Player Justice and Sweet Revenge - The Erosion Since EQ

[jpark]

My hate list is my friend's list.

That's right.  Fuck you.

You screw me over - you don't go on my "ignore" list.  Fuck that noise - you're on my friend's list.  I want to know where you are, when you log on.  Sooner or later, payback will be mine.  Even in pve.

Of course the rest of you may be more civil about these matters.  But make no mistake, I enjoy revenge for percieved wrongs (training, ninja looting, charming conversation).

People who "remember" the past misdeeds of others and act upon them at the appropriate time down the road provide the atmosphere of accountability in a MMORPG.  For those of you with unconfessed psychopathic tendencies let me make this clearer:  the IDEA is that your misdeeds today will cause misfortune for you in the future.  You're part of a community - a world - after all.

* introduces a startling insight*

Let's call this player reputation.  You reap what you sow based on your rep.

* exhibits powers of promonition *

Any healthy MMORPG player community needs player reputation.  Actions without accountability and consequence devolve quickly into calamity.

So what are we getting with the latest generation of MMORPGS?

Even today, barring Ebay, you can log on to EQ and see people on you knew years ago still working with the same character.  You can catch up with them.  These people have invested so much into their characters that, more than any other game I have seen, their reputation is critically important to them.  A bad rep can drive you off a server in EQ.

Shadowbane, CoH and WoW all offer the disappearance of Reputation.  You can create characters so quickly, maintain so many alts, that the fella you screwed with one avatar can be solicited for help when you log in with another avatar.  Shadowbane was the extreme, the avatar that ganked you yesterday may not log in again for weeks or even months.  The griefer has other alts to bide his time with - cycle through - while the steam settles.  It's very difficult to see "payback" as a player in such games.  And without such consequnce, their is a concomittant decline in the conduct of the community.

While characters that take a long time to build provide a natural system for reputation and accountability, it is not the only way: 

EQ2 offered some limited ability for this, but it would be great if in WoW (or shadowbane or CoH) it was possible to see all the alts under the control of a single account.  This would provide a means to assign reputation to an account, rather than 1 of 10 alts, which in my view might return some element of conscience to the community at large.

I am not arguing for systems that demand it takes years to build a character, but a system that identifies account ownership of a set of alts.

[Daydreamer]

Guild Wars took the first step in this direction with the way the Guild Tab is structured, but I doubt it will be picked up in a more main stream manner.  Devs will be afraid of losing those griefers as subscribers if they can no longer hide behind a new name and face.  the EQ system may turn out to be the only method Devs consider financially viable, if they put any thought into such reputation at all.

[Ralence]

  One of the best ideas I've heard in order to keep people accountable was to have players choose 1 surname at account creation, which carried over to every one of their characters.  They could change the first name to whatever they liked for alts, but by keeping their surname the same, they'd still be accountable for their actions as long as they were using that account.

  It wasn't my idea, I honestly don't remember who's it was, but I really liked the concept behind it.

[eldaec]

EQ2 offered some limited ability for this, but it would be great if in WoW (or shadowbane or CoH) it was possible to see all the alts under the control of a single account.  This would provide a means to assign reputation to an account, rather than 1 of 10 alts, which in my view might return some element of conscience to the community at large.

In coh your global friends list works exactly like this.

tbh, I don't use it, because hey, these bad things don't seem to happen to me.

I come across people who aren't very good at MMORPGs on a regular basis, I come across people who people who struggle to express themselves in MMO-chat interfaces just as regularly, they are easy enough to avoid or get along with because most people react to polite suggestions, and if push comes to shove there are other groups out there.

99.999% of people in MMORPGs just want to get on and kill shit, I've played EQ, SWG, PS, DAoC, CoH, GW, Puzzle Pirates, ATitD, and you know, in four years of playing them I can remember two genuine instances of actual grief play of the problematic intentional sort that wouldn't go away after a brief polite exchange of views (that is, two that weren't a regurgitated 8th hand story). This included 18 months as GM of the 2nd largest by population and 4th by RP-per-week guild on my DAoC server. You'd get people pming you about this incident or that incident every now and again, it almost always turned out to be two people/groups standing about waiting for a mob to spawn, not communicating before the mob did spawn, and then wondering why bad things happened after the spawn.

(NOTE TO DEVS - this is exactly why static-location spawn timer mobs are a stupid idea. Put it in an instance or make it spawn almost immeadiately after dying but in a random location you fools. As a GM I wanted to organise dragon/keep/relic raids, not deal with people having a hissy fit about spawn point camping.)

Maybe I'm just really lucky. But I've always rather felt that the righteous amoungst a typical MMORPG player base could probably cope if they relaxed a little.

All that said, I'd support single surname-per-account or GW style visibility of alts, principly so I can remember who the fuck is who in my guild. Which frankly, is a much more critical day to day issue when playing a MMORPG than griefing is.

[El Gallo]

That's one of the interesting things about EQ.  The brutalizingly slow levelling and forced grouping combined to form a player justice system that worked far, far better than anything Koster dreamed of.  If you fucked your reputation, you fucked your character and flushed the last x years of your life down the toilet.   Not saying its a worthwhile trade, but with easy levelling, easy soloing games, your character is essentially disposable, and it's no shocker that griefing skyrockets.   

[Yegolev]

The apparent ability for WoW griefers to have themselves renamed is also a big step backwards.

[Mesozoic]

That's one of the interesting things about EQ.  The brutalizingly slow levelling and forced grouping combined to form a player justice system that worked far, far better than anything Koster dreamed of.  If you fucked your reputation, you fucked your character and flushed the last x years of your life down the toilet.   Not saying its a worthwhile trade, but with easy levelling, easy soloing games, your character is essentially disposable, and it's no shocker that griefing skyrockets.   

The double-edged sword.  As we decide that other people are assholes, we demand games that don't force us to rely on other people.  But as players no longer need each other to advance, the inherent social penalty of assholery diminishes.

[HaemishM]

You will never have any sort of actual player accountability without some form of ACCOUNT accountability. It's common sense. Anonymity is the number one cause of griefers in MMOG's, and since we can't have the name and physical address of everyone in the game, their account is the only other thing we have. Having a shared surname is one way to do it, having access to the name of all of one character's alts is another. Of course, hardcore griefers can get around this by buying another box/subscription, but then, I consider that an asshole tax. That could be defeated as well, but it would be more expensive and fraught with more liability for the dev company, because they would have to link every account to a name/credit card/address matchup.

Of course, any sort of player justice relies on the players at some point, so will fail. But giving the players access to names of other characters on the account is certainly an effective tool that should be in every MMOG.

[MaceVanHoffen]

Of course, any sort of player justice relies on the players at some point, so will fail. But giving the players access to names of other characters on the account is certainly an effective tool that should be in every MMOG.

Damn, Haemish, you reached inside my head with that one.

If I had my way, every MMOG would have a right-click option for all PC's that listed something to uniquely identify the player's account.  User id would be a security issue, so maybe something like the global chat handle in City of Heroes.  Any kind of /friend option would work against that global handle rather than a character name.  That doesn't directly address accountability, but it gives other players an in-game way to identify known assmonkeys so that whatever meager player accountability could exist would be able to function.

I wish game devs would ban by credit card number in addition to account.  Any future attempts to register new accounts with the banned credit card number would fail with a suitably imperious message.  Sure, players could use a different credit card number, but you'd at least force the hardcore into eventually using up any credit cards available to them.  That's probably fraught with legal and/or contractual issues, though.

[Soln]

interesting post

if anyone wants a study in online pathology they should do a quick review of SWG.  Anyone who takes a look at the Jedi/BH forums will need a mental bath afterwards.   The level of hatred in that game post-CU is just palpable (in-game and on-forum).   

nothing compares to the griefing I've experienced there.  Seriously, nothing.  By design players kill other players to disrupt their levelling and basic game time (whatever they are doing) because of skill loss.  Camping, load jacking, account hacking, you name it, it's normal in that game.  I am not over-exaggerating. The griefing there extends to people obsessing outside people's log-out areas for hours on end (lots of anecdotes) to kill them, clone jacking (killing on rez site), monitoring and stalking from friends-lists (normal), having arrays of snitches (guilded and anonymous alts), roaming gank squads...  I mean that's just the PvP -- I'm not going into the AFK loot campers.  I guess I'm too jaded to give more examples, and it really is traumatic for some players and just weary vanilla for the rest of us.

Edit: some kind of accountability is needed, but I bet there will never be until there's some financial incentive for the operator.  All the cries of losing subs to griefing has never seemed to do much to any game I've played.  I've never seen any company take it seriously.  And again, in SWG there is no limit on the personal hatred of PvP that is now going on and it really seems the worst of the worst.

[WayAbvPar]

If anyone has the time/inclination/access, we had a huge thread about how to make accounts accountable (to coin a phrase) back on WT when SWG was in beta. It is just such a simple concept, but one that for some reason has either eluded the devs, or been purposefully ignored. GW tracks different characters on the same account in the Guild tab- no reason this can't be a global setting.

[Furiously]

GW's also tracks globally on the friends list. Which is pretty cool.

[Abel]

I dunno about you guys, but I never ran into any significant griefing except for UO. And I played games like CoH and WoW (PvP) too. Honestly the problem is exaggerated and confined to the typical few bad apples (though apparently you get concentrations of bad apples at certain spots).

Maybe I got lucky or it might have to do with the fact I've always been in active guilds.

[El Gallo]

I don't really want everybody to know who I am all the time, and I'm not a griefer.  I like to trade at the AH and wheel-and-deal in Orgrimmar, but I DO NOT want to put up with never-fucking-ending parade of "can I buy X for Y, no? How about Y+1?  No. Ok, Y + 2. No WTF U R A GREEDY ASS CAMPER FAG" when I am raiding an instance or PvPing or just fucking around.  So I use a non-combat alt character for my trading activities.  Sometimes, I just want to be left the fuck alone and chill out for an evening without friends/guildmates/strangers who know my character and his reputation asking for help with this/that/theotherthing.  So I chill on an unguilded alt nobody knows.  I mean, friends and guildmates won't nag me, but I'd feel obligated to help even if I heard they were working on something.  Sometimes, I just need a night off in the game (in addition to the nights off outside the game) to keep my playing experience positive.

I am not willing to give up that for the knowledge that MAZTAHKILLAH and MAZTAHSLAYAH are really on the same account.   

[jpark]

I don't really want everybody to know who I am all the time, and I'm not a griefer.  I like to trade at the AH and wheel-and-deal in Orgrimmar, but I DO NOT want to put up with never-fucking-ending parade of "can I buy X for Y, no? How about Y+1?  No.

I am not willing to give up that for the knowledge that MAZTAHKILLAH and MAZTAHSLAYAH are really on the same account.   

That's a good point.  In honesty I don't have a counter to it - there would be a loss here for folks in your position I agree.

It really depends on the trade off.  In Shadowbane I left not because of all the bugs - but because it was impossible to enact any justice in its pvp setting.  For me, that singular inability was design breaking - not the graphics or the lag.  You couldn't track anybody.  In Shadowbane the tradeoff is worth it to see the alts assigned to an account.  In CoH it is likely worth it since there is no economy.  But in WoW - maybe it isn't - since folks like you would lose privacy in that kind of game where raids, trades and lewts play a big role.

[Xuri]

Well, instead of clearly identifying all characters of the same account, you could instead have a "reputation" sort of flag which covers your character's relation to the various player-accounts. Even something simple such as "Green, Yellow, Red"-colorcodes (just an example).

Then whenever you encounter a new character belonging to an accountr you've already flagged you'd have some indication of whether or not the PLAYER is nice by your standards, or if he's a potential griefer - without knowing the true identity of said player or other characters on the same account.

[HaemishM]

I am not willing to give up that for the knowledge that MAZTAHKILLAH and MAZTAHSLAYAH are really on the same account.   

I imagine it'd be easy to enable a "stealth" mode that you select when you choose what character to login that night. You wouldn't show up on friends list, or guild lists, and it would disable /tells. However, any kind of multiple warnings against your account for griefing would disable the feature.

But really, if you want to protect against griefing, there are some things that are going to be necessary to give up. Freedom of gameplay is the first and easiest, of course. 

[Shockeye]

Purchasing a second account is an easy way around the privacy issue as well. If you don't want to be hassled, log in your alternate account.

[Soln]

wouldn't it be far simpler to just have a decent CSR system that actually showed player prolfiles (account names) alongwith billing CC info?  Ban the account, ban the CC.  More work to get another CC to open a new account, a bit more of a deterent.

[HaemishM]

wouldn't it be far simpler to just have a decent CSR system that actually showed player prolfiles (account names) alongwith billing CC info?  Ban the account, ban the CC.  More work to get another CC to open a new account, a bit more of a deterent.

Awwwww, look. Innocence. Let's eat it with a side of fava beans.

No, it wouldn't be easier. It would be an assload more expensive, not only to hire the people to track that shit, but to TRAIN them in actual customer service techniques. Then to replace the ones who would leave the company pitifully empty shells for having dealt with the flotsam and jetsam of Internet cockmunchery. Plus, you'd have to build really expensive, working databases that didn't shit themselves every five seconds, and that costs money. So does training the guy whose going to maintain that database before he leaves the company to get a better paying job with less work, and then training his forever-expanding list of replacements. Not to mention the money it would take for all that liability. And all of that has to be done for $14.95 a month.

MMOG's have shown a stubborn insistence on not even having competent enough CSR's to change names correctly an in proper enforcement of policy. They have also claimed that the monthly fee is too low to both maintain and expand the game as well as hire decent CSR's.

[El Gallo]

Purchasing a second account is an easy way around the privacy issue as well. If you don't want to be hassled, log in your alternate account.

Well, the cockgobbler could do the same thing, just confine their cockgobbling to one account and keep their legitimate characters on another to avoid reprecussions.  Once you add multiple accounts, accountability is down the shitter anyway even with the scarlet letter system. 

any kind of multiple warnings against your account for griefing would disable the feature.

I guess that could work, but if you are going to make all characters on a jackhole's account wear a giant "I HAVE THE AIDS" sign on their second warning, you might as well just ban them.  In any event, this option relies on CS actually working, and that's not going to happen (as you point out).

I thought we wanted a way to identify generic motards who do generically motarded things that aren't necessarily warnable even in the ideal world (and won't get warnings in the real one no matter what).  We can't rely on CS for that.

I think Jpark's right: something is going to give.  I'd rather put up with the level of jackassery in WoW and keep my privacy than I would the reverse.  Maybe I just have something to hide!

[jpark]

Well, instead of clearly identifying all characters of the same account, you could instead have a "reputation" sort of flag which covers your character's relation to the various player-accounts. Even something simple such as "Green, Yellow, Red"-colorcodes (just an example).

Then whenever you encounter a new character belonging to an accountr you've already flagged you'd have some indication of whether or not the PLAYER is nice by your standards, or if he's a potential griefer - without knowing the true identity of said player or other characters on the same account.

I like this idea.  In shadowbane there was a neat system used within guilds, where a guildmember could click on someone and see a log of their "white" and "black" marks made about them - by who - with a one line descriptor.  Something like this could be introduced on a more public basis.  A sort of buyer-beware if you will.

[Fabricated]

The internet is serious business.

[sinij]

I disagree with SB bit - individual and nation reputation does matter. In SB you can have tons of characters all virtually untraceable to one another but you have one big investment that carries over all of them - your guild and status in your guild. If you want to truly change your reputation you have to start all over again and try to find new guild, not an easy task when ‘people that matter’ don’t recruit strangers. With most of the game played at guild level who you are does not matter, rather who you with does.

[jpark]

I disagree with SB bit - individual and nation reputation does matter. In SB you can have tons of characters all virtually untraceable to one another but you have one big investment that carries over all of them - your guild and status in your guild. If you want to truly change your reputation you have to start all over again and try to find new guild, not an easy task when ‘people that matter’ don’t recruit strangers. With most of the game played at guild level who you are does not matter, rather who you with does.

I missed this point completely.

Are you saying that in creating alts in SB you were tied to ONE guild?

I saw quite the opposite:  create alts in opposing guilds to farm their resources and then channel it back either to your competing guild OR your griefer alt.  That also includes using your alt in a competing guild to buy rare goods from their vendors from within town.  Hell I did just that and conversely, any my guild was a victim of it - very common.

[MaceVanHoffen]

I think Jpark's right: something is going to give.  I'd rather put up with the level of jackassery in WoW and keep my privacy than I would the reverse.  Maybe I just have something to hide!

The thing is, we all have a bit of a dilemma:  I don't want to give up my privacy, but I don't trust you with your privacy.  So, I'm of the opinion that everyone should give up a little privacy to weed out the morons.  Ugh, that makes me feel all dirty and right-wing to type that ... but, well, there you go.

Of course, the current trend in MMO's having more solo-friendly game mechanics addresses this problem somewhat.  Maybe that's the real answer.  Make your game such that there are no consequences to leaving a group of retards.  Everquest was an example of the opposite:  you might be with a group deep in Lower Guk, want to leave, but you can't get out until your group does so you wind up putting up with the twits.  But with, say, City of Heroes, I can almost always decide to bail with little or no consequences.  I can even go solo for a while to make up xp loss/debt incurred by the aforementioned group of 'tards.

But of course, when you do that the tight-knit communities that keep an MMO alive tend not to form.  In the end, maybe that's a good thing though.

[Shockeye]

I disagree with SB bit - individual and nation reputation does matter. In SB you can have tons of characters all virtually untraceable to one another but you have one big investment that carries over all of them - your guild and status in your guild. If you want to truly change your reputation you have to start all over again and try to find new guild, not an easy task when ‘people that matter’ don’t recruit strangers. With most of the game played at guild level who you are does not matter, rather who you with does.

I missed this point completely.

Are you saying that in creating alts in SB you were tied to ONE guild?

I saw quite the opposite:  create alts in opposing guilds to farm their resources and then channel it back either to your competing guild OR your griefer alt.  That also includes using your alt in a competing guild to buy rare goods from their vendors from within town.  Hell I did just that and conversely, any my guild was a victim of it - very common.

Unless you have to send in a screenshot of your login screen with all your characters on a regular basis to the "security chief" of the guild. Oh nevermind, there's always photoshop.

[jpark]

I disagree with SB bit - individual and nation reputation does matter. In SB you can have tons of characters all virtually untraceable to one another but you have one big investment that carries over all of them - your guild and status in your guild. If you want to truly change your reputation you have to start all over again and try to find new guild, not an easy task when ‘people that matter’ don’t recruit strangers. With most of the game played at guild level who you are does not matter, rather who you with does.

I missed this point completely.

Are you saying that in creating alts in SB you were tied to ONE guild?

I saw quite the opposite:  create alts in opposing guilds to farm their resources and then channel it back either to your competing guild OR your griefer alt.  That also includes using your alt in a competing guild to buy rare goods from their vendors from within town.  Hell I did just that and conversely, any my guild was a victim of it - very common.

Unless you have to send in a screenshot of your login screen with all your characters on a regular basis to the "security chief" of the guild. Oh nevermind, there's always photoshop.

Funny you should say that because our guild at the time talked about that very option (a screenshot of the login screen with alts).  What was interesting was that members, not the guild leader, were demanding such steps.  Leaders were concerned about the admin effort.

[HaemishM]

I think Jpark's right: something is going to give.  I'd rather put up with the level of jackassery in WoW and keep my privacy than I would the reverse.  Maybe I just have something to hide!

The thing is, we all have a bit of a dilemma:  I don't want to give up my privacy, but I don't trust you with your privacy.  So, I'm of the opinion that everyone should give up a little privacy to weed out the morons.  Ugh, that makes me feel all dirty and right-wing to type that ... but, well, there you go.

Welcome to the future. We've been expecting you.

[Yegolev]

Of course, the current trend in MMO's having more solo-friendly game mechanics addresses this problem somewhat.  Maybe that's the real answer.  Make your game such that there are no consequences to leaving a group of retards.  Everquest was an example of the opposite:  you might be with a group deep in Lower Guk, want to leave, but you can't get out until your group does so you wind up putting up with the twits.  But with, say, City of Heroes, I can almost always decide to bail with little or no consequences.  I can even go solo for a while to make up xp loss/debt incurred by the aforementioned group of 'tards.

But of course, when you do that the tight-knit communities that keep an MMO alive tend not to form.  In the end, maybe that's a good thing though.

You are onto something, Mace, but consider that in WoW I can activate my hearthstone and abandon a group fairly easily and with no game-based penalty other than waiting an hour to do it again.  I don't think WoW is poorer in dicklick players because of this or because of my ability to solo, since I am still forced into casual encounters with them everywhere I go.  I think a lower population cap would help to a degree, since it would be somewhat easier to keep a mental list of the dicklicks.  Even if you can't track them by name, you might know that Asshat X is probably the same as Asshat Y since they both grief you in the same place/way but different times.  There's your community, and a community adds consequences.