Dev Discussion #39 - Griefing

Glorious Ashes community - it's time for another Dev Discussion! Dev Discussion topics are kind of like a "reverse Q&A" - rather than you asking us questions about Ashes of Creation, we want to ask YOU what your thoughts are.

Our design team has compiled a list of burning questions we'd love to get your feedback on regarding gameplay, your past MMO experiences, and more. Join in on the Dev Discussion and share what makes gaming special to you!

Dev Discussion - Griefing
What do you consider acceptable behavior in an MMO or PvP-based situation, and where do you draw the line at “griefing”?

Keep an eye out for our next Dev Discussion topic regarding RNG!

UPDATE: Hi again friends! Thank you all for taking the time to stop by and share your thoughts on griefing! We had a blast reading through them all! Check out some of the top notes you shared with us below:

Many players felt that repeatedly killing people (ex. low level players, spawn camping) who are unable to fight back, or those who harass and ruin the experience of another player at little to no benefit of the harasser is griefing.
A large majority of players felt that griefing is abusing bugs, and exploiting within the game mechanics in unintended ways, tarnishing the experience of other players.
Some players felt that griefing is okay as long as the problems caused by players can be solved by players. If the griefing requires a Community Manager, or Customer Support Representative interaction, it’s likely disruptive and unacceptable griefing.
A few players provided examples of this:

Feeding people to mobs so they die without you getting corrupted is griefing.

“Karma Bombing” - For example, taking resources from your attacker to encourage them to attack you while you don’t fight back to increase their punishment.
Alternatively, there were many players who felt that in MMORPGS griefing can be nuanced to the etiquette of that particular MMO and community. Griefing is then determined by the community aside from anything unintended by the developers.

While there was some fantastic feedback and discussion in this thread, I think this quote expertly shows us what... strict benevolence(?) looks like ^_^

Nerror wrote: »

Thou shall not PK thine enemy at spawn more than 3 times, or be banned

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Comments

Lanandaz

Legends were made from people that griefed others in wow and from this so was hit lists that got updated by the server communities. Pvp tends to bring people together more than it does to tear them apart. It is one of the things you learn after being scared and rolling on a pve server and getting bored after you run out of stuff to do and rolling on a pvp server. I never liked any part of pvp till I got to see what it brought to a game and how it emersed you will a player base you would otherwise never interact with. Random epic show downs that are organized or organic come from pvp. None of the world pvp battles had a set outcome either. People would call up their guildies to join that is what I remember. Lowbies getting camped and endgame guys that are between doing things get wind of it and then their rivals hear about it and talk about server destruction of epic proportions. That's what I remember about world pvp. That and town takeovers the only thing town takeovers were missing is actual destruction of the town. To be fair to wow that would of destroyed the game with the hard set towns that it had. They did better after implementing world pvp zones that were in constant contention and would give zone buffs when fully owned if I remember right. A bunch of this was lost to auto que sharding and cross server que. The knowing your neighbor or knowing your enemy neighbor aspect all got lost when that was implemented. I will take laggy massive raids with people on the same server over this safe space garbage. The community needs to learn to take care of the community not the devs shielding us from ourselves . Otherwise what is the point of an mmo. That is what pvp did for me and what I miss the most.

Vhaeyne

Just think, unless I read that wrong. You are talking about WOW's open world PvP bringing people together. WOW barely incentivizes open-world PvP. People just turn on war-mode and pray they don't get messed with.

Nearly every system in AOC is designed to get you out there fighting in the open world. Welcome to the love of immersive gameplay friend!

CROW3

Something else to consider: Risk. Wow had no tangible risk factor to it's open world pvp. Here are some of the risks in Ashes:

Ashes Wiki wrote:

A non-combatant (green player) who dies suffers normal penalties, which include:
- Experience debt (negative experience)
- Skill and stat dampening
- Lower health and mana
- Lower gear proficiency
- Reduction in drop rates from monsters.
- Durability loss.
- Dropping a percentage of carried gatherables and processed goods
- This includes a percentage of items carried on the player's mule
- This also includes a percentage of the certificates a player is carrying

So, yes to all the positive elements of players coming together to attack / defend in the open world AND Verra is a lot more dangerous with more realistic meaningful risks than Azeroth ever was or will be. This is why there are so many discussion / debate threads around the corruption system.

Dygz

That only works for hardcore PvPers.
Griefing causes PvE-only and casual PvPers to rage quit.
If I get ganked when I'm not in the mood for PvP combat, I don't give a fuck what happens to the gankers afterwards.
There's a wide variety of ways to bring players together besides ganking.

What will truly bond players is working together to build and protect towns, cities and metros - which includes PvP combat without ganking...on a known schedule.

Percimes

Lanandaz wrote: »

The community needs to learn to take care of the community not the devs shielding us from ourselves .

Eeeeesh, I don't share your optimistic view on gaming communities. Negative thoughts aside, we should not equate PvP with griefing, even if the former is usually the easiest way to perform the latter.

When grief play has to be addressed by players themselves it pretty much means they must out-grief the griefers.
...
I've been trying to complete my thoughts on this for the last 10 minutes but can't find anything worth saying with what I know of AoC at the moment. I'll just say that some of the proposed mechanics for the game encourage me. No predefined faction, plenty of different objectives to fight other players over, penalties coming with corruption, not knowing the health of your targeted opponent, ... My main worries are linked to power difference because of levels/equipment and numbers.

Dygz

Yes. I think the New World devs had that level of optimism, too.
Until they watched people actually play. There was so much griefing, they toned down the PvP significantly and are now beefing up the PvE gameplay.

FuryBladeborne

One of the videos I watched explained the devs from New World are game developers, not MMO developers. As in, no MMO developing experience. New World started out intending to make a survival game with full open world PvP using MMO characters and abilities. At this point, it looks like their doing their best to turn it into a regular MMO. Just as that video described, it doesn't look like they knew what they were making when they started.

Ashes is being run by Steven who is a long time MMO player that loves open world PvP and large scale battles over things like open world dungeons and world bosses (which requires PvP everywhere); and, the game is actually being created by a team of developers with a long history of developing MMO's.

Maezriel

The big thing here is not only will there be no cross realm, but w/ the time it takes to level a character, build up a node, and a home within one most of these areas are going to be fairly intimate.

You should see the same people pretty regularly which means you'll know who's likely to grief you and they'll gain a reputation for being an ass to low levels and people will get joy in hunting them down.

Dygz

The New World devs didn't have the experience to understand just how much griefers would grief.
Steven is the opposite - a player who doesn't understand the dev/production side. He's learning more each year, though.

The focus of large scale PvP battles in Ashes is on objective-based PvP combat: Caravans, Castle Sieges and Node Sieges. With Corruption outside of battlegrounds in order to curb griefing.
We still have to actually play in order to assess how well the Corruption mechanic accomplishes the dev goal.
As we've been saying every couple of months for the past 3+ years.

Hiids

losing the exp your working so hard to get for the green player will have an effect some good some bad. It did in L2 and UO at least in the guilds I was apart of in both games. I am not actually looking forward to the pvp aspects but but there's enough lure in the rest of it that I can accept its part of them game.

Nerror

AOC will likely be a game for people who can either shrug off being killed while solo, or for people who know the value of working in groups, and actively play together, and help and protect each other. People who are only used to consensual PvP MMOs, or PvE only, will find that they can't play AOC like they are used to. They can't just log on, say hi in guild chat, and then just do their own thing to the same extent. For some it will be a turn off, and for others it will be an eye-opening and positive experience to almost be forced to work in groups to really achieve anything.

Nerror

As the title says, what do you consider griefing? In AOC of course, with the planned flagging/corruption/PvP system.

I've noticed some people use ganking and griefing inter-changeably almost, which strikes me as odd, so I would especially like to hear from you guys

Definitions matter, especially in forum discussions where we only have the written word to rely on.

My personal take is, it's griefing only if the intent of the player is to harass the other player, and cause anguish, through methods that are UNintended gameplay.

For AOC, which is a non-consensual PvP game, this essentially means that being killed while green, even if it's several times in a row, is not the same as being griefed if the killer doesn't cheat or exploit.

Is spawn camping griefing? Not if it's intended to be possible by the developers. It is however really bad game design, because people will understandably be frustrated and quit the game, so whether it's a green player being camped, or someone in a guild or nodewar, I would certainly hope it's possible for the dead player to respawn at a different respawn point in order to get away.

Now, if the developers find out about spawn camping being a thing, and they publicly state it's unintended, then it immediately becomes griefing, even if it is possible.

Same thing for killing lowbies over and over in guild and nodewars. It's not nice, but it's effective and it's not griefing if it is intended gameplay. It's up to the stronger players in the guild or node to protect their weaker members, until they can also grow strong. A mitigating factor here is that you can't just perma-war another guild, and it costs money. It's a set duration time probably, or until some objective is reached.

Edit: Just looked up the wikipedia definition. Should have done that first I suppose, but it essentially agrees with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer

George_Black

Extremely foul language.
That is the only thing I cant stand in gaming and I hope to see accounts banned if a player reports an offender with screenshot.

akabear

Repeatedly killing the same player over and over again in a short span of time for no reason

Wandering Mist

To me, griefing is where you abuse mechanics to harm an ally. So, killing a low level player of the opposite faction - not griefing. Intentionally pulling tons of mobs in a dungeon so that your party wipes - griefing. Spawn camping? Not griefing.

Thedeadnight

I think the line between griefing and ganking is pretty clear. Has nothing to do with intended/unintended rules whatsoever. If you just kill someone once, then that's just a gank at worst. If you kill everyone you see, that's also not griefing. To me griefing is making it your goal to intentionally upset another player, some instances this is perfectly fine though. You are farming a spot an someone keeps trying to be your competition? Kill them 500 times or more until they stop going near the spot you're farming at. Did someone steal a kill of yours and now you've hunted them down 10 times even when they left the area? Now you're a griefer (aka asshole). It all depends if you're defending something or just being a dick. Hoarding a resource spawn is compleltly reasonable and expected. Making it so someone else can't play the game is just plain rude.

Atama

I use the actual definition of griefing, which is to perform actions with the only purpose of ruining another player’s enjoyment, and deriving pleasure from it. Griefing can come in many forms:

Repeatedly attacking someone who is unable to fight back.

Verbally harassing people, especially if using inappropriate language (racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, religious bigotry).

Stealing a resource, treasure, and so on while another person attacks whatever is guarding it.

Grouping with people then ninja-looting.

Teaming with people in some kind of regulated match or other event, then going AFK or performing emotes.

Spamming (not gold farming stuff, that’s different, I mean just flooding chat with repetitive nonsense).

Trying to scam people.

Killing NPCs that provide services to other players, like vendors or fast travel characters.

Really, anything that might make someone to rage quit the game (briefly or permanently). I don’t just mean beating a competitor, in PvP someone has to lose, but when you do something that you know is going to upset people and not only do you not care, you want them upset, that’s griefing. That’s why it’s called griefing; you are intentionally causing grief.

I don’t consider actions that cause corruption to be griefing automatically. I think it would depend on the circumstances.

Maezriel

Repetition.

Kill a guy b/c you were walking through and you can? That's fine, wrong place wrong time happens.

Sit and camp that guy for an hour just to force them to log out? That's griefing.

Same when abusing a mechanic to troll your friends. Once is a prank, 3-5 times is griefing.

Lanandaz

Ok I am heavily biased in my wow world pvp from a fun stand point. I will say my PVP fear was from playing EQ1 where when you died you had real loss to deal with. It was terrible and a risk I was happy to get out of. Probably why the pvp was so epic when the risk was gone other then closing down sections of the world for a few. Everyone was fine with sections closing and I think gear would break but it was never perm like in EQ if I remember right. The thing most of us in world pvp was wanting was for it to change the actual landscape to have an actual impact. I might be late to this game but I hope it works out and is balanced right in terms of risk reward to make it fun for constant change that doesn't break the game with too much risk that essentially cuts off the ideas because the outcome is never worth the risk. From playing eve though that extreme was a little more greeted with open arms.

Lanandaz

Percimes wrote: »

Lanandaz wrote: »

The community needs to learn to take care of the community not the devs shielding us from ourselves .

Eeeeesh, I don't share your optimistic view on gaming communities. Negative thoughts aside, we should not equate PvP with griefing, even if the former is usually the easiest way to perform the latter.

When grief play has to be addressed by players themselves it pretty much means they must out-grief the griefers.
...
I've been trying to complete my thoughts on this for the last 10 minutes but can't find anything worth saying with what I know of AoC at the moment. I'll just say that some of the proposed mechanics for the game encourage me. No predefined faction, plenty of different objectives to fight other players over, penalties coming with corruption, not knowing the health of your targeted opponent, ... My main worries are linked to power difference because of levels/equipment and numbers.

That aspect wasn't as bad as you think. As a new player you had no clue. It wasn't till end game I realized what low lvl town camping really did in terms of game play. Granted it was with a lot less consequences to the ones being killed other then a time sink. It was more of a poke the bear and get the other side mobilized for some back and forth. Usually lead to small towns being wiped clean till a major city was raided. Sometimes it would get that far sometimes it was stopped dead and you move on. I am definitely curious either way and will get back into it just to see their implementation. Might just be wishful thinking on my part or just nestalgia getting the best of me.

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