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.

Comments

Art imitates Life

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

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.'"

Yeah...we have the same problem in real life.

Re:Art imitates Life

[CSZeus]

Wiretapping != griefing.

G.I.F.T. is probably more accurate.

Re:Art imitates Life

[voice_of_all_reason]

That's why all pay MMORPGS should make the billing address of the credit card they're charging visible when you legend/finger/whois another player. They can even throw in other stats contributed by the community in order to facilitate RL pkills.

Joe Smith the Hobbit Deathmaster
123 Fraud St
New York, New York, 10138
+5% to the Obesity skill
+3% to Yu Gi Oh cards skill
0 points in "Times Laid" stat
Weak against: twinkies, sunlight, chores. Key to back door under the mat.

Forget it

[Azarael]

Bah, I have already have enough of online gaming idiocy. Even when you do get the majority of gamers to keep an eye on their peers, you get the exact opposite problem. Pedantic tight asses start running their servers or games like a police state and playing favorites with their cronies. Last time I checked, no one was buying a game called Fascism Tycoon.

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.

Re:Forget it

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, no one was buying a game called Fascism Tycoon.

Is that like Railroad Tycoon, except the trains run on time? ;-)

Re:Forget it

[coyotecult]

Last time I checked, no one was buying a game called Fascism Tycoon.

All of the sudden I have an intense desire to acquire such a game.

Re:Forget it

[JohnSearle]

The use of /ignore doesn't solve all the problems related to griefing. In most cases actions speak louder than words. A lot of the griefing seems more to revolve around (at least in my experiences) things like repeated killing purely for annoyance, training mobs, and mob stealing. These aren't things that a /ignore can solve... but they are thing that a governing body can have a great impact on.

Back in my EQ days I played on a PvP server where such griefing took place regularily. What seemed to have formed out of that system was guilds created purely for protection of it's members... and it worked. Although this is more like gang warfare, it does show the power that player organization can have over griefing. Player organization can have a positive direct impact on player griefing, much more so than simply /ignoring the problem, so acknowledging this fact may go far to solving a blight.

- John

Re:Forget it

[DrEldarion]

Try tropico - http://www.poptop.com/Tropico.htm

It's basically "sim-island", and you can run the government any way you like. Religious government with book burnings? Sure! Military state? Sounds great!

Granted, it's not incredibly deep, but it's quite a fun game.

Check it!

[Anonymous Coward]

"'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.'"

You mean like moderation or meta-moderation is?

Mod parent down!

[Anonymous Coward]

He's on to us.

And in other news:

[Burlap]

The sky is blue, water is wet, and smoking is bad for you.

And now, the weather...

Re:And in other news:

[Valdrax]

Smoking can help people with Parkinson's.

Actually, that's not true. Smokers (and alcoholics and other forms of addicts) have a significantly reduced chance of developing Parkinson's in the first place, but there's no studies that suggest that taking up smoking can reduce the symptoms of PD once you've contracted it.

It's a correlation and not a causation. Current suspicions are that addiction and reduced risk of PD have a shared root cause -- elevated dopamine levels in the brain.

At any rate, lighting up to prevent Parkinson's is a little like engaging in preventative chemotherapy.

Griefing annoyance

[zerocool^]

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

Re:Griefing annoyance

[A-Z0-9$_. !*'(),-, p]

I play EVE and constantly grief people. Why? Because I can truly play out the part of a space pirate. I'm playing the game to have fun -- and living the life of a space pirate... = fun. I suppose in some sense of the words, I'm not a griefer. I don't go out of my way to pick on noobies, nor do I run from a fair fight -- but I sure don't avoid new players and I have a strong sense of self-preservation. There is no reward without risk. And this is where EVE succeeds completely. No other game has such harsh penalties. What EVE brings to the world of MMO's is truly lacking in every other game out there. When you win -- you REALLY win, when you lose, you REALLY lose. On top of that, players are MORE then able to gang up and take charge of a situation. I enjoy this system, win OR lose. If you want your hand held by GM's while you play a cute, safe game -- fine by me. But I want to play something that's *hard* and has a point. Don't like it? Don't play.

Re:Griefing annoyance

[DarkGreenNight]

Ok, lets explain this for non-EvE players.

You are in a not-secured zone, it's security rating probably going from 0.1 to 0.4. In a secured zone (security from 0.5 to 1.0) if a player attacked another police would come and kill the griefer (avoiding destruction from police attack is cheating). This does not mean that secure zones are secure, simply that you have lots to lose if you attack.

The pirate loses security rating attacking you, that means he is not able to enter secure zones. There are ways to improve it, though. Zone security 0.0 would mean that no security rating is lost, but these zones are usualy home of aliances.

A three year old character, even if it's the only one trained in that account, does not have all the skills he wants to max, but probably he has enough to fly that ship perfectly, it it's requirements are not much, and for what you say it seems an interceptor, a ship that you can more than confortably fly in 6 months if you are focused. Training for all the skills to the max would mean more than 10 years, in real time, training.

Tech 2 ships are expensive, much more than what they give you when they blow your ship (yes, in EvE you can insure ships). And that is not counting the tech 2 equipment they may have, as equipment is not insured.

So now we have some competent players, with expensive to replace gear, attacking in a PvP zone, easy kills. Why? because a hard kill could mean their destruction, and that's a good reason not to engage what you can't win. But if they got near you you could jam them (ensnare them) so they could not flee, all you need is some basic equipment. Web (slow) them too, unless you want them to go out of your jamming range and flee. So you have options.

What can they win? A miner can leave equipment worth as much as a ship of these they are flying, people in shuttles and frigates could be transporting great treasures that don't use much cargo space.

And they teach you to be alert in a PvP zone, and everywhere too, just in case.

I am a person who spends all his time in secure zones, because I don't like many risks, but I accept them, and learn from my errors. The most exciting time I had in a game was being pursued by a pirate across a system, he in a big but surprisingly fast ship, me in a small but not so fast one. I barely managed to escape, but that adrenaline rush was so great...

A last explanation for non-EvErs, a three year old player can lose to a determined small group of newbies. So it's not like those other games were a level 60 can kill hundreds of level 5. Use what the system offers to you and have fun.

Griefers - who they are and why they do it.

[Banner]

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.

Re:Griefers - who they are and why they do it.

[WilliamSChips]

Age limits are bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. They do nothing but force kids to lie about their age. Look at MySpace for an example of that.

Griefing is its own solution

[stlhawkeye]

I started playing Warcraft. It was fun. I picked a PvP server. I got to level 20 and every goddam alliance I found killed me and camped me. Guys who were level 60 and elite mounts would stop, dismount, and come kill me. It drove me nuts. I never griefed alliance, I didn't kill half of the ones that I could have for Honor.

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.

It's only a video game - anything goes

[SpecialAgentXXX]

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.

Comments from a part-time griefer

[Hannah E. Davis]

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.

Re:Comments from a part-time griefer

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I got this problem as a thief in Silkroad online. People instantly saw the thief class as an "evil" person, where as I saw it as an option and I could be good or evil.

I'd jack traders and take half their stuff, which ment they'd make no profit on the trade run, but they'd also lose no money. All they really lost is 20 minutes of their time and maybe a bit of self esteem.

Other times I'd see dead newbies with loot I could steal and I'd res them and protect them instead of robbing them. It all depended on my mood and the level they were at.

Remember your character is your character. You maybe evil or you may not, it's your choice and my choice was always to play how I wanted others to play. To do what they felt was best for all involved.

You can't throw around excuses how "it's in character to grief newbies", because it's not. It's just you being an asshole. You can't pan off your guilt onto other reasons. YOU control what you do, you pick your path. If you decide to be a wanker than thats your choice.

Don't "Grief" the Pirate!

[Dareth]

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!

Re:And I thought

[ClamIAm]

Holy shit, Jack Thompson is just a griefer! Except instead of getting the banhammer, people listen to him :(

Re:Stereotypes and racial hatred

[Achoi77]

There is no real easy way to get both parties (Horde and Alliance) to deal with griefers diplomatically.

Just yesterday I was playing with my cousin (lvl 29 and 30), running around and trying to quest over at Hillsbrad. A pair of NE rogues would be stalking around looking for some easy ganks. After getting ganked and watching them camp us about 7 times, we've decided enough is enough: we logged on our mains, a 60 war and 60 rogue.

So we brought them over to hillsbrad, and at first, I stealthed in and stalked around some fellow horde casters trying to level. Whenever I see some NE rogues sneaking in for the kill, I would take them down in 3 hits. Easiest kills ever. Ganking gankers was about liberation. After a few minutes, it was a clear message that they weren't going to have fun, and they stopped trying and went else where.

Every once in a while some lvl 40s (clearly looking for some easy kills as they are too high for the area to get exp) would be roaming around ganking lowbies. Took them out too. After a while, they got the message as well.

After about 20 mins of that, my 60 warrior buddy was getting bored, and stopped looking for ppl to defend, and decided to have more fun rampaging around downing any alliance he could find. So him and I, we mounted up, and went lowbie hunting. Wiping out parties here and there, we did it enough times where we could clearly see that alliance were getting frustrated, shouting obscenities and whatnot. We didn't care. We were a buncha angry lvl 60's that were all caught up in the moment, when we were just trying to quietly level our way out of hillsbrad an hour before hand in the first place.

Well, about 20 minutes after that, we started seeing some alliance lvl 60's coming on in to help escort the lowbie alliance. They took us down and started camping us. We called in our guild members. We took them down. They called their guild members. And shortly after that it was a grudge match and nobody was getting anything done for about an hour.

I hate Hillsbrad. Wish I joined a pve server.

Game Over - Insert Coin?

[tepples]

No other game has such harsh penalties. What EVE brings to the world of MMO's is truly lacking in every other game out there. When you win -- you REALLY win, when you lose, you REALLY lose.

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?

Re:Game Over - Insert Coin?

[SirSlud]

No, but eve definately has some of the highest penalties ...

Basically (and I'm sure there are some corrections here, I only have about 4 months playing experience) if your ship is destroyed, its destroyed. You need to buy another one. You can buy insurance, but that only pays for slightly less than a new ship; all the cargo, weapons, hardware, ammo that you had is gone.

Better yet, once your ship is destroyed, you end up in a pod. You can be 'podded' (ie, the pod is destroyed, and your character dies) and your character is restored to the skill level you had when you last cloned your character. I've had my ship destroyed twice, and both times it takes minimum a few days to get 'back up and running', and its a HUGE pain in the ass.

WoW has nothing on Eve in terms of the true pvp experience, and guildwars is what many seasoned Eve players would call a 'Carebear' party. A carebear is somebody that sticks to high security space (where pirates generally can't operate because they get hounded by powerful NPC police) and plays the game to avoid as much combat as possible.

Eve is freaking cool ... it really does create that sense of danger, fear, and paranoia that should be a part of most mmorpgs, if you choose to participate and live life on the edge. Reprocussions for getting your ship destroyed or being podded make keeping your eye on your radar, warp-in message list, etc ... I don't play mmorpgs much, but Eve has easily been the 'coolest' experience because it feels the most real in terms of risk/reward and giving the player real options to progress quickly based on skill and cunning or keep it safe and easy if they're just there for the social side.

To answer your original post, no, you can't lose your account for playing poorly, but you can essentially fail to progress at all and in some cases lose ALOT of time if you risk too much. Thats a cool concept, and one other games really havn't created a suitable game system to explore in a satisfying manner.

Interesting, but my ex was a griefer in Sims

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:Stereotypes and racial hatred

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, if you're relying on WOW for your memorable life moments you need to cancel your account and go outside.

Re:"Social Disease"?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Eve is open-pvp for the most part. It's designed more for player oriented solutions.

Most people do not play PvP all the time. I rarely will play PvP in a MMO. I am not interested in competing or trying to ruin someone else's night.

Sane people do not pay a fee to play a game where they will be locked into the role of "victim". That's what griefers are looking for. Not "villainous roleplay", and DAMNED SURE not a fair fight. They want someone to pick on. They want to see how many people they can make QUIT.

In MOST games, it behooves the company running the game to boot "villainous roleplayers" who attempt to interfere with non-consenting players in a non-PvP situation. I'm not interested in being your victim, and I'm not interested in providing you with entertaiment at my expense, without my consent.

I'm paying a fee for my own entertainment, and to interact on my terms. Interfere with that, and damned straight I'm going to demand that Customer Service do something about you.

I'm DEFINITELY not considering EvE. It's a technically beautiful game, and the tutorial was excellent.

I'm not interested in PvP though.

Re:The big problem with players self-governing...

[Teppy]

A Tale in the Desert does this exactly. Players can pass laws that ban a specific player, or players. They can empower certain players with the ability to ban, jail, or creatively restrict others.

In ATITD 2 (or maybe it was 1), a high profile player liked to mentor new players. But, he was terrible at it - turned off new players by the dozens (or more). Veteran players passed a law limiting his access to new players via the chat, mentorship, and guild systems. Then, they taught him how to be an effective mentor, and finally repealed the law.

Re:Stereotypes and racial hatred

[green menace]

I hate Hillsbrad. Wish I joined a pve server.

I sometimes wished I had joined a pve server. Especially for the grind from 50-60. I realized at that point that I prefer an environment where I can PVP when I want to, and get away from it when I want to. It was exciting at first, but got old after awhile. I wouldn't mind if PVP servers had safe zones that went all the way to 60, with most of the good content still in PVP zones. Yeah, I know I could have leveled up in instances with a group, but I would usually rather kick myself in the balls than run an instance. Guess I am a bit of a carebear after all, even though I spent 90% of my time in WoW in battlegrounds or lookin for world pvp.

As for Hillsbrad, I don't think I finished half the quests I started there because of the ganking, but I did have some good times there defending lowbies.

Re:Stereotypes and racial hatred

[LarsWestergren]

So... to summarise, some people were acting like assholes, and you punished them. And then you started acting like assholes, and someone else punished you. Therefore the server sucks?

I'm with you the first two sentences, but I fail to understand how you arrive to your conclusion.

Re:Griefing is not a bug, it's a feature.

[DS-1107]

Exactly, and while people did petition the GHSC nothing came out of it as in EVE it is even stated as a feature. A feature that protects us from our own stupidity more then a GM can, example: EVE had a new scam a week ago when someone used IPOs to scam people for 25 bil ISK (GHSC took 30 bil or so, & destroyed more), as usual people petitioned it. Here comes the shock for the EVE community, the GMs caved in and restored 'order' in the anarchy of space, and the people went crazy - and the devs had talks & the anarchy that is EVE was restored once again, the scammer got his cash back and the rules was clarifed that scams is indeed valid. So what GHSC did bring in the end was advertisment, & self regulation; while people complained it would be the death of EVE the growth curve from last year to now is telling something else (I would not claim GHSC is the reason, but the friends who have started playing since have all soaked up the story & loved what it brings to the game; even if they like to play nice) Oh and people don't give away rights to corphangars anyone anymore ^^

Exactly

[default luser]

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.