Was this before they became developers, or were they working for the competition at the time?

This makes me ponder another possiblity: hiring griefers to invade and destroy the competitions games. Hmmmmmm….

Early 1998, Crossroads of Britannia Dev Board. There was a Taiwanese guy (I know he was from Taiwan because he once mentioned going to Taiwan to visit family) who went by the aliases of TooKuhl4U, Billieamie, and Bolton (“Ur a Bolton”). It was he who started using the term “griefing” there, and then either he or someone else made a noun from it.

Lum, if you ever run across the person who has the data from the CoB boards from that era, please ask them a) to make sure that stuff is saved. It’s history! b) to run a search for the earliest incidence of the words “griefing” and “griefer”. I am fairly sure that one of the Taiwanese guy’s aliases will turn up.

I have nothing new to say about griefers. They will always exist because some people just need to fuck with other people. PKing, kill stealing, verbal harrassment, whatever.

The Eve thing, though, was it griefing? When you base your PVP on corporate warfare, that seems to be playing the game at it’s highest, most sophisticated level. I don’t play, so I can’t really make an informed judgement, just read the article and the linked boards.

Not really, but you’re never going to get me to be a character reference for the person you listed, either.

That’s pretty much what I told the reporter when he asked my opinion on the subject. His original description wasn’t as even-handed as the one you read.

Anonymity is an issue that could possibly use a fix through coded systems. The fact is that in most games, the player can make a new character that the rest of the world cannot associate with a “main” or primary character.

This means anyone has the potential to scam their hearts out and just switch to a new char. I thought that maybe this could be fixed by showing an account ID or something in player profiles… but that feels a bit restricting.

Perhaps some sort of voluntary registration could be used where players would be willing to put an ID in their profile. This would say “Hey, you can trust me because if I ever log on another character you will know who it is.”, but other players could choose not to. Players who choose not to would but inherently less trusted, but maybe they just don’t care about random people trusting them.

“The players of World of Warcraft were left with a similar conundrum in March, when a group of gamers performed an act whose only purpose was to cause emotional pain. The death of a member of the community inspired her fellow gamers to hold a virtual funeral, which was raided by a malicious mob that made short work of the mourners, all of whom had relinquished their weapons as a sign of respect. Since the funeral was naively held in a zone designed for combat, few could question the legitimacy of the attack within the game’s rules. None the less, the mourners were outraged, not at the penalties their characters would have to suffer, but at the brazen attack on their feelings.”

I mean… I know it’s fucked up and insensitive, but you held a damn unarmed event in a PK zone? Human nature is some group of red bull fueled pricks were going to seize on the idea of massacreing everyone. I mean when Haven did shit like this in UO they always either got smurf sanction or ringed the event with GMs to take care of any asshats.

These people are veteran MMOG players and they apparently put faith in some communal recognition of common decency???? Here’s a newsflash without the peer pressure and potential for immediate person to person negative feedback that real world social interactions entail, a good percentage of people are souless pricks with near zero capacity for empathetic feelings.

These people were like blood in the water.

From the days of watching one guild rezzed and rescued from The Plane of Fear while the very next day and over the following weeks another guild was allowed to lose all of their gear in the very same situation. Justice and grief are relative and rarely is a case of either clear cut.

Hell does not our current host recall when Savant and other \’e2\’80\’9cgame devs\’e2\’80\’9d were griefing players of EA \’e2\’80\’98s Majestic?

Thanks to Scott Jennings for this pointer to a Guardian article on grief-play in online games….