Posts with tag Griefing

Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

Listening music: Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams. An awesome '80s song -- who can dispute this claim?

Last week: We talked about some fun things to do in arena while Wrath of the Lich King and the old world are still with us.

This week: All of us have had that random guy in a battleground get under our skin. Maybe he's proclaiming how terrible he thinks you are over /battleground chat, or he's an annoying jerk in some other way. Griefers are a part of the game, and they're here to stay. Nothing excites them more than making others miserable. Maybe you are a far better person than I, but I tend to wish ill towards these individuals.

There are lots of ways to exact revenge upon griefers or rivals, particularly in arenas. Justice can be fun -- very fun. Some people, however, take it too far or make it menacing. Revenge is fine; trying to make someone quit the game or use RL money for a server transfer (for instance) is not.

I mention the latter because I knew a guy who recruited someone from the #2 arena team three days before season 7 ended. They never invited him to the team, thus assuring themselves #1 gladiator because they had no competition. That goes beyond creating a rivalry into the realm of downright douchebaggery.

While I suppose what he did is completely legal, I don't know a lot of people who want to transfer over to play with him after what he pulled. His ex-partners actually play with the guy that he recruited instead of him. Poetic justice, I suppose.

One thing that was missing from the Wrath expansion, conspicuously or not, was a world boss on par with those such as Kazzak and the Emerald Dragons. For better or for worse, Blizzard completely removed them from the game, reserving the massive figures towering over the landscape for instanced quests or dungeons.

Blizzard touched a bit on why they've not used world bosses in Wrath in the recent Twitter developer chat. They observed that there are issues with the bosses that have prevented them from feeling comfortable making more world bosses, such as issues with groups racing to bosses, or the ability of people outside raid groups to deliberately mess up boss attempts. On the other side of the coin, though, they did imply that they like world bosses, and will probably implement more in Cataclysm if and when they can find a satisfactory work-around for the problems.

I was going to ask a question today about dual-heading (that is, using more than one monitor to play the game), but Amanda has already covered that topic very well. So instead, we went to Twitter for a question, where sw0rdfish came up with paydirt:

Hey WoW Insider. What's the joy in ganking lowbies over and over?

-sw0rdfish

I agree, great topic for you readers to break down for us today. What's with all the ganking? It's just a standby on PvP servers -- you're going to get ganked, and at least once, you're going to get camped again and again and again. I play mostly on PvE servers, so I've never had to worry about this stuff, but if you've ever done it, what exactly is it that drives you to camp lowbies? Are you doing it just for fun, are you just completing the circle of ganking because you were ganked while a lowbie, or are you just doing your part and grabbing your sword to fight the Horde?

Good question. And there are definitely certain times when a fragile truce arises -- usually when new content shows up (expect a PvP truce in early Northrend later this week). What say you, readers?

And if you have a question for the readers of WoW Insider (we need as many as you've got -- the buffers are low!), drop us an email at ASK at WoW Insider dot com, and you might see it here next week.

Previously on Ask WoW Insider...

Although the Wrath of the Lich King Beta has been up for months now, I acquired my key rather late, and one thing I noticed right off the bat is that the quality of player behavior takes a sharp dive on the realms.

It's a well-known fact that Internet anonymity morphs regular people into asshats, but because Beta testers are not connected to their guilds, in-game names, realms or friends, evidently, the anonymity factor hits the roof.

My minty new Death Knight had her deathcharger "stolen" from her, among other things, and mobs and pick-up items are high commodities. The general chat is filled with derision and insults, and the extreme lag helps none of this.

What kinds of experiences have you had in the Beta, with either surprisingly helpful players or extremely aggravating ones?

Apparently the new policy on raid stealing is to report early and in detail. Blizzard poster Belfaire, in a thread entitled 'Raid Harassment' explains in response to a post about a couple of people using a gullible guildmate's trust to snag his raid ID by 'asking for help on quests' and then wiping them repeatedly on Illidan attempts. Seems that now, if this kind of thing happens to you, (I once zoned into MC to find that, instead of half done, it had been cleared up to Ragnaros by another guild that had just accepted one of our mages as a member... he brought our raid ID with him, so they decided to take advantage of not having to do the first three bosses.)

The change in policy may not make much of an actual difference in some situations... if someone's wiping your raid on boss attempts, the GM's probably won't be able to act before your raid is done for the night... but it's miles ahead of the 'there's nothing we can do' policy that's been enacted in the past. After all, it is possible for GM's to teleport jerks off of the Isle of Quel'Danas when they're making the badge vendor impossible to reach, so maybe they'll start porting griefers like the ones in Ironhide's post. I can only agree with poster Podric, and Belfaire himself, when they say that it's about time for this change.

Drysc responded strongly to some QQ over at the forums when a poster from Kil'jaeden -- a PvP realm -- ranted about being griefed by high level characters while leveling up. Drysc's uncompromising response? Get some friends and fight back. He reasons that if players roll on a PvP server, they should expect to be griefed as part of the leveling process. It's the same philosophy that has prevented Blizzard from allowing character transfers from PvE to PvP realms. It really only makes sense. If players roll on a PvP server, they shouldn't complain about players from the opposing faction taking advantage of the fact that they're flagged for PvP.

As Drysc explains, "the rules of war are based around attacking when the odds are in your favor". This could mean when opponents outnumber you, outlevel you, when you're low in health and/or if you're engaged with multiple mobs... the question isn't whether it's honorable or fair. It's war. In a PvP server, everything is fair game. There are no rules, and players certainly shouldn't bother sending tickets to GMs asking for any help (or sympathy). This should probably be common sense, but Drysc's somewhat provocative response is something of a surprise -- to many players a welcome one. While I'm all for etiquette (ganking a fisherman is just plain rude) and a personal sense of honor, players who roll on a PvP server know what they signed up for. Shape up or ship out -- character transfers, after all, are just a click away.

Patch 2.4, much like most other things in WoW, has managed to bring the worst out of some people. The mask of anonymity strikes again!

No, I don't mean the node-stealing, ninja-tapping, mob-training stupidery(which is a word as of right now) you see all over the Isle of Quel'Danas. I refer to the standing-on-NPCs-while-PvP-flagged griefing. If you're lucky and haven't seen this happen on your server, what most servers are seeing is a bunch of Blood Elf and Draenei players standing directly on top of Shattered Sun Offensive NPCs, so players accidentally, unknowingly, right click on them instead of the quest NPC. This results in inadvertently hitting the player, and then getting destroyed by the SSO guards.

And by honor I don't mean the honor-as-currency system that's currently in the game -- I mean a sense of personal honor as in, there are things you make a conscious decision to avoid doing just as a moral gesture.

I thought of this recently after a truly miserable losing streak in Arathi Basin. I wound up in three consecutive matches with a full complement of 15 Alliance players to 7 or 8 Horde (with both sides being PuG's, mind you). Being out-numbered and out-gunned sucks no matter what, but it's made immeasurably worse in places like Arathi Basin and EOTS due to the dwindling number of sites you'll have to rez when your side is being utterly destroyed. There was one particularly awful game where the Alliance decided to see how much honor they could get from us before the inevitable 4 or 5-cap ensuring their victory, and simply zerged us in the graveyard as we rezzed (or tried to). The feeling was made worse by knowing, having also played Alliance in BG's, that Horde would almost certainly have done the same thing had the situation been reversed. PvP is the subject of a lot of emotional dicussion in the WoW community as a result of situations like these, and I think we can all agree that it's not the losses that drive you nuts so much as knowing that the game is full of places and times where no amount of strategy or skill will keep you alive.

There are a lot of things in PvP that I just don't like being a part of.
I don't attack fellow Druids unless I'm attacked first (yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but a surprising number of Druids subscribe to this). I don't join in when an enemy player is obviously being dog-piled. I don't /spit on opposing players or do other rude emotes, and I don't participate in griefing. There's not much about WoW's PvP system that's really all that fair to begin with, especially when compared to games more explicity designed around PvP combat, but in the back of my mind there's still that notion that your opponent should at least have a sporting chance. I risk being called a hopeless carebear for this statement, but I think "honorable kills" are a lot more enjoyable when there's a measure of actual honor involved.

Over the past few weeks, I've heard now of two different AH plots coming to fruition. A while back, Seth sent us a tip about a character named Zygar on Maelstrom who'd bought out every single item on the AH that was selling for less than 2g, and relisted it at 2g. Apparently it worked (because lots of people were willing to spend 2g on that stuff), but it didn't make lowbies happy, because they didn't have that kind of money to spend on the items they wanted.

And yesterday, I heard from Cheryl, who told us about Flaggen on Kirin Tor-- he did the opposite, and started way undercutting the other jewelcrafters on the realm. Another interesting idea, and one that's also working, because he's outselling (obviously) every other jewelcrafter out there.

Is this kind of AH manipulation "griefing"? Should Blizzard step in when one character, either by sending prices high or low on the AH, changes the whole economic system on a realm? I'd think not-- these economies were designed by Blizzard to be run and controlled by players, and all the players on a realm can stop this kind of thing easily-- just stop buying from Flaggen (if you disagree with him, although some players have rightfully pointed out that what he's doing drives down prices for the gem customers) or the guy on Zygar. But on the other hand, great discrepancies in the amounts of gold at level 70 vs. the lower levels (buying out all the items below 2g probably wasn't possible before Outland) could classify this as griefing, and cause Blizzard to step in-- perhaps by limiting the amount of auction purchases by one character. What do you think? How laissez-faire should Blizzard be about AH takeovers like this?

[ Thanks Cheryl and Seth! ]

Recently, a lot of guilds have been having some problems with Doom Lord Kazzak. Not on the actual fight, which isn't that difficult. Instead, players (of the same or opposing faction) have been flying above Kazzak, getting killed from his AOE shadowbolt and healing him, effectively griefing the raid.

A forum thread from a few months ago brings up possible solutions to this problem. Generally, if you're on a PVP server, this isn't considered griefing because you can kill the other faction before they get in range. But on flying mounts, this is a bit tougher. Someone suggested staging a raid on Honor Hold/Thrallmar to distract possible attackers before you attempt, which is a nice idea. You can also send up shadow priests or mages to POM/pyro them before the fight, or just kill them until they have ridiculously long rez timers. If you're doing this on a PVE server -- or doing it to someone of the same faction on any server -- that's considered griefing and is reportable.

Other people suggest that Blizzard solve this problem through game mechanics. For example, they could make Kazzak's AOE shadowbolt target only members of the raid who engaged him, or have only deaths in that raid heal him. But this sort of ruins the idea of world bosses, where you could theoretically get everyone on an entire server to come take down the boss (or fail to take it down, as was evidenced when Highlord Kruul visited Azeroth.)

How do you think this problem should be solved?

Unless you've experienced it first hand, you may not realize what the term "instance griefing" refers to. In this particular case, it refers to any player or players who are maliciously stealing your guild's raid IDs in order to grief you during raid time. (For non raiders in the audience, high-end raid dungeons have specific reset timers on them, preventing you from constantly farming the dungeon. At some point after zoning into a dungeon -- usually after a boss kill -- you're "saved" to the specific instance and assigned an instance ID that is the same for you and all of your group. Anyone saved with that specific ID will zone into your instance rather than a fresh instance -- at least until the dungeon resets.) Poster Trindade offers some advice on how random players might wind up getting your Karazhan instance ID:

Bob is a member of your raid and has your instance ID.
Jim is a scumbag griefer in shattrath wanting to steal your ID.
Ted is a scumbag griefer outside Karazhan waiting to steal your ID.

Jim is in a group with Ted. They have made their group a raid.

Jim whispers Bob "Hey Bob, wanna run Shattered Halls?"
Bob whispers Jim "sure".
Jim invites Bob to join his group.
Bob joins the raid group.
Bob is now the group leader.
Ted enters Karazhan.

So what happens next? Read on for the whole story.

I noticed this post on the EU forums regarding massive lost of Cenarion Circle reputation after accidentally attacking a flight master who had been mind controlled by the opposing faction.  You know how you right click on a flight master to talk to them and fly somewhere?  Well, right clicking will also enable auto-attack on a hostile target.  So if the mind control is timed just right, you may not even realize what happened - the flight path window never came up, and you just lost 15000 reputation.  (Note: in this case, the initial auto-attack tagged the flightmaster to the player, and opposing faction player killed it - thus the massive reputation loss.)
However, GM response simply stated that this was "designed this way" and a CM response states that this is a GM issue.  So is it really intentional for other players to be able to cause you to loose huge chunks of reputation like this (it's -15000 for killing a member of faction), through no fault of your own?  It seems rather wrong to me, but in the mean-time I'm going to be very careful when flying out of Cenarion Hold...