Incidents described include walling players in with furniture (forever) in Ultima-online, Secon-Life's duplicating party hats (which shouted "terror will rain down upon the unfit gods and the flock that they govern, from now until the end of days") which crashed the ENTIRE GAME, and luring high level monsters into populated areas to rampage through crowds of unprepared players (training is the name for it apparently).
I hasten to add that there is no mention of the type of incidents that we read about this week, (although World of Warcraft priests can get an ability called "Mind Control" not dissimilar to the voodoo doll, although time limited. It seems that a bug allows "Mnd Control" over player's ghosts, which is not time limited.) and that most of the griefing described WAS pretty imaginative, and harmless (if a virtual knife to the head is ever harmless).
I wanted to point out this report for a couple of reasons:
- Online Worlds with greifer punishment systems (Archlord's Villain Points and Roma Victor's crucification of perpetrators)
- Griefer's homepages (CLANS of griefer's)
here's the links
www.playtocrush.com
www.darkwolves.com
w-hat.com
2 comments:
i like the idea of villian point for less serious griefers and of course its also got to be in the right envirorment. cant really see villian points working in SL but you never know
As online games have matured in recent years, the scoring systems have evolved into a very different beast than they once were. It used to be that you'd get points for a kill, and that's it... but even in a simple (non-persistent) FPS, you can now get experience points which give you rewards, and you can lose them again by doing daft things (like suicide/fraticide).
I think applying similar thinking to persistent worlds is a great idea. In Second Life, if there was a way to reliably monitor a person's griefing activities, then I think XP could work as well. Perhaps if your XP becomes negative, then you can't spawn items so often, or your scripts run slower, and eventually maybe you can't buy/sell anything. Or maybe you'll just get money taken off you.
Lots of possibilities. But it all does hinge on reliably identifying griefing when the server sees it. Perhaps a user could hit a button to say "help me!", and the server will examine what's just happened to see if it looks like griefing.
It would be severely open to abuse, though... but what isn't?
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