Inflicting pain on 'griefers'

Getting back at the losers who try to suck the fun out of on-line games..

Published on December 16, 2004 By Draginol In PC Gaming

As online-game companies court new and wider audiences, many are running into an old problem: "griefers," a small but seemingly irradicable set of players who want nothing more than to murder, loot and otherwise frustrate the heck out of everyone else.

Social miscreants can do more than ruin the game for better-behaved competitors. They can hurt game companies' bottom line by driving away customers and burning up support lines. Problems related to grief players often account for 25 percent or more of customer service calls, according to game publishers.

Now an increasing number of companies are fighting back, using a combination of technology, sociology and psychology to limit griefer damage. Success could be important to the industry's growth, as companies seek to expand beyond the audience of hard-core players to more casual customers, many of whom are unlikely to tolerate bad experiences for long.

Read the whole thing from CNET's News.com

Comments

Gene Nash

on Dec 16, 2004

Now if only we could do something about the social miscreants who pop-up on blog sites.

Evangeline said she liked to torture new players ("newbies") by luring them into a house specifically designed to trap and torture them. "Newbies are so disgusting...they're the bane of my Sim life," she said. "I'll cage (you) like an animal and have people laugh at (you)."

Ganging up on newbies is typical griefer behavior in games with large multiplayer universes, such as "Sims Online" or "EverQuest."

. . .

"Sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to hurt other people, cause grief for them," Suler said. "It might be a form of displacement for people who have been victimized in other areas of their life. They cope by turning the passive into the active: 'Now I'm the person who victimizes other people.'"

Hmm, reminds me of someone I know....

Kobrano

on Dec 16, 2004

I've found the best way to handle "Griefers", is to put them in an enviroment they can't control. To do that, you need to remove restrictive and rediculous "Canned" rules from the game, and allow players to develop their own rules and regulations. This is something most companies don't seem to understand.

Meridian59 for example, early on, had no rules. For the first couple of weeks the griefers ruled the game. Then the common folk got together, formed laws and standards of conduct, then had their most powerful players enforce these laws.. The result was an exciting and dynamic gaming environment that was ultimately not condusive to griefing! Funny how it all works out. Shadowbane was very similar, griefers came in, setup cities, and proceeded to grief the server. Players banded together, formed alliances, and burned down/destroyed the griefers cities, and ran them off the server.

I think companies trying to impose rediculous systems to stop griefing are just doing a disservice to their game, and the people that play them. Developer(God) concieved arbitrary rulesets aren't the answer, players should be left to mold and shape the world and the politics of the world on their own. That is how MMOs should be created and managed, unfortunately few companies understand this, and continue to find ways to restrict players to the one dimensional treadmill on railroad tracks with artificial experiance bars and contrived laws.

/shakes head

on Dec 16, 2004

Brad, did you invent the word 'griefer'? If thats the case, it sure have spread enough for news to use it.

I used to play in everquest, and I agree that griefers is very annoying. I died pretty many times by "drood" ( druid played by a griefer ) bringing thousands (not literally) of animals, monsters, etc to the group I was in.

Kobrano

on Dec 16, 2004

I used to play in everquest, and I agree that griefers is very annoying. I died pretty many times by "drood" ( druid played by a griefer ) bringing thousands (not literally) of animals, monsters, etc to the group I was in.

Thats too bad, now if you were in a game where players made the rules, you could have simply asked him to stop, and if he didn't you could have killed him.. Or at the very least, called ingame player authorities to deal with it.. Thats where I was going with this.

I hate it when people whine about griefers, not even understanding that the systems that breed them, are the very systems they are playing under, and the answer to fixing the issue, is right before everyones eyes... Its really easy for carebears to scream "I'm being griefed, do something XYZ mmo company, or i'm quitting!".. Its more fun, involving, and exciting to allow players to deal with these things properly, and give them the tools to do it.

Sad nobody realises it, they just look the the Gods (developers) to handle all of their disputes for them.

on Dec 16, 2004

if you were in a game where players made the rules

Exactly my point. I couldn't.

called ingame player authorities to deal with it..

In everquest? I played it in era that GM support just plain sucked.

I once had a griefer train my group 3 times, said it was a mistake each time, GM believed that person, but I think guy was using my group as 'clearing team' each time guy made a pulling mistake. Only think we could do was move to different spot, where it's impossible to train to us and still live.

Kobrano

on Dec 16, 2004

You aren't understanding what i'm talking about apparently..... I'm talking about PLAYERS running things, and why this would be less likely to happen (or at least more rewarding) if the game was based around rules and regulations that players design and control, not some developer in a far off place.

I'm not talking about GM's.. I'm talking about REGULAR PLAYERS to enforce rules.. For example, if you can't deal with the tough guy thats killing you by training mobs, and you are too weak to kill him, then call enforcers, whos job is to do that. - who are just regular players like you, that enjoy sticking up for the little man when they aren't off killing pkers and such...

I know its difficult to concieve of such a world, being born and raised in the Everquest Box - like so many gamers are nowadays.... But shockingly, they did/do exist, and most of us old school gamers, used to play in these. Please carefully re-read what I wrote to get a better handle on what I meant. As a final example, if you were a murderer in Meridian59, your name was red. The only way to clear a red name, was to appear ingame to a "Jury" of other players, who elect a "Judge", and then hear your case. If you win, then your exonerated by the Jury/Judge and your name becomes white again.. Keeping in mind, these are NORMAL PLAYERS running all of this, NOT GMS and NOT Company employees!

on Dec 17, 2004

Ahh you have explained it more clearly. Thanks. Your'e right, I never saw anything like that.

Frightlever

on Dec 18, 2004

Most Korean MMORPGs work that way so you if you really want to play that way there are a lot of options available to you. Or Shadowbane, possibly. Why, when there are so many alternatives available, would anyone want to see the carebear games become Lord of the Flies?

The article mentions players in Everquest luring noobs away to kill them. I have no idea if that's even possible on the PvP servers since I never played them but even if it was it would only because a new player had gone against advice and started playing on a PvP server. Alternatively you would have had to have consented to go player killer on a standard server, or been involved in a guild war. I haven't played EQ for a long time so this may have changed. However on EQ PKs represent less than 5% of the server population. Same on most games where there's a choice and that's probably a generous percentage.

Uncharacteristically I've spent a good deal of my MMO game time playing helper characters in newbie zones. When I was a lot younger I went inter-railing around Europe with a couple of friends. The whole month we were there we ran into countless people who went out of their way to help us when we were low. And I mean 3-am-with-no-place-to-go-except-the-street low. But in honesty I probably don't tell the stories about the guy who gave me his map or handed me his local currency because he was leaving the country and wanted me to have as much fun here as he had. I've worn out the stories about the fascist bus inspector who gave us a hand-written fine on a piece of lined paper and threatened us with the gendarmerie if we didn't pay up on the spot. Another time we had to go to the UK Embassy in Luxembourg to sort out a problem with my Welsh mate's ticket and got taken care of, quite literally, by a lovely Scot who wasn't satisfied until everything had been sorted. But that's not a great story. Then there was Bruges where we were chased down (where every other shop in the street sold either guns or big dogs!) by gypsies. I've gotten drunk off that escapade repeatedly. My point is there are plenty of good things happening but bad things get a disproportionate amount of the press.

In MMORPGs, as in life, the answer is for the authorities to take action as necessary. Okay, it didn't help me in France or Belgium but MMORPGs are a smaller population. If I'm paying for the right to play a game then shouldn't I expect more than mob justice? Is mob justice really the best we can expect? Points if you can cite an instance when a mob did the right thing and have most everyone agree...

In WOW it's next to impossible to train a crowd of mobs on a player. They chase whoever disturbed them and when their target outruns them they go back to where they where. In EQ they'd alight on anything close at hand with chewy bits. "TRAIN!" in EQ turned your blood cold. But it's about the only graphical MMORPG that I remember it happening in.

The premise of this article is that griefers (an extremely old term, unfortunately) are a problem, and I agree. As big a problem as this article implies? God, no. Griefers don't flourish in PvP or non-PvP games because all these games encourage grouping, and you don't group with losers. This notion of lynch mobs for naughty players is akin to drawing and quartering that jerk back in school. You might think it's a good idea but in general intolerance of the socially inadequte is just as ugly and disquieting as any of the other social taboos.

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