During college, we couldn’t use the school’s network to get onto Xbox Live, so we used the System Link feature in Halo 2. By plugging an ethernet cord into the wall from the Xbox, you can host a room as if it were a LAN. My roomie and I had an Xbox each and we’d have his on a lot, just looking for rooms on the main TV. When we found one, I’d hop in and beat the crap out of them in the room they created. They’d ostensibly go to another room, and I’d follow until they logged off or until they closed the room.
Great times.
Double post.
In Total Annihilation (real-time strategy game) you could set up very complex commands for your little factories and tanks and planes and stuff. You could also control the speed of the game. When soloing, one common practice was to set up a long production queue and then slam the game speed up to minimize waiting.
That’s a no-no in multiplayer, of course, because other players are trying to do stuff like look around and make decisions, and don’t appreciate you f*ing with the time stream. Obviously I’ll lose if I’m scouting the map and you slam up the speed and produce 100 tanks before I can scroll back to my own factories and set production.
There was a command that a game creator could set that prevented other players from doing this, but sometimes I’d forgot to set it, or sometimes if the other player had created the game he wouldn’t have set it, deliberately or not.
This one game I was in, my opponent kept dialing the speed up and down to suit himself. I wasn’t the creator. I could shift the speed myself, of course, but the meaningless duels of +++ and — to the speed weren’t strategy. I asked him to lay off and he did not respond.
Then his Commander (like the King and Queen from chess combined, the Commander is very powerful in combat, but short-ranged and if you lose him you lose the game) blundered into a whole bunch of my tanks. I happened to be watching that group when it happened, and I just dialed the speed ALL THE WAY UP instantly. A storm of shells knocked him out of the game in about two seconds.
I’m not even sure he was watching his Commander at the moment; he may never have known what hit him.
Only once, and I never tried anything like that again, because I was kinda ashamed.
It was back in the days of Ultima Online. Now, you should understand that it was very difficult to actually grief someone, or too easy, depending on your view. They had no protections in place whatsoever. The closest you could get was tricking somone to attacking you in town, and then summoning the guards to smack them. Other than that, it was pretty much open-season. But people still found a way.
One day, while wandering through the giant maze of housing covering the damn planet, I happened upon another player and tried to chat. I thought he responded (and later realized something must have glitched). But then he clammed up and ignored me. I got so mad I pulled out my puny little dagger and stabbed him to death. He didn’t fight back. Oops. I wasn’t ashamed too much to steal his full set of plate and bardiche, mind.
Both of these events happened after the nightmarish housing explosion. In UO, you could buy player housing and set it up. It actually existed somewhere in the game world and once server wealth reached a tipping popint, the entire world wound up covered in houses.
When I ventured out into the world, I found that there were no monsters. This was a problem, because while you could train, it only worked up to about 25% skill and you needed an actual opponent for more. And monsters in UO didn’t spawn very fast. But all I ever found was the odd orc, about twice a day, and there were a lot of people trying to get him.
Weeeeeeell… they’d forgotten that people could block off spawn points. I finally realized that I was being popped into combat mode where I thought a mob should be. Some rich player’s damn house covered the spawn and so it never died unless he came back and killed it, and no one else could get in to do so.
During the last year of playing WoW, I was getting so frustrated at the game and other players, that I swore frequently and severely at quite a few people.
Retrospectively, I’m quite surprised I never got banned.
I should have quit a year earlier than I did. Wow just went in a direction the complete opposite of fun for me. It didn’t help that a lot of my friends changed servers too.
So, if you were ever on Scarshield Legion(EU) and a gnome warlock swore at you, or Ravenholdt(EU) and a troll shaman swore at you. Sorry >_<
I’ve never tried multiplayer mode in Minecraft, but apparently the most common form of griefing is to empty a bucket of lava over someone’s house. 
In the online flight sims, Warbirds and Aces High it is commonplace to cap an airfield and dive down and attack other team’s aircraft as they are taxiing and trying to takeoff after spawning, a practice known as “vulching”. The players can choose at what airfields they spawn, so the activity is sanctioned (though frowned upon by many.)
My best vulching experience was in a P-47 where I killed 17 aircraft as they were taking off before running out of ammunition 
I played Ultima Online at launch, where greifing was fantastically easy and common (wall of fire cast at a zone exit, for example, killing a player coming out of a dungeon before he finished loading).
I was a little more subtle with those kinds of players. Inevitably, they had their preferred stats maxed out, but at the time, the game had no way to lock stats, or prevent people from gaining points in skills they might not want–and if you were capped in stat points, and gained a point in a new skill, you lost one in an existing skill.
So on one server I had a character that I kept as a dead ghost–and I would go talk to other greifers. This involuntarily caused their ghost-talking skill to increase (a useless skill), likely causing one or more of their more important skills to drop.
It’s hard to separate griefing from normal play when you talk about Eve Online, but I like to think that I pulled off some cool stunts.
I liked to cruise around low security space, under cloak, looking for stuff to steal. Control towers were my favorite. Taking down a tower can sometimes take many hours to complete so my targets usually got pretty careless (probably going afk for long stretches) as the minutes ticked by.
If you time it just right you can swoop in last minute and take the tower for yourself. Most of the time I’d have my corpmates show up in force to get some free kills, but I think that lacks subtlety. My favorite heist was a solo gig, timed down to the second, that left a very confused industrialist with no clue as to who took his stuff. He tried asking in local but as far as anyone knew I was afk for the entire deal.
There was another time I let a group of wannabe pirates destroy my cheaply fitted cruiser, without firing back. Much fun was had later that week as I stalked and probed out one of them running missions in high security space. I had kill rights and a pvp battlecruiser; they had a faction battleship and were totally unprepared for combat. After the fight I flew back into low sec to play cat-and-mouse with his enraged corpmates and allies. (OK that part may have been trolling)
I still miss playing, sometimes, but that cloak and dagger stuff eats up way too much time!
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A little bump as I just remembered an old, old transgression of mine, from Mechwarrior 3:
I set up a heavy mech with a ridiculous weapons loadout - all large long-range laserss, linked. Heat management is a key part of MW, and as you might guess if you have played, under most circumstances the blast of heat created by this configuration would get off a single, megapowered volley while instantly self-destructing from overheating.
However, I’d set it up this way because I noticed something really cool about the sim - partially submerging your mech in a river dissipates heat almost instantaneously. I’d jump in with this loadout and make a beeline for a river. Once there, nobody could touch me - a single blast would take them out immediately, and only trigger a cooldown for a few seconds. If I missed the first time, I could still recover and get off a kill shot before they got close enough to do any damage.
Bastard.
In 4 (I believe), I loved kitting out a medium mech with the best combination of speed and flamers I could. Then I would run into the opponents gunlines of heavy mechs and shut them down with my flamers.
I consider this marginally on the griefing side because I was doing it more for the reactions of “OMGWTF i just shut down” “WTF is happening I did too” than for the tactical advantage. I don’t think it actually helped my side a whole lot, (although it may have if I had been able to communicate more effectively with my team), but it was loads of fun.
I remember vulching in AH. Haven’t played for several years, though. I mainly flew Spitfires but I used to love that little Italian plane with the cannons. One of the Yaks was also fun.
Left 4 Dead had quite a few grief points, mostly involving the Infected team moving stuff by scratching it. The most popular multiplayer campaign, “No Mercy”, had two: the Infected team could block the sewer exit with a dumpster, and could block the elevator exit with a forklift. It got so that you could tell if you were gonna be blocked, because one player from the Infected team would never attack you; he was off moving the forklift.
Got some grief in Left 4 Dead 2 as well. Fourth map of Hard Rain, my team was Infected. Two dipsticks on the other team decide to hole up at the bottom of the stairway in the starting safehouse and not move. They’re basically surrounded by health packs and ammo, and there’s no other path down to 'em, so it takes forever to take 'em out. Very long, very boring.
YOU SOUND LIKE A BOY 
I hear that one a lot when playing with women. Never really understood it though, I’ve only once ever been unsure and I never felt the need to ask.
I’ve been playing a lot of scavenge on Left 4 Dead 2 lately and you get a few people who join just to jump off a building or to throw cans off the roof or just shoot the cans. Votekicks are usually enough to pull off though.
We’ve done that once in the Port finale. It was kind of funny and, oddly enough, no one rage quit for the whole time we were there.
In Ultima Online I was Prince Keldar…a somewhat notorious (on my server) thief and griefing PvP ganker Dread Lord. What I would do is steal in town (some of the stuff I managed to steal included keep and tower deeds, though why anyone would be foolish enough to have that where I could get to it still puzzles me), and then kill the player when they attacked me. There were various tricks to do this (make yourself look pathetic by wearing noob clothes and such, get them to attack, hide, run, then get them mad enough through taunting to attack you after the time limit had run out and have the guards kill them…and possibly get a few more kills when some noob tried to loot the body in town and turned red as well). I’d also lurk around in dungeons and do similar things…wait until someone was engaging some mobs and stealth in to kill them. Another ploy I’d use was mining. I’d act like a regular miner, moving ore and such and then when someone else came in to try and rob and or gank me I’d put on my high level gear and kill them instead.
It eventually got old and I sold the account (for $3k if you can believe it…a last laugh on the world and my final farewell).
-XT
Quoth Larry Mudd:
Sounds like an Avalonian grendel, actually.
Oh, I forgot - I hid under a bridge for added cover.
Once, I had fun on Counterstrike using the fact that while a teamkill gets you punished, injuring teammates can be a lot more fun while not being penalised.
Don’t hate me too much.
I was a big PvPer in WoW and although for the most part I PvPed very honorably (only messed with people if they seemed like a good challenge or attacked me first), you just can’t help but occasionally one-shot a lowbie (or a group of lowbies) for kicks when you wield that kind of power.