Nowadays when I play Team Fortress 2 I try to stick to servers with very clear cut rules about internet etiquette, but every once in a while I still run into jerks who can’t seem to get over the fact that I’m a girl or are just determined to ruin everyone else’s good time. (My response: screencap, report, find a different server.)
What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, or that you’ve instigated on someone else?
My most unhappy experience, if not the worst, was dealing with some fifteen year old waste of space who would not stop harassing me over text chat, saying how he wanted to do obscene things to me and so on.
As far as instigation goes, I only do it with permission. I’m on a server that’s very relaxed about playing, so every once in a while I’ll just Spy Crab or what have you. It’s always great fun when other people are willing to play along and let me, say, cap a point while all I’m doing is crouching and staring straight up.
One of the things in TF2 that pisses the shit out of me is when I’m a sniper and another sniper comes along and sets up right in front of my face. Whenever there’s already a sniper at a certain spot, I find someplace else to stand, it seems like common courtesy to me. Even if you want to wait until I die and then take that spot, that’s okay. I usually switch positions a lot even when I haven’t died. But spawning and then immediately running over and standing in front of me and blocking my view is verboten.
So one time we had this guy who wouldn’t budge from his perch on the battlements. No matter who or how many snipers were already there, that was the only place he’d choose to stand. So I switched to engie and set up a teleporter entrance right next to his feet so that when he strafed to the left while scoped in, I’d teleport him to the intel room.
The one that sticks out in my mind is from WoW. I was in Southshore while leveling up–I must’ve been in the mid-60s, and there were two Hordies there camping the Flightmaster. It wasn’t just an accidental kill–one of them was a shaman, and they were setting up totems in preparation for the respawn.
Now, for those of you who don’t play World of Warcraft, the Flightmaster serves as transportation to other zones. For higher level characters–namely those over level 40–being unable to use a flightmaster is mildly inconvenient. For lower level characters, who have yet to gain all the fast movement speed skills that the higher levels have, it’s a lot more annoying. Southshore, which is where this happened, is meant for lower-level characters. So, basically, you have low level characters being seriously inconvenienced by high level characters that they can’t beat. Additionally, there’s no benefit for killing a Flightmaster, and they won’t attack you unless you attack them first.
So, after a couple of cycles–with a couple of level 20-odds waiting around to try and fly out–I told a friend of mine who was in Ironforge, and they put out the notice to Trade chat. Within about 10 minutes, about 6 level 80s showed up to help encourage the two Horde members to leave. After about three more attempts on the Flightmaster, they start just trying to leave. Whereupon the people we called from Ironforge continue to pursue and kill them. Sigh.
Then, after ten minutes pass without the Horde members showing up, one of them, instead of leaving, pipes up: “Let’s go raid Tarren Mill.”
Years ago in Air Warrior-being a veteran of countless campaigns I was used to issuing the occasional order (“Cover this airfield” or “intercept that flight of bombers”) and nobody on my team blinked an eye when I did so. Except for this one douchebag who PMed me and started in with all sorts of vague innuendos and thinly veiled insults, including bragging about how he was going to bang his G.F. later that night and how I was such a loser than I wasn’t going to get any. Never identified his in-game ID or specified what exactly I did that he found so heinous. I had enough sense to not write back.
In Diablo II, one of my favorite character builds is based on the Enchant spell, which you cast on yourself or other friendlies, and which gives the target an insane amount of fire damage on all of their weapon attacks, for about 15 minutes. It doesn’t scale with level, and once it’s cast the enchanted person doesn’t have to stay near the enchantress, so it’s great for leveling up low-level characters quickly. Sometimes when I was helping out another Doper, or just feeling in a helpful mood, I’d open up a public game where I’d just stand around and enchant everyone who came in.
Well, occasionally, there was someone who would look at their shiny new damage numbers, and say to themselves, “Hey, I’ll bet that’s enough damage to kill that high-level sorceress! That’d be a prize!”, and try to duel me. What they never seemed to realize, though, is that I also cast it on my mercenary, who can therefore one-shot them as soon as they enter the screen in hostile mode.
Only story I have is the jerk who went into a Paragon City door, rounded up all nearby mobs, then immediately went offline without warning while the rest of the group entered.
Ultima Online, I was a chest thief/dungeon thief. I’d stealth into dungeons to loot the chests that spawned throughout. I was dedicated in that I had the actual skill remove traps when the vast majority relied on the spell telekinesis to spring the trap and open up the chest so they could use the 100.0 skill points for something else. With telekinesis, you have to be a certain distance away. Whenever this person went to spring the trap with their spell, I had already removed the trap and was looting the chest. By the time they processed what was happening and returned to the chest, I had snatched the choice items. By the time they caught on to what happened and returned to the chest, I was stealthing away. Most times I easily got far enough away that their reveal spell missed me. Mostly done in Trammel where they had no reprieve anyways.
I also looted the chests while they were busy killing/luring away the monsters that spawned near them. Pissed off alot of people and only a few got the satisfaction of killing me.
I’d also do it in Felucca, but there was far less chance of encounters. When I was unlucky to be revealed, I’d opt to suicide amidst a monster mob. Anyone running after me would have the monsters turn against them, buying me time to resurrect, and then stealth back to my corpse to safely reacquire my items. I should note I kept my items in a tinker trap chest set up to where even though they were unlocked, the trap was still set (normally tinker traps are only set when locked) and would kill whoever tried to open it. The tinker trap chest was also handy as theft deterrent.
The worst time I got griefed was with my champion spawn archer. I had managed to stumble across the summoned Harrower and spent and hour lobbing arrows at it. The room was utterly crowded with people. I was lagging like hell. When it finally died, I lucked into a stat scroll. I was lagging all to hell that I couldn’t move. All I had to do was move the scroll into my tinker trap chest and I’d be home free. Amidst my lagging someone was going around snooping into everyone’s packs blatently. They saw I had a scroll and commenced to kill me. I was helpless, I couldn’t even double click the scroll to use it, even though I didn’t think of it at the time. They managed to kill me and get away with the scroll, weaving through the mob to safety. Only time I had gotten a stat scroll while I was still playing. Worse, I’d occasionally come across the guy while doing champion spawns and he never passed up the chance to gloat.
Way back in the days of Everquest, I was a Guide on one of the PvP servers and took great pleasure in ruining the days of cheaters, trolls and griefers.
One of my favorite methods was to teleport the offenders to an area they couldn’t escape, like atop the giant statue above the entrance to Kaladim. If they were particularly annoying, I’d teleport them to a safe spot in a city they were KoS in.
In Battlefield Bad Company 2, sometimes I will find myself on a squad with nothing but wookies. No matter how much you try and talk to them that we need some diversity, they want to be a wookie and perch (for example) on the hillside and try and snipe. So I have taken to using the marker pistol and plugging them full of about 15 tracer darts - lighting them up like a Christmas tree. Hilarious to watch them crouch there blinking like they’re Rudolph…
Just for context: Once upon a time, Everquest opened a PvP server which was “Good vs Evil”. They said that there was no rules against griefing such as corpse camping, training mobs, etc. So people could get their foot in the door though, you couldn’t be PvP’d against until you were level six.
Fansy played a bard and, at level 5, got a movement speed spell. He used it to go to a popular mid-level zone and collect all the sand giants (a strong mob in that zone for the intended level) into one giant train and plow into other groups, causing the giants to slaughter them. Because he was only level 5, no one could attack him to stop him. Eventually, the developers had to change the server rules to allow newbies to be attacked in mid-high level zones.
The charm trick in the last story is hard to explain but for a server with no rules, he managed to get himself in trouble again and take a lot of people down with him.
We were playing L4D, and this was after the game had been out for a couple weeks. It was a random pub team put together. We were in the hospital waiting for the elevator. One guy was all “Let’s pile into the closet and just hold down our triggers!”.
My response was “Fuck that, it’s no fun. I’m doing it in front of the elevator.” Eventually, the entire team except for this guy goes out into the hallway with me, with dipshit crouching in the closet.
Normally, I’d let it go. But then he starts it about how we’re all a bunch of stupid faggots who are going to die, etc.
So, I unloaded my auto shotgun into him through the wall of the closet, leaving him lying there bleeding. Then me and the team got in the elevator and went on up.
That was hilarious! Fansy was killing people trying to level with huge trains (which I would have hated), and yet he/she was funny while doing it. I liked all the grandfather quotes and exchanges like this:
Pungg tells [Fansy], ‘i bet uve never touched a fucking girl in ur life’
[Fansy] told Pungg, ‘I am saving myself for marriage!’
If only I had such wit when being told to ‘die w@re!’ in Wow!
Screen shopping in Halo 1 was unforgivable, but I did it all the time. Because it’s split screen, you can just look at your opponent’s side of the screen to find out where he’s hiding. I even went as far as to watch him target me with a sniper rifle, and use his screen to move out of the way of his cross hairs.
In world of warcraft you used to be able to grief newbies in starting areas by getting them to attack your pet. Newbies are supposed to be off-limits even on pvp servers in the first few zones, but if a protected newbie does a hostile action against an opposing player, he becomes fair game. Hunters could tame a pet in a starting zone, set the pet to “stay”, and then go hide themselves somewhere. A newbie would come along and see the pet standing there, and assume it was a regular AI monster they need to kill for their quest, and not a rival hunter pet. They attack the pet, which is then considered a hostile act, “flagging” them for pvp. They were flagged for 10 minutes, and there was no way to prevent the hunter from then camping on their corpse and re-killing him over and over whenever he tried to spawn. I never did it, but I always had the urge to.
One of my favorite things I’ve seen (but never done) in WoW is opposing faction players entering one of the main towns and killing the auctioneers. It doesn’t prevent you from moving from place to place or turning in quests. It just keeps you from selling your valuable crap. Saw it in Stormwind once when I was on early. On one hand it was kind of annoying as I had some crap to sell. On the other hand, I had to admire the sheer dickishness of it. I could still play the game just fine. I just couldn’t do one minor aspect of the game that I wanted to do at the time. It was absolutely brilliant.
One of the molten core bosses in WoW casts a spell on a player that is a delayed explosion. If they did it on your pet it was possible to despair them, travel to a big city, resummon, and kill dozens with the blast.
A MUD, years ago. There was a player, a woman in her 40s, we had to kick out on grounds of harassing tween boys; she’d been around for about one month, merrily playing along, then one day she started making off-color remarks to a 13yo boy. In a 20-person group. With five immorts’ main PCs in the group. And three of them had recognized her from meeting her in other MUDs or from her previous stint in ours (before I’d started there) and told her to keep her libido to herself.
Last weekend in WoW, we were running BT; most people hadn’t been there, about half the group was at-level, so there were instructions being given out beyond “just run over them”. One of the tanks says his buddy is now in, can he join? Sure, the more the merrier.
The two of them started using language that half the ESL players couldn’t even understand (“what he say? what jizz?”). Those of us who did understand told them to cut it out. At one point, after one of the ESL players asked “what they saying? I dont kno what they say!” - I answered “they said they’re 13 year old and stupid”. They started getting in my face, I said “did you even think there might be women here?”
Jerk1: “What, you’re a ladyboy?”
Jerk2: “Those are from Russia.”
Jerk1: “Ah, he’s Russian!”
Me: “No. An actual woman. And I’m elder cousin to twelve boys, so anything you little kids can say, I’ve heard it before. Now shut up and let the rest of us hear the leader’s instructions.”
Jerk2: “Wow.”
They did shut up, but man, they really must have been 13… :rolleyes:
