Enough Griefing Players Say

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Guardian Unlimited Technology has posted an interesting article giving some insight into the sentiments felt by players towards griefers, that is players who play a given multiplayer game not as it is intended but as it is technically possible in order to spoil the fun for everyone else. Here's a snip:

The gaming community calls them "griefers": people who like nothing better than to kill team-mates or obstruct the game's objectives. Griefers scam, cheat and abuse, often victimising the weakest and newest players. In games that attempt to encourage complex and enduring interactions among thousands of players, "griefing" has evolved from being an isolated nuisance to a social disease.
"The most common 'griefer counter-measure' is to put in place a strong community system," says Stephen Davis of IT GlobalSecure, a firm that specialises in developing security technologies for online games.

I guess we have another controversial topic. If you read further, you'll notice Blizzard gets an extensive mention and that's something I've witnessed myself. Ruthless PvP is one thing, but tactics which are intended only to piss off other players aren't really what makes you happy to devote your free time to a game, seeking some diversion from real life concerns. Real time strategies or first person shooters are one thing. At the worst, you lose a reasonably short match you'd otherwise win, and you still get some practice in dealing with exploitative strategies. But roleplaying games, economical simulations and other such are a whole different thing and there's more room for even more outrageous schemes.

To give you a better idea of how serious a problem it is, look here:

The act of terminating so many subscriptions and the staff required to man support lines come at huge cost to the developer. Stephen Davis estimates 25% of customer support calls to companies operating online games are a result of griefing: "For a small game, these costs can be the difference between success and failure. For a large game, these costs are a continual drag on the bottom line."

One proposed solution is moving part of the responsibility to players and allowing player moderation, such as rating other players' behaviour:

Instead of the developer intervening, online gaming is seeing the emergence of systems by which the community can moderate itself. In 2003, eGenesis released A Tale in the Desert, which offered players the ability to make laws, determining what actions were permitted and even banning problem players. This experiment paved the way for the transference of some responsibility from developers to gamers. Xbox Live's Gamer Card system indelibly links your actions to your account by allowing other players to rate your behaviour. A low enough reputation will mean few people willing to play with you. Griefing has therefore become a relatively minor support issue for Microsoft.

That does sound reasonable, but there's one thing that still needs to be taken into consideration: rating can be abused as well and I suppose evaluating a potentially mala fide bad rating is as troublesome and problematic as investigating a case of griefing. Here:

"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."

Having a griefer banned or suspended is always good riddance, but we can't have elections in every game for every post related to administration or games are going to turn into political arenas. In-game politicians, in-game player police, in-game lawyers... Where will the fun go? Will it still be playing? It doesn't seem so obvious to me that this system will work, but I need to see more before judging. What I know is there must be control over those player structures as well, so maintaining a support line may not always require hiring more people than that. And what's your say?

[ June 17, 2006, 01:33: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

I choose not to play with people like that.

 

Griefing, farming, other immature behavior, and generally spoiling the adventure are the reasons why I do not play play MMORGs like WOW and DDO, sadly.

 

Chev, I just opened your post, but the link went elsewhere...
"Mating games arouse wrath of 'moral majority'"
by "Aleks Krotoski", written Thu June 15, 2006... Same site.

It's an interesting subject, but I'd rather not make comment before reading the entire thing.

 

I've heard games with subscription fees turn off the immature people who don't care enough to pay and will go grief in a free game instead, but it looks like WoW still has acres of room for that kind of gameplay, anyway. By the way, what is farming in RPGs? I only know the strategy version, i.e. one team member only harvesting resources behind some heavy defences and giving those to other players who don't have to maintain and defend any economy and have thus also extended unit limits for their armies. Guess there's no direct equivalent in cRPG, though.

Edit: Link fixed in the opening post. Thanks, Hugo.

 

In WoW, Something Awful, a forum, had a system of counter-griefing. If someone in their three guilds were griefed, they called on the AGT(Anti-Griefing Team) and they ganked that player in groups of five to ten over and over for a month.

The guild and it's allies are now very, very feared.

 

Farming is camping out at spawn points and taking the loot and monsters, thereby preventing other players from playing. It also refers to real-world "businesses" that hire farmers to give them the loot and sell it to players for real money.

Despicable behavior in both cases.

 

I remember an ear system from Diablo. Clans would pay for people's ears, be it in in-game forms or just outside of the game clan-based rewards. I wanted to introduce the same thing in Warcraft 2 BNE when I was running a clan site, but it didn't eventually work out, so there was just a black list. And quite a crappy one at that, in retrospect. But there were some real nasty hackers on it.

Yeah. Occasional camping isn't probably as bad as getting involved in real-world businesses with real money, but I still generally hate all sorts of such gameplay if it's about getting undue XP or items for PvP, using meta-knowledge etc. I guess they could roleplay hunting somehow, but they probably don't bother, do they?

 

Well, why bother RPing anything in a MMORPG? It's not really supported by the game at all, and usually not by the other people...

 

IMHO the roleplaying zealotism often gets close to griefing, actually. Griefing is spoiling the fun for everyone else for the sake of your own stupid satisfaction and some of the roleplaying zealots do just that. A fighter, cleric, ranger and paladin stopping and quarrelling about what's in character for one of them are very much in character indeed. Or talking in completely ungrammatical 17-19th century English, thinking that's how people should talk in a quasi-mediaeval setting. Here's some news: for mediaeval people, mediaeval English didn't sound mediaeval. It was as current for them as ours is for us, so there's no reason to speak archaic dialects unless it's actually the real mediaeval one that no one understands, anyway. Oh, and just in case someone really has to use -st's -th's, thous, thees, thines etc:

singular:

I have it.
Thou hast it.
He/she it hath it.

Plural:

We have it.
You (ye) have it.
They have it.

It's mine/yours/his/hers/thine. It's my/your/his/her/thy sword. But, it's mine (in more archaic modern English)/his/her/thine arrow. Especially if you do the -ine before vowel rule, you need to apply it to my/mine as well. And putting -st's and -th's at the end of verbs at random is not archaic grammar. It's wrong grammar.

And this all is apart from the mere annoyance of expecting people who come there for fun to follow someone else's arbitrary rules.

A paladin talking like, "w00t kewl lotsa f4t l00t OMG nobodys lookin lets kill them all OMG u n00b," is a whole different thing altogether.