Potential avenues for MMO companies to deal with griefers

by James Egan May 5th 2009 at 5:00PM

Filed under: Game mechanics, MMO industry, Opinion

Ah, the MMO griefer. Most of us have encountered them, or been them, at some point. It can be frustrating to deal with but griefing in MMOs is enabled by the very nature of most online interaction -- anonymity -- and there's not much that can be done about that. Or is there? Much has been written on eliminating griefing before, and will continue to be written we're sure, but Allen Varney at The Escapist has a different take on handling griefers.

Varney writes, "The motive to block and frustrate griefers masks what might be a great opportunity. Can we distract would-be griefers? Can we make the game so unpleasant for them they leave voluntarily? Sure. But go further: Could we turn griefers, despite themselves, to productive ends?" His article "Wanted: Ganked or Alive" points out how the behavior of griefers is something that can be predicted and exploited.

Varney writes: "Like spammers, griefers can be exploited because of their strong motivations. Griefers obey psychological compulsions to push boundaries, demonstrate superiority and punish perceived arrogance and naiveté. Some griefers rationalize their pathological actions as 'teaching a less' to their victims. These compulsions make the griefer vulnerable to shrewd manipulation or punishment."

He gives some potential examples of how MMO developers or operators can curb griefing, namely by implenting a bounty system. As EVE Online players know very well, bounties by themselves do not dissuade players from inflicting harm upon one another, and an especially high bounty can actually be a badge of honor in addition to making the offending player a target. But what if, as Varney mentions, bounties in an MMO go beyond offering other players rewards for taking out the griefer. Having NPCs hound a flagged griefer could be a different story, and Varney cites the example of proposed bounty hunter NPCs in Age of Conan.

Wanted: Ganked or Alive also looks at deception in MMOs, and how this can be employed against griefers. "Many griefers work confidence games, deceptively cultivating a victim's trust, then betraying it," Varney writes. "A deception strategy makes development of that trust more difficult by making the griefer distrust the game itself." He suggests that game developers could provide misinformation to a flagged griefer, for example showing weaker players as stronger or vice versa, leading to a potentially grim end.

On the idea of altering a griefer's perceptions, he also points out a related scenario where the griefer appears to be isolated from the community. Other player avatars do not display, turning the massively multiplayer online game into a single player RPG with no fodder for grief.

He also looks at the notion of griefer profiles being shared among game companies to identify their subscribers as such, and how the communities themselves can organize and work together to reduce griefing. While not all of Varney's suggestions would be easy or even feasible to implement, he does provide some food for thought.

Why not take a look at "Wanted: Ganked or Alive" and see what you think? What concepts have you envisioned for dealing with griefers?

Tags: age-of-conan, allen-varney, eve-online, game-mechanics, grief, griefer, griefers, mmo-industry, opinion, the-escapist

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Cray said on 7:13PM 5-05-2009

I like the "lord of the flies" idea of having gankers play with other gankers. I also think Gankers could be beneficial to MMOs by offering these players free subscription to the game if they play as Mobs bosses. For example, After being unwittingly placed in a server with other gankers. If he kills enough of the other gankers he'll be flagged again. Then offered a chance to earn free subscription playing time if he plays as NPC boss allotted to him/her and successfully defeats a certain quantity of players that pass through instanced zone in which the NPC boss lives. Otherwise he/she can continue to pay and only be allowed on a ganking server with other flagged gankers.

This would be like employing a player to be part of the game. This would also increase the quality of PvE in terms not having to rely on A.I. bosses. Basically it would convert PvE into PvP, but it would be very structured and the ganker disguised as a NPC boss could only use the skills given to the boss. Also the communication would be scripted so there would be no clue other than combat that could give you an indication of if the boss is a ganker or NPC.

Kaamos said on 10:20PM 5-05-2009

The bounty system is great, period.
Furthermore, having npc's hound the gank-er makes his life all the more rogue like, making the game itself interactive with his persona.
It would create- a piracy/bandit/criminal style of gameplay.

Then you can create dangerous area's designed only to accept criminals with bounties* and criminal backgrounds, like basically, creating a faction you slowly get accepted to over time.

Perhaps even, a faction who has benefiting quests/player interaction along the lines of the ganker's interests.

Imagine a daily quest enabling the player to gain things from eliminating players within limits of the faction areas, or assaulting a normal city. Accruing faction from killing city guards/police.

So on and so fourth, be the bad guy!

Plastic Rat said on 10:39PM 5-05-2009

"What concepts have you envisioned for dealing with griefers?"

Most of the ideas I've come up with involves tracing their IP addresses and then it sort of devolves from there into stuff involving rubber hoses, boiling oil and a bag of rabid ferrets.

Seriously though, the best thing any company can actually do about griefers is just have a no bullshit policy. Get the word spread that griefing gets you banned, period.

I play on an RP server in wow and I see a fairly large amount of griefing. It's been going on for years. If Blizzard was taking the reports of griefers seriously and actioning them with adequate punitive measures, this kind of stuff wouldn't still be happening.

Most griefers (in WoW at least) are quite aware that they have a ridiculously long rope before anything much happens to them. Until companies accept the fact that they need to lose the subscription fees of a few griefers for the good of the community, griefing will continue to be a problem.

Vespian said on 1:46AM 5-06-2009

The whole problem with this issue, is that "griefing" isn't necessary a compulsion. Griefing might only affect one person, a small group, or a single guild. Griefing might just be a person disliking another person and going to extreme lengths to disrupt that persons online life. Griefing, might not be considered griefing by each and every person.

How do you ban a thing that is experienced entirely different by each person. How do you define griefing? Is griefing, someone that has a spambot in a global channel, that responds automatically to certain words said in that channel, to try and provoke people into flame wars? Is griefing directly related to Trolling, or does it go deeper than that ?

All these things make me reluctant to say, ok, install a policy that punishes griefing severely. In my opinion, griefing is too subjective to be subject to a harsh policy.

If without any doubt, could be proven that a certain person made griefing his primary gameplay, I'd personally not go for the bans and account removal. I'd hit them where it actually hurts them ingame. Remove their entire flying mount skill and remove their flying mounts. They'd be struck ingame by more than just one effect. In raids they'd nearly always have to be summoned, they'd not be able to grind any money real quickly, not to mention any travel whatsoever. They'd have to put about 7K gold on the table again to get back what they lost and then they'd still not gain back their special mounts, such as achievement mounts and special drops.

Of course, this example only works for WoW, but nonetheless, every game has "something"that affects players ingame so much, that they'd never want to lose it.

Hypester said on 8:53AM 5-06-2009

I think they're on the right track, turning griefing into a playstyle is the best route to take. Obviously, Vespian, there are some outliers on the bell curve of griefing who do it with chat, or only do it to certain people, but I think most of us, writers and readers, have run into enough of a certain psychological profile to have a common understanding of what a "griefer" is, just as we have a common understanding of "blue," another subjective concept. I do think the subjective nature of it prevents a "zero tolerance" policy, as many of us would like, but I think it can still be addressed, on the whole.

I think bounties are the first step towards "accommodating" griefers and gankers into gameplay. Using NPCs to hound them, must in the way GTA does, is a great step forward. Sending out progressively stronger NPCs, just as GTA does, is a way to further curb extreme ganking habits, though I'd suggest a much longer warm up and cool down time that a console game, in keeping with the pace of the MMO.

I've always dreamed of turning gankers against each other. If there were some psychological reward for them attacking others with similar kill counts, that'd be awesome. Any shrewd manipulation should point that way. If you can make other gankers seem like marks for a griefer, you've got gold, I say. Gold.