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Sorry to bring up such an old topic of discussion, but is the Team Flare TF2 griefing group still going on? I can find it on Steam, but there's noone in the chat to ask 
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Feb 9, 2009 16:12
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I have a question and possible griefing possibility. In the L4D, is it possible to throw poo poo at and destroy the get away vehicles? I am thinking specifically of the level with the helicopter, but if it worked on any level it'd be good to know. I would try it myself, but I don't have an xbox, and I don't go home enough to try it out on my brother's.
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Feb 9, 2009 16:17
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Spanish Matlock posted:Welcome to a loving long time ago! Welcome to a loving long time ago! (its been patched) Knux_The_Echidna posted:Sorry to bring up such an old topic of discussion, but is the Team Flare TF2 griefing group still going on? I can find it on Steam, but there's noone in the chat to ask It was patched, so why bother sitting around in a dead steam group?
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Feb 9, 2009 16:21
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The HL2 Mod Dystopia was released on Steam recently. It's pretty good, with a mix of real-world and cyberspace levels. One fellow named 'Jeff' was on a server with me last night, and he was using the old tried and tested 'get people to TK you by attacking them, then kick them' tactic. He was pretty good at it as well ( or everyone else was retarded) and managed to kick about half of our team within the space of five minutes. By running in front of his bullets I got him down to two TKs needed to be banned, then gave up.
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Feb 9, 2009 16:27
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Spanish Matlock posted:-Running through the level and knocking all of the upgraded weapons off the tables so that the survivors pass them by I had no idea this was possible!
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Feb 9, 2009 16:34
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quote:-Running through the level and knocking all of the upgraded weapons off the tables so that the survivors pass them by This.. this is awesome. This would make the second and third levels so much harder for the survivors if they get a tank. Plus if you are infected first and do this.. you'll know where the Tier 2 spawn is and really piss them off when you get it and they don't.
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Feb 9, 2009 17:14
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Dash O Pepper posted:Welcome to a loving long time ago! (its been patched) Awwww, someone plays on the PC. (  We don't get patches on Xbox)
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Feb 9, 2009 18:35
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Not much raging in this one, but sometimes it's effective. Since the rage quitting is so rampant in L4D, my buddies and I find the limiting the other team's time to play Infected is pretty fun. Usually by the start of the 3rd map, we have such a large lead, we'll all start suiciding when we are survivors. Then the other team will play their hardest to make up the points and usually get jumped and killed 1/4 - 1/2 way through the map never to make up all the points to beat us. We did this the other night and people were fuming because they got seconds to be their precious Infected. Hey, it's either this or a sound rear end beating and everyone quitting. What I love is the other team acts like we kicked or made their teammates quit. That and as soon as some scrub gets the tank and dies, he'll rage quit; more so if killed by the gas station. Edit: Oh yeah!! So the other night it was 2 of my friends and I playing against 4 Infected on NM4. Bill bot takes his sweet time as we rush, kill 1 or 2 infected, and get to cafe area. Bill gets jumped by a hunter and we just leave him behind. We keep rushing until we get to the elevator and Bill teleports to us from the 1st floor with literally 5 health. The screams were glorious as some jackass hunter thought he'd cripple us but Bill made it to the elevator. BiscuitErsedRenton fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Feb 9, 2009 |
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Feb 9, 2009 18:39
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Spanish Matlock posted:-Running through the level and knocking all of the upgraded weapons off the tables so that the survivors pass them by Does that still work in the PC version?
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Feb 9, 2009 18:41
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Kessen posted:I think a lot of online sports games lack any real way to grief other than, say, getting the ball and just kicking back while the other player waits for you or something. I don't know if this is technically griefing, but it is along the same lines. When I have a huge lead in NCAA or Madden I'll just punt the ball away at random intervals. Sometimes on first down, sometimes second, sometimes on third and inches. Sometimes I'll drive down the field and punt the ball through the uprights once I get into the red zone. You don't know when it's coming, but if I have a good lead and it's late in the game, I will punt.
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Feb 10, 2009 01:00
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m2pt5 posted:Does that still work in the PC version? This is really important information. As in, I'd-start-up-L4D-right-now important.
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Feb 10, 2009 01:37
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Kessel posted:This is really important information. I just tried, and I believe it doesn't work on the PC. I think they patched it out actually. But I will be using it on the XBox... they are AWFUL. Those players exploit like script kiddies and are just awful players. I need my roommate to get a PC to play on...
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Feb 10, 2009 03:48
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curious posted:What's in the loving Case!! While this thread is meant to be more about players griefing the game, I think there is room to discuss coders griefing players. In a similar deal to curious, I'm a semi-retired senior developer on Discworld MUD and as one of my final pieces of code, I have created something I like to call "Mr Game". He's an NPC that stands in a safe zone, and offers people the opportunity to sign up to play 'The Game'. Everyone interested signs up over a 24 hour window and is told to return at certain intervals to perform a specific task: The task: Tell him how many fingers he is holding up. The time interval: 4 hours (An average sleep cycle lasts 4 hours, this means that most players have to interrupt REM sleep to get up and do this thing.) If we ever reach a point where only one person checks in for a given phase, that person is declared 'the winner' and receives the grand prize: Achievement points. Yes, Discworld MUD now has an achievement system - After watching a friend of mine grind out mocks for 10 hours a day for over a week to get a 'server first', I wrote Mr Game to teach players not to grind achievements at the cost of their health. Having said that, the second 'round' of the game lasted for seven and a half days before a winner was declared, and so I can only conclude that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. [Or maybe I'm just a bit of a dick who likes people getting up every four hours to perform the most menial task I could come up with.]
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Feb 10, 2009 15:19
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Heliotic posted:While this thread is meant to be more about players griefing the game, I think there is room to discuss coders griefing players. So do I. I'm loving these. I love the idea of game developers genuinely trying to gently caress with it's playerbase in subtle ways.
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Feb 10, 2009 15:29
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I would absolutely love to hear more stories of devs/coders messing with players.
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Feb 10, 2009 15:30
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I spent about 3 months helping design a pretty successful MUD, then worked on it as an admin/developer for a while before college. I eventually couldn't stand the players and stopped being able to handle it. Ungrateful, demanding and stupid, they burnt me out fast. To me the worst were pvpers and socialite mudders. The interactions between the two led to some of the worst admin problems I could have imagined. Never, EVER let a pvper kill a socialite RPer, you will never hear the end of it. Now, I love the game and there were some great people there, but as a whole I got to liking to pick on players here and there. One of my last tasks before quitting was a sort of contest amongst us admins; design an unattached, random mobile to add character to the game. Most Gods(admins) designed things specific to their area and so the world became a bit bland outside of what they were working on, so the hope was that we would all make interesting mobs to talk to and improve the world. I designed Gerolith, the God of Might. He was a normal person who randomly picked a bar in the world to inhabit, and stayed there as long as people brought him booze. He told drunken stories where he claimed credit for the activities of some of the more prominent game players (much to their annoyance), and spoke in entirely third person. Every day or two, if he didn't get alcohol, he moved on. He was annoying enough by claiming credit, but most players were amused he was telling their story and they could correct him. I had a reputation as one of the more creative programmers for quests, so I spent a great chunk of time getting him just right. He played darts and armwrestled, and would keep a running tally of wins and pay out accordingly, sometimes quite a nice sum. Except not with girls. quote:Gerolith, God of Might does not challenge women! They are delicate flowers that Gerolith, God of Might would not wish to cause any harm! Cue one of the longest continual protests I had ever seen in any game. Women wanted him out of the city, demanded he be removed, even tried to kill him. Now I'm not a misogynist, but I wanted to hear outrage, and I got it. I believe eventually he was declared banned from certain cities and his code was changed a great deal after I was gone... but it was fun while it lasted. Gerolith, I raise a brew to you. Not the most hilarious thing, but a small act of revenge humor. I also wrote a few more things into the game to pick on player types, but never got the effect Gerolith managed. Raiche fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Feb 10, 2009 |
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Feb 10, 2009 16:40
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I was having a bit of fun in the Goldeneye: Source Beta 3 the other night with a little bit of light griefing. Now, the game itself is decent at best, and I was having trouble figuring out how to kill people effectively without dying in like two or three hits. So I started switching to the Hunting Knife every time I spawned and ran around like a madman trying to stab people to death. When everyone has the AR33 assault rifle as a starting weapon, however, it's hard to accomplish. I then began typing in chat about how people were cowards for not wanting to face me like men and how they were hiding behind their petty guns. This set a few people off, either in text chat or over voice chat; they started yelling at me, trying to mock me, what have you. Whenever I managed to squeeze in a lucky kill, I would declare my triumph continually until someone shot me in the back. Eventually I made a passing reference to Valhalla, and someone said "this isn't 300 dude". So I called him out on this - admittedly insignificant - error, and then on the next map I changed my name. I became "ODIN, LORD OF VALHALLA". I turned on my microphone and began challenging people to duels to see if they were worthy of joining my army in Valhalla for the war at Ragnarok. I went back to calling people cowards for using "strange metal bows" and "repeating crossbows" and the like, which pissed off a few people. Luckily, the majority of the people on the server grew to like it and started playing along, including one guy who was playing as Baron Samedi. For whatever reason, I started referring to this guy as a heathen because he always screamed over the microphone and ran away from me. Other highlights include Odin being confused because he couldn't figure out how to get out of a secret backroom with a hidden wall-door, and Odin's frustration with "tinder rocks" (proximity mines), and how he could take them out with a strange metal longbow. Somewhat juvenile, but I enjoyed it.
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Feb 10, 2009 16:44
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GoldenDelicious posted:I was having a bit of fun in the Goldeneye: Source Beta 3 the other night with a little bit of light griefing. Now, the game itself is decent at best, and I was having trouble figuring out how to kill people effectively without dying in like two or three hits. So I started switching to the Hunting Knife every time I spawned and ran around like a madman trying to stab people to death. When everyone has the AR33 assault rifle as a starting weapon, however, it's hard to accomplish. This made me smile  I don't really have any great griefing stories but I did have some fun messing with beggars and other such undesirables in Ironforge back when I still played WoW. Most of my characters were mages just like with every other game I played and like many mage characters the WoW mage has a portal spell. This allows you to summon a portal to any of the major cities which party members can then click on to use. This spell looks, at least to the uninformed somewhat like the warlocks sommoning spell which requires two people to click on the portal in order to summon party members from elsewhere. I played alliance and for the two of you that haven't played WoW the alliance have three cities (pre expansion anyway) two on one continent and one on the other. Ironforge is basically the only one anyone bothers with, it's fairly central and, when I was still active, the only one to have an auction house. Stormwind also had a reasonable location and easy access to Ironforge via a tram so that was fairly well populated too. Then there's Darnassus, Darnassus is located on an island off the northeast coast of the other continent and was a bitch to get to, it didn't even have a flightmaster inside the actual city, so naturally it was a wasteland lacking most notably gullible newbie friendly idiots you can probably see where this is going. Anyway on my server if you hang around Ironforge for about 5 minutes looking like a halfway competent player you can usually expect about 5 people to message you repeatedly with subtle variations of "gief gold plzzzz i am new" 9 times out of 10 they will also let it slip that they are that rarest of breeds; the internet female. Each one of these irritating parasites gets a friendly invite to a party and a promise of 5g (a large amount pre Burning Crusade) so long as they help me summon a friend first. Most are so eager for the cash that they never bother checking the tooltip that appears when they mouse over the portal, those that do have experienced a strange glitch much like that one that they claim lost them all their starting equipment. With the victim now on the other side of the game world I can happily move on to the next victim that has inevitably messaged me whilst I was busy safe in the knowledge that my evening will be a little bit quieter. Of course this is normally only a temporary solution since a hearthstone will transport them back to Ironforge as soon as the cooldown wears off. Of course the magical energies of the hearthstone interfere with the summoning spell and must be discarded before the summoning ritual can be carried out, people will swallow a very large amount of bullshit if they think there's gold in it for them (bonus game, see how convoluted you can make your explanation before they get bored and wander off). At first I just put each person I pulled this on on ignore to drown out the flood of angry messages but then I realized that weeks later there were still a couple of my little friends running between the two people in darnassus begging for the paltry few silver it would take them to get back. After I realized this I friended each of them before sending them on their way allowing me to check up on them, by the end of it my friends list was full of lowbie gnomes running around what had become known across the server as the beggars Alcatraz. In all the months I spent doing this whilst waiting for raids or battlegrounds only a couple ever succeeded in getting the 10 or so levels you need to easily return to civilization or had the luck to run it at level 1 dieing every step of the way. Unfortunately since I stopped playing blizzard patched in global chat channels and auction houses in each city to break up the lag clusterfuck that was ironforge meaning that beggars could still be heard even in darnassus .tl;dr Beggars don't know difference between Summon and Portal, get exiled. edit: Another particularily idiotic breed of players (albeit a rarely encountered one) is the blackmailer, these people are usually level 3 or 4 and whisper you demanding help on a quest, if you refuse they tend to threaten to "log on with their lvl 60 ork warrior, gather their guild and corpse camp you for hours. The best response for this is to follow them around everywhere they go instakilling everything in sight and thus ensuring they are totally unable to gain any experience, do this until they log off or you get bored. Holistic Detective fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Feb 10, 2009 |
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Feb 10, 2009 19:52
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Holistic Detective posted:tl;dr Beggars don't know difference between Summon and Portal, get exiled.
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Feb 10, 2009 23:28
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Zereth posted:Can't you get a new Hearthstone by talking to any innkeeper? Yes but it's set to whichever inn you pick it up from so they're stuck teleporting back to darnassus if they try to use it before finding another innkeeper.
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Feb 10, 2009 23:35
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Dash O Pepper posted:It was patched, so why bother sitting around in a dead steam group? I thought it was turning into a general griefing group once the flare bit got patched. I was hoping we'd found some Roomba-esque activities to set up
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Feb 11, 2009 00:14
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I find it easier to just tell annoying newbies that hearthstones are currently broken and can irreparably damage your character. Therefore, you should never, never use them under any circumstances.
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Feb 11, 2009 00:19
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A lot of people have mentioned the UO shard IPY already so I'll contribute some stories from it: - I had a house placed on the northern Vesper shores that I shared with my friend Leroy. Ithaqua had a house placed on the southern Minoc shores (where the river curves up towards the mountains). I would recall to his house, every hour, on the hour, sometimes more, kill his macroing characters inside his house and then recall away. I would then message him and say "owned 1v1 no pots". He kept trying to brush this off like he didn't care, until one day he finally got the balls to show up at my house and face me. I ran around and around my house like a headless chicken while I waited for Leroy to login, then we both ganked him and I promptly messaged him "owned 1v1 no pots". He got pretty angry, screaming at me calling me a ganking human being etc, so I had him come back and this time did indeed own him 1v1 no pots. I still have a screenshot of him dead on my doorstep somewhere. - Spleen used to run this bot that sat on exit tile of the northern Jhelom island teleporter. The bot had GM Hiding, Stealth, Detect, Tracking, etc. We would stack about ten red boxes on top of the same tile the bot occupied (stealthed, of course) and then hide off screen. The bot used an EasyUO script that constantly looked for players and would report to us in party chat if it saw one. As soon as it saw a target, we would rush on screen with prepped ebolts, and drop the target. If there was more than one or they tried to escape, they would run to the teleporter and find themselves blocked by boxes. If they somehow managed to move all the boxes, they'd find an invisible player blocking them. By the time they had a chance to deal with that, it was already too late. We snagged a numebr of house deeds this way and more than a few pissed off groups of newbies forming vigilante groups in Jhelom proper. We of course could see all this happening thanks to our scouting bot and would have fire fields, poison fields, boxes, daemons and mass dispells all ready for them when they came through the teleporter. - Following on from the above, we discovered that ghosts could not pass through red boxes on the ground, so of course, with all the boxes on the teleporter tile, they couldn't escape the island and therefore couldn't res, resulting in the all too common ghost spam. One day we'd been at our regular Jhelom antics for a few hours and had managed to collect a number of ghost followers. They were pissing us off by following us around, spamming OOOooOOooOOo's and sometimes warning our victims. I decided to deal with this. We got the ghosts to follow us into the building on the southern tip of the northern Jhelom island. Once they were all inside, I dropped red boxes at the doorway, then teleported out. All the ghosts were now stuck inside, free to OoOOOooOO to their hearts content. But that wasn't all. I decided to take it one step further with one particularly annoying ghost. While he was standing next to me spamming, I quickly threw down four boxes around him in all four directions. The end result? He was completely confined, in ghost form, to one tile which he could not move from. We would then mark a rune to the spot and recall in every thirty minutes or so to refresh (pick them up, put them back down again) the boxes, to prevent them from decaying. I think the record was keeping somebody stuck for 8 hours. A few people quit the shard because of this, I'm told. There's more stories but I can't be bothered typing more for now.
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Feb 11, 2009 05:42
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Raiche posted:I spent about 3 months helping design a pretty successful MUD, then worked on it as an admin/developer for a while before college. I eventually couldn't stand the players and stopped being able to handle it. Ungrateful, demanding and stupid, they burnt me out fast. To me the worst were pvpers and socialite mudders. The interactions between the two led to some of the worst admin problems I could have imagined. Never, EVER let a pvper kill a socialite RPer, you will never hear the end of it. Now, I love the game and there were some great people there, but as a whole I got to liking to pick on players here and there. The only thing I did was deify my character's pet puffin, because some people got really into the God Order sort of stuff. So I decided to make my puffin into a God and worship him and spread his word. I also made statues and dropped them at public locations, including the entrances of statues. Statues could not be removed except by an admin, so a bunch of people who took the Divine roleplay seriously were stuck with a statue of a Puffin God at their city gates with no way to remove them. Some people got pretty riled up about it. Eventually (a few months later), they managed to get some admin to take away the statue and I got a warning about it. Oh well. Then I started making statues of players I disliked in comical and lewd poses and placing them in public areas. People didn't like that either, but they couldn't do anything about it because I made sure to put them in neutral territory, where they couldn't be taken out by complaints. I'm not a very good griefer. 
Brydinut fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Feb 11, 2009 |
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Feb 11, 2009 16:52
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Brydinut posted:Haha, I remember this. I play the same game, though I've been logging on less and less over time. The playerbase is indeed pretty poo poo. I haven't really done any griefing, except minor comedic things. No no, you're a hero. Were I admin when you were doing that stuff, I would have fought tooth and nail for your right to make whatever drat statue you feel like wasting the incredible resources to make. I also would have just been a big fan of a Puffin God in general. The only other 'grief' things I did to pick on people were much tamer. One of my early newbie quests for the game's opening was planned to be endless fetching. Take something from Eekan to Phillipus, then take something from Phillipus to Eekan... over and over, for piddling gold and promise of a great reward. 50 or so items down the line it would start to repeat, while also continuing to promise an even better reward. I also built the most complicated monster in the game, put him in a difficult to reach place and underwater. I made mobs talk about him in reverential tones, everything implying the greatness of the monster. He had one goal, to tell me who he killed. No reward, no quest, rather tame experience... I just wanted to know who would fall for it. He was also supposed to inform me if he died, but I believe I made him too well. I was also to blame for Smithing, I forgot how much grief that caused, maybe I should tell that story sometime.
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Feb 11, 2009 17:43
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Raiche posted:No no, you're a hero. Were I admin when you were doing that stuff, I would have fought tooth and nail for your right to make whatever drat statue you feel like wasting the incredible resources to make. I also would have just been a big fan of a Puffin God in general. Another part of the Puffin story. I forgot about this buy I used to fly into cities and airdrop roughly 50 statuettes and a few books that I made of the Puffin God. Usually they said things like "Recant your false gods and obey the Lord of the Puffin." and some other religious drivel about the glory of the puffin. I think there're still a lot of them out there. I really should start making random items again. There're still a few people who froth at the mouth whenever they see my statues. It's really very satisfying. I think I've tried fighting that monster, is it a squid-thing? I ran away.
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Feb 11, 2009 17:57
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Brydinut posted:Oh boy, smithing. Yeah, he was in Kaark'krazul, I can't remember his name. Tentacles that healed him and drained life and such... really epic compared to how the average mob in that game is written. Would that I were there, I would assist in your Puffin Mission.
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Feb 11, 2009 18:32
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In WoW, if you stand perfectly still and create 2 or more portals, they'll overlap and it's impossible to tell which city you'll end up in when you click. Teleport Lotto is fun to play after a 25-man raid, especially if you're the only mage and/or you're raiding in a PUG. Open one to the major city everyone expects to port to, and one to the middle of nowhere. Alternately, no raider is prepared for success without his Direbrew Remote, an item that pops a giant drill out of the ground to carry your party/raid into an ancient instance that no one runs anymore. Blizzard created it during a seasonal gimmick when they added a new boss to the instance with some good gear for high levels, it gave you a quick ride to a location that would otherwise take about 15 minutes to reach. The gimmick boss went away but the Remote stayed, and a giant clickable drill that pops up in the middle of a raid has a way piquing curiosity. Not a whole lot of players have seen the Remote before, or know what it's for, but by the time they figure it out, you're whispering, "see ya in 15 minutes lol" The best part is that its completely anonymous if you don't admit to it, it's like a Mage port that can be created by anyone. I played City of Heroes for about a week, and if you picked flying as your superpower along with a class that could summon, you and a buddy could fly a mile into the sky and summon low level people all day long, watching them fall to their deaths. I think it was patched so falling would bring you to 1 health and never kill you, but you could still summon people over high level bad guys, which was just as fun. Finally, I played Myth 2 online a lot back when it was active. There's a mode called King of the Hill, wherein the object is have units occupying the center of the map for longer than any other player. One map, featuring undead units, was an island surrounded by deep water. The undead can travel through deep water, and won't appear on the minimap if they're completely submerged. The only unit a griefer is interested in is the Wight, a big pus-filled undead bastard that ambles slooowly towards his target, then stabs himself and creates a huge explosion. On King of the Hill, I'd get nothing but Wights, hide them in deep water behind other players, and wait for everyone to focus completely on micro-managing the Hill. You then set loose wave after wave of Wight which would be trivial to deal with if people 1) saw them coming on the minimap and 2) weren't so focused on winning, God bless their hearts. One Wight hitting the mass of your army will decimate it. 15 will keep any one player from being able to occupy the Hill at all, even if he sees the Wights coming. It's basically a way to target any player you choose and guarantee a loss.
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Feb 11, 2009 19:19
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Somebody fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Feb 19, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2009 19:25
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Raiche posted:Yeah, he was in Kaark'krazul, I can't remember his name. Tentacles that healed him and drained life and such... really epic compared to how the average mob in that game is written. Your stories are awesome. I'd like to hear the smithing tale.
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Feb 11, 2009 20:29
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Lockback posted:Your stories are awesome. I'd like to hear the smithing tale. Indeed, MUDS were really the first truly functional multiplayer games and really, the origin of griefing as we know it. Especially considering the kind of playerbase MUDS did(and still do) attract it makes causing people to go ballistic a little TOO easy at times. Just out of curiosity are your stories from Achaea?
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Feb 11, 2009 22:32
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Amused Frog posted:An acquaintance of mine who plays Eve says it was just a "Billfail" which is apparently a bug caused by the payment system Eve uses. Say it ain't so Sanctum posted:I lost interest in EVE around the time BOB got caught getting hand-outs from certain devs who also had characters in BOB. That's so good to hear, it's like griefing known cheaters. MrL_JaKiri posted:Anyone who thinks they even might consider it is retarded. This metagaming stuff is by far the best advertisment they have for the game, even ignoring notions of fair play and rules. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Feb 11, 2009 |
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Feb 11, 2009 22:46
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I don't care anymore it's all a distant memory.
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CaptainStag posted:Indeed, MUDS were really the first truly functional multiplayer games and really, the origin of griefing as we know it. Especially considering the kind of playerbase MUDS did(and still do) attract it makes causing people to go ballistic a little TOO easy at times. Just out of curiosity are your stories from Achaea? I played Achaea for a long time, but I was one of the designers for Imperian. It's Achaea with a Magic vs Nonmagic theme... except I think they forgot that and became a bit more Demons vs Everyone Else. It was pretty awesome at first, though! Like most MMO's, in MUDs what you own is a pretty big deal. People are especially fond of their armour or weapons in IRE games like these, because the stats generated by them are largely random (within upper/lower bounds). Some fighters could claim skill sheerly by their equipment. I recall a Christmas event in Achaea where they handed out candy canes that could be sharpened... some staffer didn't notice that their speed was at 255 (max), and I and some friends caused quite a bit of trouble using them. Damage on them was 1, but for classes that didn't use damage to win, skills with 3 second balance (cooldown) became about .3 seconds. Fun PKing was had. Anyways, the forging system was obviously boring. You hammered away over and over and got an item within some range of stats. If you didn't like it, you got materials and tried again. Boring! My last major effort there was to completely revamp the system, using good statistics and allowing for more variability. The idea was a mixture of ores for different results, malleability, etc etc. Whatever, the point was I needed to utterly revamp the Forging system and replace it with Smithing. I was told by the Boss and Coding head that anything related to the old system needed to go, and that my new system could come in on top, but it'd really be about a RL year before the new stuff would start to overrun the old stuff. See where I'm going? They wanted me to wait for all old stuff to be shuffled out of the system over about a year IRL, and to maybe freeze the current system and wait. Hell with that! The world is Magic vs Anti-magic... and sadly, Magic usually wins. Almost all Divine supported magic users, and it was generally just a sad show for anti back then. So, I brought in a Mage. One of unheard of ability, who was a metalmage of unmatched skill. He promised the ability to harden metals and make them faster, stronger.. better. Then started passing out free upgrades to the side of Magic. I had a blast upgrading their damages and speeds to 255, the players were eating it up. They bothered this poor NPC Mage constantly, because he was essentially making them invincible. Then he promised to do it for as many as he could at once, inventing an entirely new metal, just bring him these ingredients I made up on the spot off the top of my head! They ran wild gathering for me... huge buildup, spell charging... and bam, he failed the spell, we hit the big button. Every metal item in the game had 12 real life hours to live; rust magic devoured any metal item forged. Don't play with untested Magic, kiddies! As my Divine, since the game started, I cautioned people (I was anti). While I played with the Mage I blatantly told players to beware Mages and what could happen as my Divine. Oh well! The next day I ran a timed event with riddles and such, and long story short players got the new system (after like 3-7 RL days without metal), but it was still a blast. There were SO many complaints and issues; everyone had lost their precious EQ and didn't know what to do! SO MUCH BETTER than waiting a RL year or so for the system to even out. It was really the first time anti-magic had a point over magic as to why they sucked. The new system was better anyways. I put in a huge amount of effort, a new city came with it, new skills, all sorts of things... but the sum of it was that I got to EQ reset the game without telling any players what was going on. The complaints over me giving free superweapons were fun... but they didn't like the solution much. Raiche fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Feb 11, 2009 |
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Feb 11, 2009 23:17
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Faleran posted:I find it easier to just tell annoying newbies that hearthstones are currently broken and can irreparably damage your character. Therefore, you should never, never use them under any circumstances. [1 - General Chat] A dozen newbies: OMG I just deleted my hearthstone now I have to make a new character! ...To be fair though, I didn't know you could get a new hearthstone for almost a year, until after the GrizzlyPete+Lok'Delar incident..
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Feb 11, 2009 23:30
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Raiche posted:I played Achaea for a long time, but I was one of the designers for Imperian. I never played Imperian myself, only Achaea (and regrettably spent a lot more money on it than is reasonable ), and knowing what I know from back then makes this the best griefing story yet. Well bloody done 
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Feb 11, 2009 23:41
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flatluigi posted:I would absolutely love to hear more stories of devs/coders messing with players. One of the first things I did as a wizard was to remove that line then recode all the spells so they used a single damage function rather than each function having it's own wacky calculation system. Then I added the line back in so it now affected all spells and sat back waiting for him to lob some new complaints. The best thing of course was the head admin had known about the prior creative adjustments to his damage and approved highly of my changes. Of course the admin took it a step further by adding in a system whereby for every line of chat the player said on the global chat it reduced his damage further until he logged off. This was of course completely hilarious as every time he complained about his damage, it got worse. Another wizard also coded a special monster called <playersname>XPHandicap which was invisible, indestructible and couldn't be targeted by aoe effects. And it inherited from the PC class. This meant said wizard could spawn it, set it to follow him then party with him. End result? Shared xp with the monster and more moans about not getting full xp. This generated a moment of comedy when the monster gained a level and therefore announced on a channel that <playersname>XPHandicap is now level 73! I've also managed to grief a wizard before. On a mux I played wizards had the usual ability to go invisible and would follow players around and because there was often some really cool stuff going on, they would do this often despite the fact they weren't supposed to go onto the game area without a good reason. Queue some magical knowledge I had from coding on another mux using the exact same code base, players who picked things up got certain rights to whatever they picked up. You could pick up wizards. Then you could write an @teleport command onto them which took precedence over the wizard one which did nothing leaving the wizard trapped in your pocket unable to teleport out. There was a command to move a wizard somewhere but none of them really knew about anything other than the @command. I actually managed to get three pet wizards as more wizards came to look at this bizarre anomaly before the fourth one just teleported them to him. The excellent thing about this feature was it wasn't something simple to fix as you would imagine, it wasn't handled in the in game language at all but it was done in the actual C code which meant fixing it required digging through code, changing it, recompiling and restarting the instance. I fixed that one on the mux that I coded for promptly after that and it got patched back into the server I did that on eventually.
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Feb 11, 2009 23:56
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Raiche posted:I played Achaea for a long time, but I was one of the designers for Imperian. It's Achaea with a Magic vs Nonmagic theme... except I think they forgot that and became a bit more Demons vs Everyone Else. It was pretty awesome at first, though! To anyone thinking of playing Imperian, don't visit the forums. Our playerbase is pretty lovely overall, and the forums are like the bottom of the barrel. In addition, the game has a lot of cliques, and if you piss off the wrong one, be prepared to be killed a lot for dumb reasons. In all honestly, playing is probably a bad idea. Brydinut fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Feb 12, 2009 |
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Feb 12, 2009 01:28
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Mirsha posted:Of course the admin took it a step further by adding in a system whereby for every line of chat the player said on the global chat it reduced his damage further until he logged off. This was of course completely hilarious as every time he complained about his damage, it got worse. True genius!
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Feb 12, 2009 02:18
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Raiche posted:I had a reputation as one of the more creative programmers for quests, so I spent a great chunk of time getting him just right. He played darts and armwrestled, and would keep a running tally of wins and pay out accordingly, sometimes quite a nice sum. Except not with girls. You'd get along famously with Teppic, lead developer of A Tale in the Desert. He dropped a sexist 'foreign trader' NPC into one of the earlier iterations of the game, and the players went absolutely bugfuck.
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Feb 12, 2009 03:38
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Mirsha posted:I used to play on a fairly small mud where there was a player who was an annoying prick and online grinding all the time. Eventually he started to complain quite loudly that he wasn't doing as much damage as he thought he should be, I found out why later when I was raised to a wizard and given access to the code. There was a line that checked the casters name and if it was his it halved the amount of damage returned on the main damage spell he used. Eventually he figured out that he would do much better using another spell. That is absolutely hilarious! I love this thread so much! Keep the stories coming please!
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Feb 12, 2009 03:52
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