Your theory makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t really considered it that way before…
'cept your modern 13-year old griefer has grown up with multiplayer games.
Right, and I grew up with Super Marios Bros, not tabletop D&D, and I learned how to share and play nicely with others.
I think, if it’s true that younger players are more often griefers, that it’s the fact that there isn’t as much local multiplayer to be the culprit. When you play D&D or Power Rangers SNES or whatever with your friends you learn that fucking them over, while occasionally funny, pisses them off if you’re just an outright asshole to them. When you finally come around MMOs, you project that onto the other players: sure, it may be fun to PvP, but being a dick and griefing lowbies is just like when you kill stole every one of your best friends mobs for 3 dungeons straight in D&D, and you’ve been conditioned to getting a response, in person, from someone you care about (or at the very least, you’ve been conditioned because they could possibly try and kick your ass since they’re right there).
But since games are trending more and more towards remote multiplayer you lose a lot of that. Sure, you steal that guy’s node, but you’ll probably never see him again. Oh, how cute, he’s yelling at me through chat, it’s not like I care about him, he’s not my friend. You just don’t get as much of an opportunity to get a real reaction from someone for things you do in a game as you did when someone was on the couch next to you, and I think that hinders the empathy, since even if there’s another person, they’re still just pixels and you have no real frame of reference like those who actually have pissed off real people in meatspace from their in-game actions do.
And I have been involved in MMORPGs since 1999 … and back then they were nintendroids, now they are script kiddies. Same shit, different decade. Bunches of immature jackasses out to cause a ruckus. If it were a real life playground they would be stealing footballs, baseballs and candy from kids on playgrounds.
<shrug> But I will confess it was fun being a GM and having the power to deal with griefers … instead of having to try reporting them and avoiding them.
Are you a griefer? You also probably had parents who trained you to be civilized.
S’my point. I’m not sure the theory you posited is fully accurate.
What I really don’t understand about that in-game WoW funeral is why they never held it in a safe zone. I don’t know the rules of PvP servers, but I have read that Dalaran is a safe zone, so Shattrath should have been (wasn’t that video from back in BC?). The newbie zones are also safe zones.
I grew up with single player games, but I’m just a giant carebear anyways. There is no polite world PvP unless you start a server that you control the players of, meaning WoW isn’t the best game for you.
EverQuest’s Fansy, the Famous Bard
Fansy is the best griefer ever, across all games
*Emphasis added. The “you” in “Wittle tells you,” above is Fansy, not me.
Hahahaha! LMFAO, ROFL, LOL, ROFLMAO
Fansy had people begging, pleading, rationalizing, philosophising, as if their real life was at stake.
Best is “'i also want to be a double agent for the good, another method by which to take down the evil,…”
He doesn’t want to be an agent for the good. I bet he couldn’t give a shit about good and evil. He just wanted to put his Newbie Sword of Bat Slaying +1 in the bank and Fansy had him questioning his moral alignment.
Griefing will never be so good again.
I don’t think a person who ganks (within the rules of the game) is mentally ill. Hell, I don’t think a person who ganks outside the rules of the game is mentally ill. I also don’t think an anti-ganker is mentally ill.
People who get married in-game however…
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
In Everquest, gankers got to confiscate all the coins and 1 piece of gear from the guy they killed.
[/QUOTE]
Because you had to be “wearing” the item (you couldn’t loot items from bags or general inventory), I remember desperately stripping off the most important gear as quickly as I could when I knew I was going down. I’d also travel long distances naked, with no coin.
+1
I don’t ever powergame so I never have the “strongest bestest” flavor of the month character, and usually my attention is split 2 or 3 different ways when I am gaming, so PvP environments are out of the question for me.
When I’m outside, walking down a street window shopping or just admiring how people have landscaped their homes, the odds of a random stranger passing by me gutting me are near zero. Even the evil ones. When PvP players…even evil ones :rolleyes: …realize that evil ≠ sociopath, maybe it would be more fun for a truly casual player.
Honestly, I totally disagree. I think it has everything to do with the MMO model and little to do with the platform the players grew up in.
Say there is a mithril node and a player is running up to it on foot to mine it. A higher level character swoops in on his mount and gets there just in time to steal the node, and he mines it. Why did he do this? Simple economics. If he steals the node he gets some stuff and looks like a dick to the newbie, ruining his reputation with him. But he is only one character out of thousands. No real loss. If he doesn’t steal the node he gets nothing.
This can be extended to pvp. And there is even less reputation at stake with cross faction pvp when you can’t communicate with the enemy.
Note that these economic incentives only explain the behavior of the middle 80-90%, not the oddball sociopaths and antigankers.
I grew up with Nintendo, i am 33 years old. I don’t know who this older than me gamers are supposed to be, but i am certainly above the age average. There is no older generation that learned to play well with others, people playing pen and paper rpg are a tiny minority now and they were a tiny minority back in the day.
I went from being a mission running bear in eve to being a pirate coming up to a month ago.
Ive killed a few newbies that ventured into low-sec, by I always try and start a convo with them and offer them some friendly advice and help. I’ve also given some a lot more money than I’ve blown up from them or said I’ll leave them alone or even defend them for the day if they’re nice about it. I’ve made quite a few friends doing it which really is the proof and the pudding.
I’m doing it for the excitement and and adrenalin and the whole point is non-consensual pvp, I want to get more kills than losses and if I limited my targets to those who did want to pvp me I would normally be fighting people who know they have a big advantage otherwise they wouldnt want to engage. I will engage people in bigger ships than me, but on my terms not theirs.
I wouldn’t call myself honourable but I have standards and will never resort to fighting in high-sec or scams which I consider griefing.
Theres a common saying in eve - if you cant afford to lose it dont fly, theyre are plenty of cheaper ships there, go into lowsec and your fair game in my opinion.
TLDR:
I blow stuff up but I’m a friendly pirate and I’ve made friends doing it. If youre in low-sec your fair game.
It’s precisely because of single player games that I hate griefing so much. The whole point of video games is escapism, to get away from real life. The one thing I like most about that is the ability to try again if bad things happen. The whole fun of the game is that I can try what would ordinarily be outrageously risky behaviors, and, if it doesn’t work out, I’m not significantly worse off than when I started.
From what I can tell, most online games do not work this way. You have one life, and if you lose it, game over. Why in the world would that not change how you view death? Why wouldn’t it hurt is you have completed 25% of the game and now have to go back and start over? And why in the world would you not be pissed at this hurt if it happened because a player was just being a dick?
This takes me to the OP. Let’s say you are working on an old fashioned cardboard puzzle. You’ve spent a significant amount of time, and you’ve gotten at least, say, half of it done. You come back to it one day, and someone has completely broken it apart. If I am upset about that, does that mean I have a mental illness? If I find out that you took it apart just to mess with me, is there something wrong with getting really pissed at you?
People keep on trying to make the morality of the online world different from the real world. But we’re still people. When what you’ve done is undone, and especially when it is undone just for the lulz, we get upset. To say that there is a mental disorder involved is stupid.
This is very different from the real life analog of griefers. That’s people who destroy other people’s property for fun because they know they won’t get caught. That’s people who say mean things to you because they think it’s funny watching you get upset. These are people that very well could lack empathy, and thus have a real personality disorder or mental disorder.
Nitpick: the phrase is actually "If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t undock in it. EVE, very deliberately, only has safer space, and no such thing as safe space. If you undock, even in an unfitted ship, and you are undocking in assets. You’re fair game if you’re in Empire, lowsec, nullsec, or wormholes. The single place in which you are safe is your hangar.
If I had my way, they wouldn’t iterate on Walking in Stations without adding Perforating Fools’ Skulls in Stations.
Of course you can. A game is a social activity, an MMOs doubly so. Hell, an MMO goes beyond being a game - it’s a social network, a dating site, an in-group social community all rolled up into one. And, yes, a dragon slaying simulator besides that. And if you don’t play well with others in a social activity, if you take pleasure in annoying other people involved in that social activity for the only purpose of amusing yourself, that’s skirting pretty close to antisocial right there. Maybe not DSM IV, clinical, diagnosed disorder (though I suppose the latter would come with the former). But your garden variety complete asshole ? Sure.
To take your chess example: say you were in a quiet park, playing chess with your mate. Guy you have never seen in your life comes up to your table and knocks it over, laughing. Bugs out. You and your friend curse, prop the table back up, set the pieces for a new game, start playing again. 10 minutes later the guy comes back and knocks the table down again. For no “real” reason. Just to piss you and your mate off. Because to him, that’s funny. Or worse, because he figures you getting angry over what to him is “just a game” is a sign *you *have a problem.
Wouldn’t you say that man has issues ? It’s bad enough when that kind of heinous shit happens in the third grade recess yard. When it’s a grown ass man doing it, it gets a little worrying, doesn’t it ?
You are ignoring an essential difference, Kobal. One guy is acting outside of the rules of chess; you can not smack over an opponent’s table. But if he played to win and devastated you in a few moves, that would not be acting like a jerk.
In a game where you can be “PvP flagged”, or a game like EVE where you are always PvP flagged, you are playing the game as it was designed. There, it is not like kicking over someone’s chess table because you can, but other people complaining because you served an ace in a competitive match of tennis, but served too fast for them to volley it back to you.
?
Everquest 1 - you die, you lose a certain amount of experience points, and your naked body pops back where you bound it, and you have to run to wherever your corpse is and loot it to get your stuff back. I think on the PVP server the killer could loot your coinage and 1 item. I never played nor GMd on a PVP server.
World of Warcraft - improvement, no experience point loss, made it funner =) I played on a non-PVP server but I do not think the killer could loot you.
EVE Online - you get killed, you are floating in space in your pod. mobs didn’t pod kill but human players could kill your pod, making you wake up in a cloned body back in your home station. If you didn’t upgrade your clones to have the right number of points, you could lose skills. That game doesn’t have character levels, you actually take time to ‘study’ skills to get to use items.
Lord of the Rings Online - again, like WOW, but free to play. You die, you pop fully equipped back in a graveyard closest to where you died. No loss of stuff, and I don’t play PVP so I can’t say what happens in PVP.
Runes of Magic - you die, you pop in a graveyard, nothing more than a run back to where you were questing.
Well - in general in MMORPGs you lose any non permanent buffs when you die, though I remember WOW has some buffs that can carry on through death.
The worst effect in a MMORPG is losing some XP, your cash and 1 item, in general you have the annoyance of having to run back to where you died to keep on questing/grinding/whatever. I do not know offhand any MMORPG where if you die your character dies totally as well. Though I do seem to remember maybe abotu 8 or so years ago hearing about a game where you die you have to start a new character, but Ill be damned if I can remember which one it is because I never played it, and I have played a lot of them in betas, or on trial accounts. [Most MMORPGs are fairly forgetable to be honest]
Not necessarily. There’s playing PvP and then there’s griefing. There’s playing the game, and playing the player. Griefers do the latter.
It’s one thing to go to a hostile zone and zap some guy from the other side, take his shit and move on. It’s another to zap that guy. Then go to his spawn point, zap him again. And again. And again. Ignore everyone else but him. He zones away, you follow him and zap him there. He delogs, you put his name on your friendlist so that whenever he pops his head back up thinking the coast is clear, you can go right back to zapping his ass. In short, making it your goddamn mission to ruin his fucking night. On purpose. That’s griefing. It’s the same with team-killing in CounterStrike type games, or intentionally ruining your side’s game of DOTA.
That’s not being competitive, or role playing, or playing the game. It’s being a dick, plain and simple. Which itself is a cunt hair away from antisocial behaviour.
'Cause most people, see, they don’t want to be dicks. They don’t set out to be dicks. They never think of themselves as being dicks. If they realize whatever it is they do is being somewhat dickish, they’ll rationalize it away and call it doing what they gotta do, or being competitive, or getting ahead in the game, or that it doesn’t really matter, whatever. Anything but admit to themselves they’re being dicks. I’ll go full Godwin and say even Hitler probably never once thought of himself as a dick.
Griefers know they’re being dicks and they rationalize that in a variety of new and interesting ways. That, to me, is the mondo fucked up part.
Now we can always argue about where the line between taking your competitiveness seriously and being an actual dick is; we can always point to this story or that story and say what we think which is which. But the fact remains that there be dicks out there. And when they are doing what dicks do, I don’t think it’s fair to say their victims are weird for getting a little miffed. It’s never fun being in the general vicinity of a dick. Hell, even just watching a dick in action is pretty unpleasant.
You know, unless you roll that way. Not that there’s anything wrong wit’ dat 