There is a fine line between legitimate griefing and standard pking.
PKing is when you spot an enemy and kill the player once. Then you move on to a new location and do the same thing to a completely different player. This is standard because you're equivalently killing everyone or non-allied players once because it's along the path of your destination and these players were just in a bad place at the wrong time.
Griefing is when you target a specific player and consistently travel the world to find and harass this player with pking, stealing monsters, standing in the player's way to force him to flag an aggressive attack on you so you may have rights to kill him (somewhat) legally, and I'm sure there are other forms of griefing that I didn't mention.
To an extent, griefing is when someone asks you to stop, and you refuse to stop. This is why legitimate pking -- in my eyes -- is a one time happening from that particular pker.
However, open world pvp will always have griefing. You somewhat need to bite the bullet, man up, collect your own army of merciless pkers, and make mmo history from your completely cruel and callous lack of care for those who don't even remotely threaten you. This is what MMO's used to be made of.
"Maybe I'm just a bad person," he said. "Maybe I'm just a bad person."
That was the half-confession, half-boast of a self-professed video game troll I met in a bar. He'd just gotten done regaling a friend and me with tales of his preferred method of playing games: messing with people, sometimes even driving them to tears. A slight chuckle followed. Was it simple nervousness, or a hint of childlike mirth, a smile glinting unmistakably in the dark like a poorly concealed dagger? At that point, I was fairly certain the answer was both.
There's never going to be a bright-line definition.
But when your concept of fun involves making the game *not* fun for others, you are griefing. When you try to exploit your superior knowledge of the quirks of the game engine or system to gain unfair advantages over others, you're griefing (think "corpse-popping" someone in Diablo II).
Part of why (this is my personal opinion) the world we had in UO and EQ is never EVER coming back is that, even if you weren't a griefer, the community of those games developed because of the griefing. Once the "fodder" realized that they could play games that minimized griefing, the "old days" of MMORPG died and will not return.
I think it's when someones only goal is to ruin another persons experience by any means. This is why I am turned off from Eve anymore. The community as a whole changed. Or maybe me. Probably a little of both. I appreciate the game for what it is and CCP for sticking to their guns. The Eve 05 community vs. current is very different. One could do the same thing back in 05 that one could do now. The difference being now the community is geared more towards ruining another persons experience rather than actual game play. All people post about is tear extraction. When I read the forums and I see people playing devils advocate over situations that they know is wrong and isn't accepted anywhere else. Something is wrong with that.
The Bonus Round was going way to far. I wouldn't have stood by and just watched something like that happen had I seen it in real life. I suspect most people wouldn't either. I don't care what the victim said. It's all there in the recording and him and his wife became very unstable. Erotica and co. broke him and that was their intent nothing else. They had nothing to gain from it other than sending him over the edge if they could. Of course his dumb ass was embarrassed and wishes it went away. It was stupid to get that worked up over.
The Bonus Rounds only intent was to crush people. Just because something like the Bonus Round doesn't always work doesn't make it ok. When what's his name snapped that became very real very quick. Listen to the recording all the way through as he is slowly breaking. Erotica admitted in later interviews even people who beat the Bonus Round, he never really gives shit back. He allows them to join the party if they want. So there it is. That guy was never going to get his stuff back . The carrot on the stick, the object that Erotica dangled in front of this players face which in turn allowed him to be taken advantage of and pushed to far. Erotica didn't give a fuck the guy became unstable. He kept trying to push him more and more right up until the end.
if you have read about your civil war, general Sherman was one of the greatest griefers and thats the main reason the southerns lost .
so for me someone will go on griefing in order to eliminate his enemy in a total war scale ... If there is no obvious reason for him to do this, then he is asshole and soon you will friends to eliminate him ; ) If even then you are unable to kill him/them then the game has flaws (usually this happens with RvR games.. )
thats how i see griefing. on FFA PvP games i saw griefing from lower enemies in order to press the enemy guild who rules the map ... in RvR its just bullshit : )
Honestly... "griefing" is just the dark side of a free/realistic gaming world since usually it's all within the bounds of the game mechanics.
The more you remove the dark side from the gameplay, the less griefing there will be.
hmm .. you cannot grief in many games. How do you grief someone when there is a pvp flag, and most people are doing instanced dungeons anyway where they can just quit if they don't like someone.
Things like FFA PvP sandboxes in which a player or group of players gank you and continue to do so over and over again, allowed in since the game was designed with FFA in mind.
So you can be attacked by anybody, anywhere outside of locations that limit PvP.
So that wouldnt be a violation of the game rules in any way since it was designed as so. So would that be considered grief?
intnetionally destroying other players fun.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
In one FFA game, I died and was re-spawned at the respawn point. But there was a high level player there that killed me as soon as I spawned, so I re-spawned. But there was a high level player there and he killed me when I spawned, so I re-spawned at the respawn point. But there was a high level player there ....
Im not a PvP person but i like open world pvp encounters that are fair. If its a fair fight then there is no grief from either side. If the person is being verbally idiotic then ill report him and block him.... after trying beating him. But if the fight itself is fair (relatively close in levels and gear) then it is a fair fight. If i lose its because i suck at pvp, not because anybody was being a dirty azz
Just because something is allowed by a game, doesn't mean it's good.
For example, with this language I can easily insult you, but that doesn't make it a nice thing to do.
Griefing is when someone does something to harm, irritate, or otherwise inconvenience another player for that purpose only. Exactly what griefing may be will vary with the game.
Let's say the game has pvp most places. A player is currently talking to an NPC, and that game won't let him do anything until he closes the npc chat windows (trade, quest, etc) which may take several seconds. Now along comes someone who sees this, is probably a higher level (if not much higher) and knows they'll have an unfair advantage, so they gank them.
A different example. The game has a battlefield where players are put into two teams that fight. Killing someone of the other side is part of the goal, so it is not griefing to kill them. On the other hand, if you and your buddies keep hunting that person down to gank them, or corpse camp him, then that is.
Another game doesn't allow non-consensual pvp, but someone has found out that if monsters are close enough, they will attack anyone. So he gets a bunch of monsters to chase him, heads over to the person he wants to grief, and then uses invisibility, feign dead, or some other ability that will make the monsters forget him so the monster swarm all attacks the other guy. This is called training (because it looked like a train of monsters following someone in a particular game) and is a form of griefing.
Griefers often try to avoid fair fights. They are not interested in the excitement and challenge of combat, but rather the antisocial thrill of messing with someone else. When they attack, it may be in a group, almost always at a higher level (character or gear), and definitely with some kind of advantage. It's not uncommon for griefers to use cheats and bugs to their advantage as well.
Of course, griefing may not be combat related, though that is the most common form.
If you see someone that likes gangbanging noobs and lowbies, they are a griefer. If they use cheats and bugs to defeat someone else, again, it's a griefer.
Remember, it's not about whether you can do something, it's whether or not you actually do it. There are plenty of games where they have worked out a lot of limitations to reduce griefing, and griefers still find another way to screw with other people. It won't go away, although it can be limited in the scope of how much it affects other people. Also, even if a game company doesn't do anything about griefing, that is more due to lack of personnel and proof than a desire for it to occur since griefing is known to reduce the user base. There are a lot of people that spend plenty of money on/in the games, but will leave after a getting griefed enough, and that's bad for business.
One time I got bind camped in High Hold Keep for about two hours. I leveled up my Alcohol Tolerance from (12) to (200) during that time. Was that griefing?
Just to question the philosophy. Army of Socrates.
Griefing = playing for the sole purpose of pissing other players off and ruining their fun.
Griefing isn't PvP specific, a good PvE example would be the assholes who roll need on everything even if they don't need it in pickup groups (aka "ninja looters").
i forgot about that. I totally agree with you here. Ninjas need to die in a dark hole. Also all game devs should create shared PvE content to avoid same faction verbal fights over resources. GW2 did that very well.
griefing is a biproduct of making mmo's anti social. in the good old days if someone where to gank you, you would call for aid and it could turn into epic fun.. but now since the majority of players refuse to communicate with eachother you get griefing.
Originally posted by hallucigenocide griefing is a biproduct of making mmo's anti social. in the good old days if someone where to gank you, you would call for aid and it could turn into epic fun.. but now since the majority of players refuse to communicate with eachother you get griefing.
In the "good old days", griefers were ruining the community in UO so much that they had to patch in a PvE only side to the game to save it. You seem to be confused about who is anti social too... it's not the players minding their own business, it's the griefers who are anti social.
You have a just as great percentage of antisocial asshats in todays games than in game from 20 years ago.
no players that refuse to take part in all aspects of the game (forcing PvE only stuff) is what i call anti social.. the fun part about mmo's used to be that you never knew what could happen while out and about and the bond you'd form with other players... now it's just a "eeeewww leave me alone" mentality going on.
Things like FFA PvP sandboxes in which a player or group of players gank you and continue to do so over and over again, allowed in since the game was designed with FFA in mind.
So you can be attacked by anybody, anywhere outside of locations that limit PvP.
So that wouldnt be a violation of the game rules in any way since it was designed as so. So would that be considered grief?
Griefing is when you make another players life constant hell. Just go around and murdering random noobs isn't really griefing (even though I don't see the fun in it) but when you track up the same player and kills him constantly or corpsecamp him if the game allow you to do it, that is griefing. Same with sending spam of really rude PMs even if most games have an ignore list.
To quote Motörhead: "Just because you got the power doesn't mean you got the right".
Constantly making a certain players life a living hell is contraproductive since you can bet the game is going to loose a lot of player for it. It also suck because what is fun in a MMO is risk Vs reward, but there is no risk in ganking some poor noob over and over whatsoever.
My solution is to lower the gap between noobs and vets, if noobs who play well actually can beat a poorly playing vet you get some risk again but very few in any MMOs have that including so called skillbased sandboxes.
It also makes rather little sense from a logical kind of view, what society would like a whole bunch of mass murderers that kills any young man or woman they run into? You couldn't do that as a Hun, a Vandal, A Viking or any historical society. That doesn't mean that you should take away the PvP but you should even the playingfield.
There is a reason that no FFA sandbox done well for itself after UO, and that is crappy mechanics that makes it so only noobs who are in a large and overprotected guild will become vets, or at least very few others.
I think griefing is the darkside of powergaming...the cynical underside of why players try so hard to be "the best". One might even say it is the reward and justification for all the hours spent grinding, the reward of limiting yourself to the one class/gear combo that makes you the best and the reward for submitting to a highly disciplined, efficient guild system.
When you play these games to acquire power, grief is both the expression and benefit of that power. Because it is one thing to dominate a computer subroutine. It is another thing to dominate an actual person, one who can't do anything about the humiliation.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I define 'Griefing' as the harassment of another player by way of legitimate in-game mechanics that yield little to no in-game reward. It is done solely to degrade the play experience of the griefed.
see King Geoffery for a fine example of this type of behavior.
Frank 'Spankybus' Mignone www.spankybus.com -3d Artist & Compositor -Writer -Professional Amature
Comments
not entirely true.. it used to be a means to promote wpvp.. you know some high level guy kills you and you call in reniforcements etc.
it's a thing of the past though we'll never see anything like this anymore unless from newly released game with a healthy population.
I had fun once, it was terrible.
There is a fine line between legitimate griefing and standard pking.
PKing is when you spot an enemy and kill the player once. Then you move on to a new location and do the same thing to a completely different player. This is standard because you're equivalently killing everyone or non-allied players once because it's along the path of your destination and these players were just in a bad place at the wrong time.
Griefing is when you target a specific player and consistently travel the world to find and harass this player with pking, stealing monsters, standing in the player's way to force him to flag an aggressive attack on you so you may have rights to kill him (somewhat) legally, and I'm sure there are other forms of griefing that I didn't mention.
To an extent, griefing is when someone asks you to stop, and you refuse to stop. This is why legitimate pking -- in my eyes -- is a one time happening from that particular pker.
However, open world pvp will always have griefing. You somewhat need to bite the bullet, man up, collect your own army of merciless pkers, and make mmo history from your completely cruel and callous lack of care for those who don't even remotely threaten you. This is what MMO's used to be made of.
http://twitch.tv/woetothevanquished
Here's an article:
"Maybe I'm just a bad person," he said. "Maybe I'm just a bad person."
That was the half-confession, half-boast of a self-professed video game troll I met in a bar. He'd just gotten done regaling a friend and me with tales of his preferred method of playing games: messing with people, sometimes even driving them to tears. A slight chuckle followed. Was it simple nervousness, or a hint of childlike mirth, a smile glinting unmistakably in the dark like a poorly concealed dagger? At that point, I was fairly certain the answer was both.
http://tmi.kotaku.com/i-met-a-video-game-troll-in-real-life-and-he-really-pis-1575282798
It's simple really.
PvP harassment and I'm not talking about killing somebody who is engaged with a mob or resource node
Honestly... "griefing" is just the dark side of a free/realistic gaming world since usually it's all within the bounds of the game mechanics.
The more you remove the dark side from the gameplay, the less griefing there will be.
There's never going to be a bright-line definition.
But when your concept of fun involves making the game *not* fun for others, you are griefing. When you try to exploit your superior knowledge of the quirks of the game engine or system to gain unfair advantages over others, you're griefing (think "corpse-popping" someone in Diablo II).
Part of why (this is my personal opinion) the world we had in UO and EQ is never EVER coming back is that, even if you weren't a griefer, the community of those games developed because of the griefing. Once the "fodder" realized that they could play games that minimized griefing, the "old days" of MMORPG died and will not return.
I think it's when someones only goal is to ruin another persons experience by any means. This is why I am turned off from Eve anymore. The community as a whole changed. Or maybe me. Probably a little of both. I appreciate the game for what it is and CCP for sticking to their guns. The Eve 05 community vs. current is very different. One could do the same thing back in 05 that one could do now. The difference being now the community is geared more towards ruining another persons experience rather than actual game play. All people post about is tear extraction. When I read the forums and I see people playing devils advocate over situations that they know is wrong and isn't accepted anywhere else. Something is wrong with that.
The Bonus Round was going way to far. I wouldn't have stood by and just watched something like that happen had I seen it in real life. I suspect most people wouldn't either. I don't care what the victim said. It's all there in the recording and him and his wife became very unstable. Erotica and co. broke him and that was their intent nothing else. They had nothing to gain from it other than sending him over the edge if they could. Of course his dumb ass was embarrassed and wishes it went away. It was stupid to get that worked up over.
The Bonus Rounds only intent was to crush people. Just because something like the Bonus Round doesn't always work doesn't make it ok. When what's his name snapped that became very real very quick. Listen to the recording all the way through as he is slowly breaking. Erotica admitted in later interviews even people who beat the Bonus Round, he never really gives shit back. He allows them to join the party if they want. So there it is. That guy was never going to get his stuff back . The carrot on the stick, the object that Erotica dangled in front of this players face which in turn allowed him to be taken advantage of and pushed to far. Erotica didn't give a fuck the guy became unstable. He kept trying to push him more and more right up until the end.
Ganking is not griefing.
if you have read about your civil war, general Sherman was one of the greatest griefers and thats the main reason the southerns lost .
so for me someone will go on griefing in order to eliminate his enemy in a total war scale ... If there is no obvious reason for him to do this, then he is asshole and soon you will friends to eliminate him ; ) If even then you are unable to kill him/them then the game has flaws (usually this happens with RvR games.. )
thats how i see griefing. on FFA PvP games i saw griefing from lower enemies in order to press the enemy guild who rules the map ... in RvR its just bullshit : )
hmm .. you cannot grief in many games. How do you grief someone when there is a pvp flag, and most people are doing instanced dungeons anyway where they can just quit if they don't like someone.
intnetionally destroying other players fun."I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
In one FFA game, I died and was re-spawned at the respawn point. But there was a high level player there that killed me as soon as I spawned, so I re-spawned. But there was a high level player there and he killed me when I spawned, so I re-spawned at the respawn point. But there was a high level player there ....
That was griefing.
------------
2024: 47 years on the Net.
gankers = griefers.
Im not a PvP person but i like open world pvp encounters that are fair. If its a fair fight then there is no grief from either side. If the person is being verbally idiotic then ill report him and block him.... after trying beating him. But if the fight itself is fair (relatively close in levels and gear) then it is a fair fight. If i lose its because i suck at pvp, not because anybody was being a dirty azz
Just because something is allowed by a game, doesn't mean it's good.
For example, with this language I can easily insult you, but that doesn't make it a nice thing to do.
Griefing is when someone does something to harm, irritate, or otherwise inconvenience another player for that purpose only. Exactly what griefing may be will vary with the game.
Let's say the game has pvp most places. A player is currently talking to an NPC, and that game won't let him do anything until he closes the npc chat windows (trade, quest, etc) which may take several seconds. Now along comes someone who sees this, is probably a higher level (if not much higher) and knows they'll have an unfair advantage, so they gank them.
A different example. The game has a battlefield where players are put into two teams that fight. Killing someone of the other side is part of the goal, so it is not griefing to kill them. On the other hand, if you and your buddies keep hunting that person down to gank them, or corpse camp him, then that is.
Another game doesn't allow non-consensual pvp, but someone has found out that if monsters are close enough, they will attack anyone. So he gets a bunch of monsters to chase him, heads over to the person he wants to grief, and then uses invisibility, feign dead, or some other ability that will make the monsters forget him so the monster swarm all attacks the other guy. This is called training (because it looked like a train of monsters following someone in a particular game) and is a form of griefing.
Griefers often try to avoid fair fights. They are not interested in the excitement and challenge of combat, but rather the antisocial thrill of messing with someone else. When they attack, it may be in a group, almost always at a higher level (character or gear), and definitely with some kind of advantage. It's not uncommon for griefers to use cheats and bugs to their advantage as well.
Of course, griefing may not be combat related, though that is the most common form.
If you see someone that likes gangbanging noobs and lowbies, they are a griefer. If they use cheats and bugs to defeat someone else, again, it's a griefer.
Remember, it's not about whether you can do something, it's whether or not you actually do it. There are plenty of games where they have worked out a lot of limitations to reduce griefing, and griefers still find another way to screw with other people. It won't go away, although it can be limited in the scope of how much it affects other people. Also, even if a game company doesn't do anything about griefing, that is more due to lack of personnel and proof than a desire for it to occur since griefing is known to reduce the user base. There are a lot of people that spend plenty of money on/in the games, but will leave after a getting griefed enough, and that's bad for business.
Lost my mind, now trying to lose yours...
Just to question the philosophy. Army of Socrates.
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
i forgot about that. I totally agree with you here. Ninjas need to die in a dark hole. Also all game devs should create shared PvE content to avoid same faction verbal fights over resources. GW2 did that very well.
I had fun once, it was terrible.
Griefing is just a common excuse used by players who do not want to adapt to a PvP environment.
---
Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
no players that refuse to take part in all aspects of the game (forcing PvE only stuff) is what i call anti social.. the fun part about mmo's used to be that you never knew what could happen while out and about and the bond you'd form with other players... now it's just a "eeeewww leave me alone" mentality going on.
I had fun once, it was terrible.
Griefing is when you make another players life constant hell. Just go around and murdering random noobs isn't really griefing (even though I don't see the fun in it) but when you track up the same player and kills him constantly or corpsecamp him if the game allow you to do it, that is griefing. Same with sending spam of really rude PMs even if most games have an ignore list.
To quote Motörhead: "Just because you got the power doesn't mean you got the right".
Constantly making a certain players life a living hell is contraproductive since you can bet the game is going to loose a lot of player for it. It also suck because what is fun in a MMO is risk Vs reward, but there is no risk in ganking some poor noob over and over whatsoever.
My solution is to lower the gap between noobs and vets, if noobs who play well actually can beat a poorly playing vet you get some risk again but very few in any MMOs have that including so called skillbased sandboxes.
It also makes rather little sense from a logical kind of view, what society would like a whole bunch of mass murderers that kills any young man or woman they run into? You couldn't do that as a Hun, a Vandal, A Viking or any historical society. That doesn't mean that you should take away the PvP but you should even the playingfield.
There is a reason that no FFA sandbox done well for itself after UO, and that is crappy mechanics that makes it so only noobs who are in a large and overprotected guild will become vets, or at least very few others.
I think griefing is the darkside of powergaming...the cynical underside of why players try so hard to be "the best". One might even say it is the reward and justification for all the hours spent grinding, the reward of limiting yourself to the one class/gear combo that makes you the best and the reward for submitting to a highly disciplined, efficient guild system.
When you play these games to acquire power, grief is both the expression and benefit of that power. Because it is one thing to dominate a computer subroutine. It is another thing to dominate an actual person, one who can't do anything about the humiliation.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I define 'Griefing' as the harassment of another player by way of legitimate in-game mechanics that yield little to no in-game reward. It is done solely to degrade the play experience of the griefed.
see King Geoffery for a fine example of this type of behavior.
Frank 'Spankybus' Mignone
www.spankybus.com
-3d Artist & Compositor
-Writer
-Professional Amature
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
A max level player killing someone 40 levels lower than them over and over when all the lowbie's trying to do is get some quests done.
(True story from playing on a PvP server in WoW. Damn NE Rogues...)
I understand there's a bit of risk involved in playing on a PvP server, but the lack of honor in players these days is kind of pathetic.