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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Eksemple, if I farm mobs or resources and someone shows up to do the same. I kill them if they come back only to try to get me corupt that is grefing. Not the fact that I killed him.
If a guilde "owns" a raid and kill anyone else trying too do it, that is not greifing.
If you kill someone farming resources that is not greifing even if you do it meny times. I want the free stuff and that is fear gains.
I think that in a MMO there are week and strong players and that is how it should be.
What are your thoughts on bodyguard system as part of the bounty hunter system?
Something like I will hang out and protect you while you gather and guard you from gankers for reasonable fee. I like pvp and hate gathering, but we all know you have to gather in an mmo.. In ESO I would sell my pvp points in order to not have to gather and was an annoying process.
Obviously pvp rank and a qualification standard would have to be met.
People do this a lot but most of the time it's a "friend helping a friend" situation because you know when your done the deal will be honored. A system that automatically honors the agreed payment would make this option more readily available to everyone
Some snowflake mindset people assume griefing is any player activity that interferes with them or inconvenience them in any way
Griefing, actual real true griefing is sorted by corruption system, all we need is to test it in Alpha 2. Honestly Im not sure what even is the purpose of this thread. If you want to protect snowflakes and limit player interactions like WoW does, you might as well just make a singleplayer game with group raids and dungeons like WoW.
Bad topic honestly
the following example will explain, what i consider as griefing:
10 Players (8 in Group) and two(non combetant) player will go to an very lucrative gathering(farm) spot (a place where you can get valuable ressources) and will kill every solo player / small group in order to obtain those goods. Only the full group will kill enemy players(whatever flag they might have) and after some players of them become corrupted, the "two other players" kill the corrupted players in that group to remove its flag and save their loot from being captured by "legit nongriefer". And with the actual flagging system you can kill corrupted players as non combatant without becoming a combetant or corrupted. These griefing squads will be in discord and tell the non combetant where the corrupted respawn and go there and kill him again, to remove those corruption stacks. (you might need more non combetant players to do that, when there is a mechanic that prevents corruption stack reduction when killed by the same player twice or more times in a row)
Another thing that might be a pain in the a** move is that some no lifer with higher level go to a important quest spot (instance entrance, main quest story line area(if there is such thing in AoC)) and farm those lower level player and make them loss progress and time (XP loss!). These players will be pretty much pissed, when they get owned by some alpha apes in a bossfight or getting stopped from looting an imporant item or interact with quest objects etc. And don't forget, the main player base on a pay to play MMO are not the hardcore players, its the casual player base who play 2-3 hours after work shift. When these players lose progress in continuous matter in their playtime, they might leave the game. And telling them, yes you can do this or do that without having any fear of progress loss might not be enough to satisfy them.
Griefing comes in variable forms, the more complex the game system is, griefer will find a way to annul some mechanics to use them in their favor.
@Vaknar In november 2020 I made the same topic/thread that reached 9 pages long. Perhaps worth a read for more feedback: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/47354/what-do-you-consider-griefing-in-aoc/p1
If someone is causing me or my guildmates any inconvenience, whether it falls within someone else's definition of "griefing" or not, we are going to take steps to resolve or mitigate the issue.
The only thing I ask from the Devs is the tools for individuals to flag up players, write some notes and share with guilds/alliances/nodes. The Guild collective list from all members should be exportable as a .CSV. Same for a node mayor? Something like a "Book of Grudges", but for all players, regardless of race. Once everyone has "the naughty players" flagged then it becomes easier to deal with them. False reporting and the ability to mark reporters as untrustworthy might also be desirable.
AOC is supposed to be pvx right? So very competitive in the open world, everything is valid except maybe killing Low lvls, the corruption should be higher for players that kill a player like 10 lvl above them, or they should have some kind of protection or safe area before venture in the wild like albion...
But even without any system to protect low lvl players i think bounty hunters can play a big role on this.
I think devs need to keep remember that Aoc wont be an walk in the park, open world pvp will be a thing, fight for resources , mobs, territory, or the forums will be full of people crying likee i see in new world, from pve players that think they are coming to another wow or ff14
A lot of time times people will get 60-120 minutes of play a night. If I have to choose between games, because there are many to play, and I choose say Ashes, I don't want to waste my time dead, or corpse running. In New World, especially in the beginning, there are a lot of moments when you wanted to gather some resources and a mob would attack you. While you were fighting with the mob, someone else would come and take the resource node from you. Or you would kill the mob, and they would just stand next to you and the mob and spam E to loot it faster than you do. I find this griefing, as it takes away the fun from the game, especially since there is NOT a thing you can do. In Ashes, you could technically attack that person for 'stealing' your node, but then you would be a criminal, because he didn't attack you at all, he just took the resource.
So for you, there is no win condition. You either lose the resource, or you attack and lose reputation/gain corruption, or you actually get killed, and lose even more.
To minimize the risk of this, one could create nodes that are gatherable my multiple people at once, and would simply deplete proportionally faster with the number of people gathering. Or make instanced nodes for players when looting.
Simply being denied to play the game is not fun sadly.
The corruption system presented until now is basically : kill SOMEBODY, JUST ONE GUY that does not want to fight, DOES NOT MATTER if its a low level or a player armed to the teeth and get your game ruined with a 400% death penalty and deal with possible loot dropping. Thats total shit and its gonna kill world pvp if it releases like that. I agree with you in the amount of PK's u have to accumulate to get worn down. This amount of penalty in your FIRST MURDER is a joke.
What has made me stop playing a game is open PvP. I know people would like to say that PvP has honorable people who only challenge fair fights. Well, that is not my experience in any PvP I have played in. Yes, a few do it, but invariably, boredom sets in and it turns into people trying to make a name for themselves by killing as much as possible in any way possible. Whether it is letting someone fight a mob, then jumping in while they are down in hit points or killing obviously afk players who never fight back, it always turn into a griefing game.
Personally, I enjoy helping my fellow players achieve greater things and the PvP game is 100% lost on me with no interest in it at all. I am currently playing New World and the developers have obviously listened to elitist gamers and changed so many things mid-stream, that people are giving up and leaving. When PvE content is replaced by PvP battles, wars, or whatever, casual gamers such as myself move on. To me, when PvP guys finally realize that they cannot defeat the better players, they turn their attention to easy targets, us "carebears". I suppose that moniker has some merit, but it is my time and money, so I just move on as many elitists have already suggested in this very forum. I am not afraid of getting killed in a game. I just don't have the time to be a pin cushion for people who play to kill their fellow adventurers.
I love the look of this game and the potential is outstanding. However, if there is open PvP all over or in zones that I have to go to in order to finish my quests, then I will wish everyone a great game experience, but will not even try it out. Flame away, but it is just my opinion.
Kindest Regards
I see many people who understand AoC as a "hardcore PVP" style game; however, it is unlikely that this will be strictly true. Instead, there will be some elements from a hardcore PVP game, but that will almost certainly require a balance to keep casual players engaged. Some of the systems explained illustrate this already, which implies that the developers understand this as well. This is a positive sign, but it remains to be seen if these systems are enough.
That being said, griefing is practically inevitable in an MMO game. This is due to the temperaments of people in the general population. When you get a large enough sample pool, some individuals within that sample will have... let's say, significant anti-social behaviors. Perhaps the MMO community has a higher rate of those individuals. Anecdotally, this is true, but I lack sufficient evidence.
The only problem that I have ever had was when I am powerless to do anything against the griefer. That is a problem, it is frustrating, and it will cause casual players to leave the game permanently. This is a problem.
Cyberbullying and harassment should have no place in our community. Griefing is harassment. We should understand it as such. We cannot stop all harassment, but systems can prevent much of it. (By "systems", I don't mean automated systems that users can abuse to harass individuals.)
Another element is the chat system, and harassment within it. In particular, my children want to play this game, and if the general chat is not friendly toward that group, they will not. Someone else mentioned cursing in chat (even censored but clearly understandable), so I will give my opinion to that point as well. I don't raise my children to curse, and I won't willingly encourage them to spend time with people who do. Perhaps only my teenager will play.
A group of players preventing access to a quest, resource, etc. by anyone not approved by them is a potential problem in heavy PVP games. This is simply unacceptable and it should not be allowed. My temperament makes me such that I will work around such behavior, but it is a significant point of player loss in other games.
To summarize, cyberbullying and harassment should not have a place in our community. Griefing is harassment. Casual players (or "care bears") are a required part of a healthy MMO, and we should extend sufficient effort to ensure they remain in the game (for its long-term existence). There are, in fact, far more casual players than "hardcore" players.
According to the OP, pvp should be all together disabled. I agree on the Chat harrasment part, however this conversation in about griefing.
As the game revolves around tiles of land where groups of people constantly fight for development and access to better resourses, then everyone should be on the same page.
Any form of pvp should be considered non-griefing.
- The only protection system/needed should be in the situation where there is too big of a difference between character levels while engaging in pvp with each other, in order to allow people to actually level up and chase the individual server power curve.
- If any form of non-consentual pvp is heavily punished on the side of the initiator, in this future PvP centered MMORPG, it will drive those players away. What you are left with is the PvE carebares, that don't really know what they are doing in this future MMORPG in the first place. Eventually, because there is no PVP scenarios, those people reach endgame with full gear, and then proceed to logoff.
As a player who enjoys having potential competitives aspects to almost everything I don't blame you for thinking like this at all and enjoyed your perspective.
It's very clear there are a lot of people like yourself that enjoy participating in particular mmo concepts, basking in their polished fantasy themes and hoping to find like minded inviduals to share that experience with. The issue that many other people are having and myself, with western developed MMO's is the limited cieling, you said it yourself, people are trying to make a name for themselves. People's achievements on the likes of WoW/FF14/GW2 are personal accomplishments, only shared to their close friends or allies and these games make it their business to keep providing you with content tailored, that is pretty much, a guarenteed success story.
Dedicated gamer's are after achievements that you can't see, things that had influence on many players and their behaviour. PvP isn't the only system where competition can exist, but it can certainly make for some massive and great personal achievements.
You wanting to influence games by saying that "everything relating to PvP is just plain wrong and where does that leave me as a person with limited time" is imo a defeatist attitude.
Sure, with limited time you can't ascend to the top or near it but didn't you say you wanted to help others? I've got plenty of time for mmo's, I make it my main hobby, I still believe you can have a good influence on my experience in a positive and innocent way, without us battling each other.
Griefing is the result of not only boredom but also the lack of existance of a good system where the PK'er is punished in some fashion. That Pk'er killing people weaker than he is, relies on the world to gain fame, strength and allies as much as you do and much like the real world, there needs to be some sneakery on his part and possibly a harsh punishment served to keep up his existance in a healthy way, not to mention the damage to his repuation based off of most peoples morale code.
You can say "Well I don't want to be the unlucky victim of that, ever" but is that ultimately how you want to live when there's potential for exciting systems? Additionally you could meet up with some nice people that have helped you based on that unjustly encounter, friends and allies that you would of never of met trodding along the "success guarenteed" yellow brick road of games like FF14.
Edited - Also NW went from 900k recurring players to 150k with a PvE friendly system that had NO significant added advantages for PvP they did not lose players because of PvP.
I think the best way to solve this situations is PvP always and you can kill this scumbag who tries to steal your ore or some other methods like you mined 10 out of 16 seconds needed to completly mine this ore so you get your share for this 10 out of 16 seconds.
I do think that some trash talk and 'BM'ing' belongs in a game, but there should be hard limits. I've always thought that things like Tea-bagging and /spit were funny and i never considered it 'griefing', but some might disagree. Hard limits would include harmful words being used in chat, not things like 'trash' but moreso along the lines of homophobia, racism, sexism etc.
The online definition of "Griefing' is: "deliberately irritates and harasses other players within the game (trolling)". (let's assume we can agree on this base understanding, enough, to proceed)
So to reduce/minimize the griefing is definitively trying to reduce the irritation and harassment people (particularly bad faith actors) can inflict on others.
Here's what we know:
- irritation and harassment is subjective for each individual
- tolerance levels are different for each individual
- there will always be some level of harassment and irritation if everyone is given complete agency over their actions.
To reduce the level of harassment and irritation players can experience is going to require the reduction of player agency. (This is the very fine line that the game development and design teams have to balance). How much freedom do you want to grant your players, knowing they will have the agency to inflict irritation and harassment to others. If you restrict player agency too much, with systems, people might feel like they are on too many rails. If you DON'T restrict player agency or develop disincentives to certain behaviors- then players WILL have to ability to harass and irritate others. That is the nature of this genre.
Common tools/mechanisms that currently "work" for games:
- good reporting tools
- good communication tools (feedback) and active moderators
- the free agency of players (to an extent/limit) for example hard caps or limits
- incentivizing social interactions to combat opportunities of negative experiences. For example, high-level characters being rewarded for aiding low-level characters
- disincentivize irritating or harassing behavior (non-consensual) through disciplinary systems
All of this seems like an obvious conversation but I think it's essential that people understand the fundamental issues. Free player agency vs. Risk of irritation or harassment.
If you are sensitive and getting upset mute the person. If you are up to the challenge and put the toxic person in their place go ahead and school the kid.
A more action grieving like (spawn camping, or killing low-level players etc.). That is where I have a problem. But Ashes has corruption and systems hopefully to combat this.
I believe this game should have full freedom of speech, on messaging or voice chat etc.
If they are toxic or inappropriate conduct. Then they will get muted or the community will chew them out. Guild will ban them or even put a bounty on them.
So over all I recommend:
- Proximity chat( best thing ever). It was funny in new world people singing etc.. funny in the warzone hearing people's last few words after they die.
- Freedom of speech so you have say whatever you want. Its a fantasy world so let people do whatever and let the community sort it out. But of course have options to mute the player etc.
Griefers are people too. They don't kill for the King or Queen. Nooooo. They don't care about crafting or moving cargo via caravans, they just want to kill peeps over and over and over. Yaaaay. For Griefers I give you 1v1 or 3v3 arenas so you can kill for hours upon hours without corrupted penalties. Move up the PVP leaderboards and become the best of the best. Vera labels you corrupted but the arenas will declare you a Champion in the making. Will you become the God of PVP or will it be ME?
Just a couple of things to say on this point. 1) WoW still has open world pvp, all you have to do is just toggle it. It gets very intense, very quickly if you're in a populated zone and becomes either super fun or super frustrating. 2) The corruption IS balanced, you SHOULD be penalized heavily for killing a player not flagged for pvp. You don't get corruption for killing other flagged players. I highly suggest yall read up and refresh https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_flagging because as it stands I think the system will be fairly beneficial to deter pvp griefing for combatants vs noncombatants.
I do consider a player not being flagged but following a combatant and taking resources as griefing because at that point you only have two options: leave or kill the NC and get corruption. I don't really see an obvious workaround for this because if you do what WoW did and make it so the only other people you see in the world are other pvpers who toggled PvP, then that defeats the purpose of the corruption system.
As you said, it defeats purpose, although it would be classed as "Open World Consensual PvP" which is in every essence the bane of proper player interaction when you weight up everything.
WoW DOES NOT HAVE WORLD PVP anymore, due to the shit warmode and shard system.
Its completely dead.
I know the corruption system well, i just think its too strong, u think its balanced, fine, lets see.
Agreed. WoW Open world PvP servers in 2004 were good. The experience declined over time. TBH this is one of the things I'm most looking forward to in Ashes, an actual sense of danger.
Yeah bro, i got you.
To be honest, world pvp was good even in Legion. It had a big decline in BFA, for sure, with the warmode system, but u could still having fun on it. But now in shadowlands its dead, its over. Unfortunately the shit shard system combined with the warmode killed it, so sad. Why this bunch of incompetents changed the division servers system (PVP/PVE)???? U know, it worked well for more than a DECADE in this game. Totally no sense.
Im looking forward this open pvp and sense of danger too, this is a must in a open world game in my opinion!!
Everything else is just good PVP
Visions of bad (IMO)
1) Old school WoW where lvl 60s would PK in lvl 10 zones. Until a max lvl came by to stop it there was literally nothing anyone could do.
2) When flagging mechanics can be exploited to gain advantage. Example: Eve Online where a "neutral" support ship could "heal" during an pvp encounter to give one side an advantage (do not believe this is possible anymore). If I remember right there may have been ways to do this in SWG back in the day as well.
3) Spawn camping in general.
4) Newbie zones in general. The danger can be added later but the areas where new characters are spawning should be safe zones for sure. No one there knows what they are doing yet, and ruining the new player experience is a great way to get rid of new players.
Visions of good
1) Getting ganged up on by multiple characters. As long as you can reasonably fight back, maybe you can take one or two with you, its totally fine. Adds a sense of danger to open world areas.
2) Safe zones the you can escape to if you are fighting a losing battle. Even though this doesn't directly relate to player behavior it helps mitigate bad situations. We'd like to imagine that perfect mechanics or active GMs can prevent people from doing what people do but it's never really the case. Escape routs help give griefers pause and forces them to plan and it lowers the aggravation of would be victims when there is something they can do about it.
I don't talk about scenarios like equal one v ones or anything similar because having an issue with that is having an issue with pvp in general.
I like this definition in general. It's very well put. You could put it in a textbook.
I assume this dev discussion is about the developers wanting to take our feedback and design the game accordingly, not about us spending time defining griefing in general terms. Maybe they can try to define something actionable in their TOS as well.
Since the developers cannot act on perceived griefing based on the intent of the players, only on their actions, the only way we are of any help in this thread is if we use something like @Karthos 's definition and apply it to actual examples. But, I also think there is a little more to it.
The OP asks "What do you consider acceptable behavior in an MMO or PvP-based situation, and where do you draw the line at “griefing”?" which isn't specifically about Ashes, but without us looking at and considering some of the core philosophies of Ashes, the entire Dev discussion becomes moot and kind of useless.
The Wikipedia says this:
So we also need to look at these intended gameplay mechanics and philosophies from the developers. I was trying to get at this in my first post in this thread, but I think I worded it poorly.
Relevant to griefing, Steven talks about one of the core gameplay philosophies regarding Player Killing, corruption and player agency in this interview with Summit1g and Shroud. Starting at 45:12, Shroud asks what the gain is to PK someone, considering they can get corruption. Steven replies: Steven goes on to talk about two more reasons, like PKing to get their gathered stuff, or PKing to take over a good grind spot.
So clearly it's ok to kill a person in Ashes simply because you dislike them and want to make them feel bad for dying and losing stuff and xp, because corruption is there to give your pleasure of killing them a cost. That freedom and cost-benefit ratio and player agency is an important core philosophy of the game, according to Steven. You can kill the same player over and over ["whenever you see them"], but it costs more and more corruption to a point where it doesn't pay to continue. This is where @Karthos otherwise well written definition clashes a little with the intended game philosophy.
In guild wars and node wars corruption doesn't enter the equation. You can kill an enemy guild/node member over and over and over without immediate repercussion . In fact, that might even be one of the ways you win the war; by killing enough of their members before they can kill enough of yours.
I think it's bad form to spawn camp a player (except perhaps in a siege situation). It's also bad for Intrepid's bottom line. It can definitely be considered griefing. However, I also consider it bad game design to even allow the option to exist to an extent where the only recourse of the victim is to log off. In a situation where the PK gets more and more corruption for every kill, I see it as a smaller problem than I do in a guild or node war, where there is no cost to it.
Instead of Intrepid trying to stop spawn camping in the open world by saying "Thou shall not PK thine enemy at spawn more than 3 times, or be banned", they need to make it near impossible to do so. For example by respawning players at a different spawn point, if they were killed by a player near the first one more than once. The player can choose to go back to the fight or they can choose to escape at that point.
Some exploits can obviously be used to grief other players, and when an action is both an exploit and griefing at the same time (like we saw in A1, where an exploiter found a way to insta-kill other players without corruption gain or even becoming flagged), the penalty should be much harsher. If it was up to me, that is straight up permaban material of both the account and the person, credit card, MAC address and whatever else they can think of to try and prevent them from coming back to the game. No second chances should ever be given for that.