes. But the good thing is this sort of behavior was self-regulating: it was rare to see even a quarter of the clan's members on the server at once, and the members tended to break the server rules (few that there were) so fraglantly that they would be banned.
My point? A little grief is a good thing. And, so long as you don't limit players, they can largely self-police excessive griefers. I would never play ANY multiplayer combat game without pvp, otherwise you're just fighting the AI.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
MMO this MMO that blah blah. You ought to see how bad the griefing gets in BF2! Idiots TK you for any vehicle. The cowardly ones actually stand in front of your vehicle so that you tk them which counts against your stats and allows the victim to "punish" you off the server. There are uncapturable zones on most maps which is usually your teams airstrip. Unfortunately, good pilots on the opposing team can leave your air force crippled for the whole round! What's worse is that some servers have rules against it and everyone breaks it!#@ That's just the tip of the iceberg, the list goes on and on and on... it seems like every time DICE releases a patch for the game the griefers gain a new toy.
The moderation of this comment as flamebait proves the posters point! This was obviously modded so by a child. And adult would have not wasted the mod point. Especially if they've had to deal with children online.
I don't have much experience on age limits for anything that costs a monthly fee to play online, admittedly. Although for most sites on the web that don't cost money, adults can be just as annoying as children, and more so because they're better at it. Although I guess children are more likely to spend money just to annoy people because they don't know how to spend money yet(the adults who don't know such are less likely to have disposable income)
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.