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