Interesting article on griefing in MMOGs

Not that this is a game or anything but still...

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1797198,00.html

Its your opinion its not a game. Its my opinion it is..at least I have the decency to admit its only an opinion.

Interesting article. Being anonymous brings out the worst in us.

Actually its LL's. I don't really give a shit whether its a game or a platform.

I read about the guild in WoW who raided that in game funeral, they make me sick. Common decency should have prevented them from acting like complete assholes. I know WoW is definitly a game, but there are other humans behind the characters, and that much disregard for the grief of other people sickens me.

They also said havoc2 by 1.7 ....

Eve Online is a griefers paradise. People make their virtual living griefing other players. There are some areas where you are fairly safe but never 100%. The players with the biggest stick and best organizational skills win.

I've been in Eve for well over a year and still feel like a total nooblet. To say it's a large and developed MMORPG is an understatement.

Until there is a real verification system there will always be griefiers. I suppose games could charge a deposit or or levy RL$ fines to discourage griefing but I don't see that happening.

You are totally right about the biggest stick and best organizational skills winning in eve. I have been in eve since October and I think that there needs to be a distinction drawn between a PvP (Player vs. Player) environment and griefing. Basically, eve is a true PvP game - anything goes anywhere except exploits of the game code. They designed it that way and it will be played that way. If anything, they should go out of their way to explain this to people when they sign up. My main, Alex Vindaloo, stays in the "safe" empire areas and does trade PvP (buying stuff for way lower than it's worth and reselling it.) My other characters are being "skilled up" for upcoming race wars and I think then I will start blowing up Amarr ships. The Guiding Hand adventure in that story is a textbook example of how eve works and it really should be required reading. If a person reads that and can't handle having that happen to them, they shouldn't play.

I have never received a "killmail" in eve for killing a player, but I watched a person mine a million ISK worth of ore and have them gladly sell it to me for 1/3 of that because they don't know what it's worth. I profit off of the various corp wars by moving replacement parts to lowsec areas where they pay dearly for them.

That thing in WoW with the funeral being "griefed" is very contentious. WoW has both PvP and non PvP zones. The people that held the funeral CHOSE to go to a PvP zone unarmed for this service. Again, in PvP, that is how the game is played. In this case, it was poor form, but perfectly legal.

Both Eve and WoW are games that require payment to play and have hard set rules of conduct - so at least the griefer is paying something and can be banned for breaking the rules.

This is where we get in trouble in SL, because we aren't PvP in the slightest (Jessie excepted) and there are folks that just don't get that. On top of that, they don't have to pay now. This is now where the griefers will congregate, much to our detriment.

Flavian, send me an evemail (alex vindaloo) if you want to meet in Eve. I can share some tips that might make you feel less noobish. I think there used to be an SL chat channel, but I can't remember what it was called.

I really enjoy eve - I can be a total bastard there (if I want to) and it is okay - in SL, I get to be a really nice guy who owns an island and (thankfully) I never got hooked on WoW. What can be better?

Ok, I am really not that much of a bastard in Eve, and Maeve, you are right that the thing in WoW was totally uncalled for. The anonymity of these games does make it possible for decent people to do bad things.

There is a post on Osprey Therian's blog about her encounter with a noob in SL who thought she was a game generated Non Player Character. That is the big hurdle here - for years, we blew up computer NPC's without any thought of their feelings or their families. Now the folks we blow up have names and it is kind of hard to reconcile that.

I won't stop placing my insanely low buy orders in EVE and I will most likely only kill other players in the game for storyline reasons (Eve has a great storyline). Will I go out of my way to blow up another ship just because I can, no, because I know it's a real guy or gal and I hate it when it happens to me.

Griefing is a part of our psycho-social makeup, its been around for a very very very long time and it's not going to go away (unless lobotomies for griefers becomes law). I've watched Eve-Online walk a very fine line between grief-play and open-ended functionality, and it manages it very well in most circumstances, yet they still have their problems as people adapt and overcome.

I've been playing Eve-Online since beta, and during my time I've done some things which could be considered griefing to those who don't know the backstory and/or role-play their characters, I've declared war, I've attacked without war declarations, I've deliberately killed unarmed miners and traders, but all of it was consistent with my character's outlook.

however you define grief, just sit back and think for a few moments, what the guiding hand did was an awesome act of sabotage, betrayal, murder, theft, and in-character dis-loyalty.... but was it grief?

Just another step, a challenge, in the evolution of MMOs. Griefing happens in real life, doesn't it? It was happening way before humans invented the rock-on-a-stick, angry now-extinct animals were griefing humans and humans were griefing them to extinction. There is much griefing going on in Iraq right now. But people will find new ways of dealing with it, whether it's the developers or the players, in real life or in MMOs, and organization appears to be the key.

For example, game developers always add a friends list, but they rarely add other lists, or let the players add them. For some games, it would be convenient to have not only the friends list, but also an evil-jerks-whom-I-should-not-trust list, an associate list, a contact list, a customer list, a block list, a hit list... you get the idea. Of course, it is always better to let the players organize and customize the lists however they want. If an in-game corporation fears griefing attacks, the players in charge of security would exchange lists of potential griefers to recognize and assess threats better. In games like Eve Online, such a list would allow a guild to form a hit list of players who griefed anyone in the guild, which would make griefing anyone in that guild unwise.

Hmmm.... sounds like an idea for a SL equivalent of a "Blacklist server" like those used by some email server admins to block SPAM from "identified sources" of SPAM.

I quit EVE because of the exploit-based griefing.

I was a pirate and griefed quite a few people in my time. My sec rating is pretty bad. I was even a moderately well-known pirate in regions I camped.

What killed it for me is that every time they implemented a new system in teh game, it was broken. For instance, now if someone kills you in Empire, you can hunt them for a month and kill them without reprocussion. However, they can defend themselves.

When this first came out, you COULDN'T defend yourself. It was bugged and Concord would rip you to shreds if you protected yourself from an I4I attack.

This pretty much killed my trade. That, and macromining.

I have always wanted to burn one of my alts and join one of the macrominer hunting groups.