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Hobo Siege
Apr 24, 2008

by Cowcaster
You could create incredible amounts of chaos with that mod. Half the modes were based around shifting blame onto other players by doing things like making it so one party member is never marked. I would usually put this on the healer, wait for them to get kicked, switch it off immediately, then switch it back on as soon as they found a new one.

People get loving LIVID over having a mark on their head.

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PokeWarVeteran
Apr 3, 2012
Would that thing display during stealth to enemy players? I could see that becoming grief-tastic in battlegrounds then.

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


^^^^^^^
No, raid icons only showed to people in your party/raid. Nobody outside the group could see it for better or worse.

The best use of that mod was combined with a bug that let you increase the size of icons on hunter pets. Because pets are lower to the ground than humanoid characters, their icon would be right about chest height when attacking a humanoid target. If you buffed your pet with things that increased their size while putting raid icons on them, you could make the raid icon "grow". There was a bug that made it so desummoning your pet during this process would keep the icon from resetting to proper size so you could stack a bigger and bigger icon and then use it to block out normal size enemies.

Made it irritating for some melee fighters and people who didn't have enemy cast bars (which was most people way back when it worked).

Kerbtree
Sep 8, 2008

BAD FALCON!
LAZY!

SynthOrange posted:

So they couldnt turn it off? I'm failing to see why someone would get angry over a mark over their head.

Well, many peoplewow players (irrespective of their actual level of incompetence) are super serious about doing maximum DPS/topping the damage-done meter so they've typically got allsort of timers, scrolling combat text and so forth popping up in the middle of their screens that they're waiting to pop up so they can push [3] for a free fireball, or whatever. Throw five of the madly-scrolling iconsets shown above onto the already rather distractingly flashy screen, and it's quite easy for players to get confused.

ed:At one point after the introduction of Death Knights, the DK's pet ghoul's was bugged. It had the ability Leap, which worked as a stun attack when used on enemies, and a leap-to-safety when targeting something friendly. There was a quirk that somehow let you fire off Leap and have it be considered an attack at, for example, your own faction's flight master, who being on your side wasn't normally attackable. This allowed you to get the (buggy) ghoul to temporarily make them want to fight you, so you could run like hell, occasionally attacking to keep them following you, leaving a gathering crowd of players sitting where they ususally were, wondering how they were going to get around the continent.

Kerbtree fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Jun 2, 2012

where the red fern gropes
Aug 24, 2011


WoW griefs... this one wasn't intentional, but it annoyed people so I kept doing it.

There was a world event called Brewfest, and I was playing when it first came out. There were these dwarves (of course) who were drinking beer, and if you /waved at one of them, she'd throw you a beer - there was an animation of her throwing the mug, and it hit you on the head, fell off in a random direction, made a noise, and added a Unique-tagged mug of ale into your inventory. (Unique meant you could only have one, so this wasn't filling up my inventory or anything)

I decided this was really cool. I set up a macro so that, when I pushed a button, it would /wave for me. This would keep me from having to type. Then I pushed the button repeatedly and had lots of mugs come and smash me in the face over and over again. Such fun!

The chatbox:
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.

Over and over again. Every time this happened, she'd throw a mug, it would bounce off, make a sound. I set up the macro to /wave as many times as possible, so at a 255 character limit, with /wave + next line taking up 6 characters, I was /waving 22 times every time I pushed the button.

There was no spam prevention filter back then.

I push the button once. 22 lines of "Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf." pop up. The chat box can only accomodate about 8 lines of text before you have to scroll. Since I was pushing the button repeatedly, and had in fact bound the button to all my keys from 1 to = (total: 12 keys), I was /waving 264 times every time I pushed the buttons, and I could spam them about 7 times a second, which is 1848 lines of text every single second.

Every single one of those lines of text, representing a /wave, resulted in a beer mug being thrown at my head. My computer had trouble rendering all those beer mugs, and the rage, and the tears, were incessant. I was eventually disconnected by a game master. Nobody could chat because the chat box was repeatedly being filled up by my /waving, and nobody could move because the beer mugs were taking up all the CPU.

Synthbuttrange
May 6, 2007

Please tell me the beer mugs had physics and collision and you were surrounded by a mountain of mugs.

FuzzyPickles
Jun 7, 2004

Kerbtree posted:

Well, many peoplewow players (irrespective of their actual level of incompetence) are super serious about doing maximum DPS/topping the damage-done meter so they've typically got allsort of timers, scrolling combat text and so forth popping up in the middle of their screens that they're waiting to pop up so they can push [3] for a free fireball, or whatever. Throw five of the madly-scrolling iconsets shown above onto the already rather distractingly flashy screen, and it's quite easy for players to get confused.

It never confused me when I used it. I think a lot of people just cant handle not being in absolute 100% control of their character. I've seen people in raids completely wig out because a raid leader just put a plain mark on their character. I never really understood that.

Dead Cow
Nov 4, 2009

Passion makes the world go round.
Love just makes it a safer place.
My favorite WoW grief was an item that was given out during Brewfest that would pop up a drill out of the ground. Clicking on the drill would send you from wherever you were in the game to where the event was being held. There was a boss in one of the instances that had a part where drills that looked exactly the same would pop out of the ground and bad guys would come out. If you used the item to make the drill come up during the boss fight people would end up clicking on it and get warped out of a fight where they were really needed to beat the boss and end up all the way across the map.

venus de lmao
Apr 30, 2007

Call me "pixeltits"

SynthOrange posted:

Please tell me the beer mugs had physics and collision and you were surrounded by a mountain of mugs.

Unfortunately, no, it was just an animation (I remember the beer mug dwarf he's talking about), but it made an absolutely obnoxious "BONK!" sound.

Bo Steed
Apr 12, 2012

Kacho: ON

Dreggon posted:

WoW macro shenanigans

Reminds me of that quest in Westfall. Essentially an extension of the "cow clicking" joke that has been in every Blizzard game since it stopped being funny, the way to get the quest involved doing the /chicken or /flap emote at a chicken some hundred times until the chicken randomly turns into a quest giver and lets you do some small quest to get a pet chicken. Naturally, the easiest way to accomplish this was to write a macro that does the /chicken emote several times a second so you could just spam it until the quest triggered. Naturally, this macro had other uses....

Fizbin
Nov 1, 2004
Zoom!

Bo Steed posted:

Reminds me of that quest in Westfall. Essentially an extension of the "cow clicking" joke that has been in every Blizzard game since it stopped being funny, the way to get the quest involved doing the /chicken or /flap emote at a chicken some hundred times until the chicken randomly turns into a quest giver and lets you do some small quest to get a pet chicken. Naturally, the easiest way to accomplish this was to write a macro that does the /chicken emote several times a second so you could just spam it until the quest triggered. Naturally, this macro had other uses....

There was also a macro going around that used some logic command to go through the entire 200+ list of emotes all at once, which was enough to disconnect other people when pressed.

Yaos
Feb 22, 2003

She is a cat of significant gravy.
Everquest also let you macro text. I got in around release (quit around level 12 or so). Everquest had a language skill, where you could not understand certain languages unless you had a good enough skill in that language. Somebody thought it would be a good idea that you had to train the skill by speaking it in the chat box.

I decided it would be a good idea to train this up during the many lengthy periods of down time while murdering random monsters. I created a macro button that I could spam that would say the alphabet to the entire zone. Some of my group members stopped talking in chat. For some reason I decided to check /who, and noticed a lot of people had (linkdead) next to their name.

Was it me that did this, or a server issue? Once everybody had reconnected I decided to spam it again, and checking /who showed (linkdead) next to a lot of names. After that I decided to stop because I thought I would continue playing EQ and did not want to get banned. Oddly, I never saw anybody else trying this method to up their language skills.

The real grief was Everquest. Forced grouping, to regen mana you had to stare at a magic book that took up the entire screen, nothing to do but kill monsters or beg NPCs for gold.

EvilCoolAidMan
Jun 26, 2008

Dreggon posted:

and nobody could move because the beer mugs were taking up all the CPU.

This is the great part to me because a lot of WoW players have low end computers.

venus de lmao
Apr 30, 2007

Call me "pixeltits"

Fizbin posted:

There was also a macro going around that used some logic command to go through the entire 200+ list of emotes all at once, which was enough to disconnect other people when pressed.

Not only that, but because a lot of the emotes had voice clips attached to them, it would play them all simultaneously and make the most godawful noise.

where the red fern gropes
Aug 24, 2011


Another one, discovered by accident and then utilised to its maximum potential. This one was a long, long time ago when I used to play RuneScape. This one needs some explanations, and my memory of a game I no longer play as of several years ago is probably a little bit faulty. I will alternate between the past and present tense because gently caress off it makes it easier to write. Some of the information may be incorrect by now, since it's an MMO and they're prone to change, but it was probably correct when I was playing. Deal with it.

-----------------------------------------------

I played a lot, since I was a child and had lots of free time. I had a fairly high-level character - not super-high, but it was noticeably higher than most other players. This is relevant for later.

This grief occurred on a place called Monkey Island. At least I think that's what it's called, it's an island populated by monkeys and it was probably called Monkey Island because of it. It's the main hub for some sort of quest, where you land on the island, go through the jungle and get kidnapped by monkeys, who then throw you in jail. It's a required part of the quest that you get thrown in jail, and since it's an MMO, that means other people who get caught will share the cell with you.

As with any jail you might come across in your life, this one has guards. Well, a guard. Normally characters take up a 1x1 space, but the guard - a large gorilla - takes up 2x2. This isn't massive, since there are much larger ones, but you can't path through him.

Pathing... also needs an explanation. You cannot block other players, so the simplest grief of getting a couple of friends and standing in the middle of a thoroughfare does not work. Players can path through most NPCs, with some rare exceptions. NPCs, however, usually cannot path through each other, so if you get a line of them in a corridor you can take them out one by one. However, if you walk into an NPC (we'll call him NPC1), other NPCs can also walk through NPC1, as long as NPC1 is still standing on that same tile. But if NPC2 walks through NPC1 and stacks on top of him - standing in the same place - other NPCs can still path through NPC1 (since you've pathed through NPC1 as well), but can't path through NPC2 (since you haven't pathed through NPC2, even though they're on the same tile). Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn't, and I was too young to try and work it out. I just accepted it.

There were some NPCs that you couldn't path through for whatever reason. These were generally quest-related guards designed to stop you from accessing certain areas where you weren't meant to go before you finished a part of said quest.

Anyway, this gorilla guard - you couldn't path through him. You were supposed to hide in a side room, then run past him. If you didn't, he'd punch you, dealing a hefty percentage of your health in damage (health maximums were between 10 to 99, I think I had about 70 which was decent, guard did about 30-40 which was a lot) and you'd get returned to the cell. The guard would path from point A to point B, passing by the jail cell and also pathing to the exit. If the gorilla caught you outside the cell, he'd punch you (see above 2 lines).

If you were too close to the bars of the jail cell, the gorilla would punch you anyway. But when he punched you, he also knocked you back. You were sharing this cell with other players, and if you crashed into any of these other players, they would take damage too, based on how much damage you were dealt. As I mentioned earlier, my character was quite a bit higher than most other players, meaning I had more health, meaning I got hit harder numerically but not percentage-wise, but people who I crashed into got hit for the same numerically but much, much higher percentage-wise. Since the percentage damage was based on my current health and not my maximum health, I was at no risk of dying (the gorilla would never deal enough to kill you), but since the damage was based on MY health and not anybody else's, I would get knocked back into other people, quickly eat food to heal back to full, then get punched again, crashing into everyone again.

They'd laugh the first time ("haha lol"). They'd be annoyed the second time ("dude stop"). They'd die the third time. Since this was a high-level quest, they'd have high-level gear, which they would subsequently drop... along with certain quest items.

Which brings us back to pathing (or it will in a moment). The quest items themselves were called greegrees. To get a greegree, you had to go through this long, stupid, pain-in-the-rear end tunnel system populated by some very hard-hitting mobs - and since I was high-level, "very high damage" to me was "almost instant death" to those lower-level people who had somehow managed to join me on the island. Once you reached the end, you could make these greegrees, which turned you into a monkey so the monkeys on the island wouldn't attack you. You actually had to go through the cave system several times, since there was a monkey-speak amulet that let you talk to the monkeys which you also needed, which most of these people were dropping when I killed them in the prison cell. The people in the cell could turn into monkeys using the greegrees to escape the cell, but since they were getting stunned from my crashing into them, they couldn't talk to the guard to get him to let them out, so they'd die and drop these hard-to-get items.

By the way, if you talked to the guard as a human, he could punch you from several tiles away through walls. I don't understand how that works but it helped me get people killed.

Pathing... If you were a monkey, the guard wouldn't attack you. Since he was impassable, you could wait until he was in front of the cell, then stand in front of him, and he'd be stuck and unable to move past you. People without the power to turn into a monkey could not leave the cell (there is a gorilla in the way) and would thus be unable to proceed with the quest. Eventually the gorilla would teleport back to the jail entrance, so I would go and block him some more (so people couldn't exit if they'd gotten out of the jail).

Here is a picture I stole off the internet:



When the two gorillas (forgot there were two) are in the room where that one gorilla is, you're supposed to escape. The gorilla never paths into the room on the left, so that's a 'safe spot'. It was possible to stand outside the door disguised as a monkey, then remove the monkey disguise, get punched, and land people in jail who were standing in the 'safe spot'. The result of this is that, if done correctly, the only way that anybody was getting out of that prison was a monkey suit, logging out (nobody ever did this), or teleporting. If they teleported, they'd have to walk all the way back.


Tell me if I forgot anything or if I haven't explained a thing adequately (or if I need to pare it down).

where the red fern gropes fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Jun 4, 2012

HoldYourFire
Oct 16, 2006

What's the time? It's DEFCON 1!
I think that's fine, the explanations of relatively complicated things are nice and succint. I would say it needs a bit more of a "payoff" or punchline at the end though.

Chopstix
Nov 20, 2002

For the old school MMORPGers, theres a lot of talk about everquest but a lack for Asheron's Call. One particular story comes to mind, which would be the evil white rabbit. There was a white rabbit in AC located in a cave outside in the middle of nowhere, parties were formed to take it on but all early attempts failed, it didnt have any quest important, it was just there as a gag. I dont know the situation now but for the longest time it was the most utterly powerful and dangerous thing in existence (a reference to quest for holy grail obviously), could one or two shot any level character with incredible melee attack and instatgib essentially with a look at you attack.. It even had a possibilty of aggroing when you just checked out it stats. Someone had the bright idea to click on the bunny, teleport away, and ID'ing it from a nearby, heavily but high level town, and somehow it traveled to the city an massacred everything. Please correct me if i have some details wrong.

Ribbo
Jun 28, 2009

by T. Smith

Chopstix posted:

For the old school MMORPGers, theres a lot of talk about everquest but a lack for Asheron's Call. One particular story comes to mind, which would be the evil white rabbit. There was a white rabbit in AC located in a cave outside in the middle of nowhere, parties were formed to take it on but all early attempts failed, it didnt have any quest important, it was just there as a gag. I dont know the situation now but for the longest time it was the most utterly powerful and dangerous thing in existence (a reference to quest for holy grail obviously), could one or two shot any level character with incredible melee attack and instatgib essentially with a look at you attack.. It even had a possibilty of aggroing when you just checked out it stats. Someone had the bright idea to click on the bunny, teleport away, and ID'ing it from a nearby, heavily but high level town, and somehow it traveled to the city an massacred everything. Please correct me if i have some details wrong.

The white rabbit aggroed on being targetted, so yes IDing it definitely got you killed :) It was eventually killed and dropped bunny slippers.

The cool thing about Asherons Call was that one of the classes could apply buffs and debuffs, but you could buff the monsters as well as the players. The other cool thing was that the monsters in the game actually levelled up. If they killed a player, they gained experience.

So what I did with 3 friends was to buff a rabbit, debuff myself and let it kill me over and over (this took a while as it only hit for 1-2 damage per bite).

Eventually we got the level 1 rabbit up to level 9 before some level 72 came along and 1 shot it. Yes we got griefed after trying to grief the starter area by having a fluffy rabbit maul them :(

Brain Aged
Feb 10, 2005

Bridle all this indiscretion, Long enough to edify. And permanently fill this hollow

Yaos posted:

Everquest also let you macro text. I got in around release (quit around level 12 or so). Everquest had a language skill, where you could not understand certain languages unless you had a good enough skill in that language. Somebody thought it would be a good idea that you had to train the skill by speaking it in the chat box.

I decided it would be a good idea to train this up during the many lengthy periods of down time while murdering random monsters. I created a macro button that I could spam that would say the alphabet to the entire zone. Some of my group members stopped talking in chat. For some reason I decided to check /who, and noticed a lot of people had (linkdead) next to their name.

Was it me that did this, or a server issue? Once everybody had reconnected I decided to spam it again, and checking /who showed (linkdead) next to a lot of names. After that I decided to stop because I thought I would continue playing EQ and did not want to get banned. Oddly, I never saw anybody else trying this method to up their language skills.

The real grief was Everquest. Forced grouping, to regen mana you had to stare at a magic book that took up the entire screen, nothing to do but kill monsters or beg NPCs for gold.

I believe this was a common method to leveling up the language skill. Me and a bunch of other people I played with would use it all the time.

thedisorient
Jul 2, 2007
Are you a magician?

Chopstix posted:

For the old school MMORPGers, theres a lot of talk about everquest but a lack for Asheron's Call. One particular story comes to mind, which would be the evil white rabbit. There was a white rabbit in AC located in a cave outside in the middle of nowhere, parties were formed to take it on but all early attempts failed, it didnt have any quest important, it was just there as a gag. I dont know the situation now but for the longest time it was the most utterly powerful and dangerous thing in existence (a reference to quest for holy grail obviously), could one or two shot any level character with incredible melee attack and instatgib essentially with a look at you attack.. It even had a possibilty of aggroing when you just checked out it stats. Someone had the bright idea to click on the bunny, teleport away, and ID'ing it from a nearby, heavily but high level town, and somehow it traveled to the city an massacred everything. Please correct me if i have some details wrong.

It was mentioned earlier in the thread. You have it pretty accurately other than the guy lured the rabbit to town by having him and his buddies draw aggro and try to outrun the rabbit. Since they'd die pretty quick the rabbit was actually getting drawn closer to the town until he eventually got there and started slaughtering everybody.

I think there was something wrong with its pathing too so it ended up getting stuck in town.

where the red fern gropes
Aug 24, 2011


HoldYourFire posted:

I think that's fine, the explanations of relatively complicated things are nice and succint. I would say it needs a bit more of a "payoff" or punchline at the end though.

Yeah, though it gets a bit tedious writing out the entire post and then going "gently caress, what have I missed". It was a very long time ago though. I'll see what I can do.

Ribbo
Jun 28, 2009

by T. Smith

Nucleotide Oracle posted:

I think there was something wrong with its pathing too so it ended up getting stuck in town.

In Asherons Call mobs did not always reset. If you ran away eventually they got bored with you, but they would immediately look for a new target from their new location. Lugians were famous for doing this and often you would see someone type "LUGGY TRAIN INC" only to see one person being chased by about 20 of these mobs.

The great part was players would zone in to dungeons via portals, and usually the exit portal back out of the dungeon was super close to the entrance. So if you made it to the exit while being chased by the Lugians, they would turn around and smash all the players who had just entered the dungeon and hadn't had time to buff yet (buffing took a stupidy long time typically).

The Lugians would then typically bug out and not reset which lead to them gang raping any new player who came in.

Eventually players learned to buff up before going in the dungeon entrance...

Coolguye
Jul 6, 2011

Required by his programming!
Macroing was king back on SWG. The macro system allowed you to perform almost any action out there aside from basic movement and UI clicks. And it had almost no protections. Any veteran player had a ton of macros in their toolbar, to do everything from sampling resources (done properly, a macroed player could out-produce the smallest machine extractor, leading to the macros usually being called JohnHenry or something similar) to automatically killing, looting, and skinning the nearest enemy.

Well, early on in my server it became really common to see fighter characters AFK grinding on anything they could beat. This became a problem, because if you happened to grind on humanoid enemies that dropped credits on death, you could become pretty wealthy by glancing at the game once every two days or so (when spawns moved).

Crafters didn't like this very much. As it got more and more commonplace, inflation started setting in very quickly on the server, to the point where most of our wares were no longer covering the cost of materials. Sure, we were able to sell a suit of armor for 100k credits, but when resource miners checked in on merchant tents or whatever outside of Coronet City and saw these prices, their prices shot up to match. The problem being, miners were almost never full-time artisans, so they didn't really know how painful high-level crafting is. I'll detail what all we went through to bring a single decent weapon, suit of armor, or foodstuff to market in another post if someone wants, but for the moment it was a gigantic loving pain.

Now, there were two interesting things about items at that time. Firstly, you didn't actually need any ranks in anything to equip any weapon you wanted. Instead, if you equipped something you didn't have the ranks for, you were 'unqualified' and took huge penalties to accuracy and damage.

Artisans tried to just call out grinders and shame them into stopping, but when that didn't work we decided to just exploit their macros by training poo poo onto them. We just took whatever lovely rifle we could and pissed off a bunch of enemies that would socially aggro, or get pissed because you shot their buddy for those of you who don't play MMOs. We'd then run at anyone who was AFK grinding and let the mobs run over them, at which point the next time they killed their target they'd probably target the much more dangerous social mobs and get knocked over. Social mobs had a tendency to kill their targets instead of simply incapacitate, too, so that was a massive pain in the dick as well.

The forums erupted with rage on this griefing, but crafters just laughed their asses off and SoE barely cared about people being able to connect to the servers, let alone griefers, so nothing happened and basically from then on you could macro, but you had to be at your computer or some wise guy crafter would run over you. The funnest part of this was that it crossed sides in the GCW. Rebel and Imperial crafters would happily trainkill a grinder for eachother, even if they were of the same faction. Guilds were basically the only sacred affiliation, because usually you could just get the head of crafting in the guild to yell at the grinder until he knocked it off.



Entertainers were probably the most wide abusers of macros in SWG, though. The macros to keep them eternally dancing or playing their instruments were stone simple to write, and their choice of venue was the cantina, a special building where healing of permanently-handicapping Wounds could take place. Cantinas were always in cities and 100% safe, so popular cantinas were always overflowing with dancers and musicians who had looping macros begging you to pay attention to them (the only way they got XP) or even tip them (as though they deserved money for writing a 5 minute macro and walking away).

There wasn't much you could do about these guys until someone figured out how to automatically toss group invites and the practice became popular. Groups of entertainers in cantinas formed 'troupes' and got XP whenever any one of them got XP, so it made it easier to level up. There was, however, a delightful little bug with the "/change" command in troupes. "/change" allowed you to signal the troupe to change either song or dance to go along with you, as long as you knew the song or dance. So you'd do something like "/change starwars1" and every musician in the troupe would start playing starwars1. If you didn't know the song, the game would tell you so and nothing would happen.

Well, just because the game tells the initiator doesn't mean it tells everyone else. The bug with /change was that if someone in the troupe didn't know the song that was called, they'd start playing it anyway, but it would bug out the entire troupe so nobody could gain XP. To fix the bug, everyone had to stop playing/dancing and restart again - definitely not acceptable during macro time!

So one of my friends and I would, when bored, roll down to Coronet City's cantina and troll around for troupes that weren't full. When I found one, I'd alert my friend (a master musician), and then quickly drop group for her so she could bug out the group with a top-level song and drop. I'd then send private emails to everyone in the troupe and tell them we'd bugged their ability to gain XP forever, and if they wanted me to fix it they'd have to (insert whatever boon here). I handled this part because my friend was, to put it bluntly, kind of a wuss.

Most people ignored me, either not believing me or understanding we'd used a well known bug on them. Occasionally we'd get someone who would desperately email back after they macroed for 12 hours straight and didn't get a single XP. Oh, the fun we had with those guys. We'd usually give them a faux-contract to sign that they'd never macro again (important to my friend, who really liked her profession and felt macroers cheapened it), and then figure out what hijinks to get them in. Sometimes we'd have them go act like total fools in front of the Imperials so we could sneak up on them, sometimes we'd tell them we needed some rancor bone or something equally retarded, other times we just extorted them for money. Unlike fight-grinding, though, we nobody ever made a real dent in the Entertainer cesspool simply because their profession was so loving safe and risk-free.

Moonshine Rhyme
Mar 26, 2010

Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate
Nice. SWG grieving is always entertaining.

Ah Runescape. Tried playing a couple of times, game was poo poo so I never got very far. One time however, a nice high level player decided to give me and my noobie self a nice breastplate, helmet and sword. This gear was absolute magic to me, as at low levels (at least when I played) it was not easy to get decent gear, much less player crafted steel. I actually enjoyed playing for a bit, getting to beat the crap out of monsters and what not. Found a tower, quested into that piece until I got to the highest room. I saw a monster inside of a room that was separated by a door. I went inside to fight it, and I believe then there wasn't much of a way to determine how strong things are. I was fighting and losing, burning through my healing items, and decided to attempt to escape. However, another player had entered the area, and whenever I tried to open the door to leave, he kept blocking it and I was eventually killed by the monster. It cost me everything but the breastplate, but that was more then enough of a reason for me to stop playing that poo poo. So in essence, I got grieved out of that game. Good riddance.

TacticalUrbanHomo
Aug 17, 2011

by Lowtax
Planting demo charges on parked friendly vehicles in SW Battlefront II and blowing them up whenever someone started to run towards one. As long as no one was paying attention when you placed the charge, and you didn't kill anyone, it was impossible for anyone to know who was doing it.

Oppenheimer
Dec 26, 2011

by Smythe
If someone did see you you just get in and land it in the enemy base for some easy kills for your team. Alternately you could fly around and come back in. Online memory spans are goldfish size.

A Pinball Wizard
Mar 23, 2005

I know every trick, no freak's gonna beat my hands

College Slice
Wait, so there was a class in SWG that gained XP via dancing for hours on end, and you weren't supposed to just macro it and do something more interesting AFK? Are you seriously mad people didn't sit at their computers watching their characters dance for hours or am I missing something?

HoldYourFire
Oct 16, 2006

What's the time? It's DEFCON 1!

A Pinball Wizard posted:

Wait, so there was a class in SWG that gained XP via dancing for hours on end, and you weren't supposed to just macro it and do something more interesting AFK? Are you seriously mad people didn't sit at their computers watching their characters dance for hours or am I missing something?

The inherent vice of macroing is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of grinding is the equal sharing of misery.

Coolguye
Jul 6, 2011

Required by his programming!

A Pinball Wizard posted:

Wait, so there was a class in SWG that gained XP via dancing for hours on end, and you weren't supposed to just macro it and do something more interesting AFK? Are you seriously mad people didn't sit at their computers watching their characters dance for hours or am I missing something?

Me personally? Not really on my radar. The /say spam of random people begging to be looked at/listened to or begging for tips was pretty obnoxious, but since I was mostly a crafter I rarely had any wounds to heal so I visited a cantina approximately once every blue moon.

The woman I rolled with had...stronger opinions. She'd been playing pretty much from day 1 and said that being an Entertainer used to be a very engaging sort of thing. You played in a cantina with your dancer friend and spent the time chatting with people, gathering all sorts of information from various guilds and poo poo - in her mind, entertainers should be given XP to socialize and, you know, entertain. When the macroers turned every popular cantina into a spam den of clipping polygons and a blanket of on-screen text boxes, people stopped talking to her and basically reduced these players to glorified mechanical actors - people came in, hit /watch or /listen for a few minutes, and walked away.

You can evaluate how crazy or un-crazy she is at your leisure, honestly I haven't spoken to her since I quit SWG which was like 10 years ago so I struggle to remember details. But it's also worth noting that this point in the game, there was no such thing as an alt. So this dancing doll was literally all you were paying 15 bucks a month for.

But as far as my involvement goes, sometimes that sort of stuff was all that was going on. The social aspect of SWG was really good, but it had to be because there was basically nothing else in the game. When I was crafting, for example, I had a few unmacroable steps, so I had to make 3 mouse clicks every 45 seconds but beyond that I had nothing to do, so when someone asked me to trainkill a grinder or grief the entertainers, it sounded like a lot of fun compared to staring at the ceiling.

Leif.
Mar 27, 2005

Son of the Defender
Formerly Diplomaticus/SWATJester

A Pinball Wizard posted:

Wait, so there was a class in SWG that gained XP via dancing for hours on end, and you weren't supposed to just macro it and do something more interesting AFK? Are you seriously mad people didn't sit at their computers watching their characters dance for hours or am I missing something?

The grief is that those dancers provided a vital resource in that they were an easy way to heal certain kinds of wounds. It's been a long time but I think I remember they provided buffs either if you watched them for a certain time (you had to actively type in that you were watching a specific dancer, rather than just being nearby).

So loving things up for them, ends up making things harder for combat classes in an indirect sort of way.

President Ark
May 16, 2010

:iiam:

Dreggon posted:

WoW griefs... this one wasn't intentional, but it annoyed people so I kept doing it.

There was a world event called Brewfest, and I was playing when it first came out. There were these dwarves (of course) who were drinking beer, and if you /waved at one of them, she'd throw you a beer - there was an animation of her throwing the mug, and it hit you on the head, fell off in a random direction, made a noise, and added a Unique-tagged mug of ale into your inventory. (Unique meant you could only have one, so this wasn't filling up my inventory or anything)

I decided this was really cool. I set up a macro so that, when I pushed a button, it would /wave for me. This would keep me from having to type. Then I pushed the button repeatedly and had lots of mugs come and smash me in the face over and over again. Such fun!

The chatbox:
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.
Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf.

Over and over again. Every time this happened, she'd throw a mug, it would bounce off, make a sound. I set up the macro to /wave as many times as possible, so at a 255 character limit, with /wave + next line taking up 6 characters, I was /waving 22 times every time I pushed the button.

There was no spam prevention filter back then.

I push the button once. 22 lines of "Dreggon waves at the beer dwarf." pop up. The chat box can only accomodate about 8 lines of text before you have to scroll. Since I was pushing the button repeatedly, and had in fact bound the button to all my keys from 1 to = (total: 12 keys), I was /waving 264 times every time I pushed the buttons, and I could spam them about 7 times a second, which is 1848 lines of text every single second.

Every single one of those lines of text, representing a /wave, resulted in a beer mug being thrown at my head. My computer had trouble rendering all those beer mugs, and the rage, and the tears, were incessant. I was eventually disconnected by a game master. Nobody could chat because the chat box was repeatedly being filled up by my /waving, and nobody could move because the beer mugs were taking up all the CPU.

It should be noted that you were not the only person to do this during the first beerfest. During the first beerfest this grief became so widespread that blizzard wound up flat-out disabling the entire "wave for beer" mechanic, including an hourly "Evil dwarves invade and you stop them by throwing beer mugs at them" minigame during the holiday.

...Which gave prize tickets which a lot of people were relying on to buy a whole bunch of special cosmetic gear. All the prize ticket sources were gated in that you could only do them every so often, so losing one of the big sources of it meant a lot of people weren't able to get everything all at once.

The crying on the forums was incredible.

And if you're wondering, they fixed it in subsequent years.

Coolguye
Jul 6, 2011

Required by his programming!

Diplomaticus posted:

The grief is that those dancers provided a vital resource in that they were an easy way to heal certain kinds of wounds.
Only way. For those keeping score at home, there were 3 bars in SWG: Health, Action, Mind, abbreviated as the HAM bars. As you took combat damage to various parts of these bars, they accrued Wounds, aka 'black crud', that handicapped your maximum values for these bars. Beyond that, there was also a tertiary thing called Combat Fatigue, which would handicap your natural regeneration. All of these were represented by a number, so you could have 1 or 1000 combat fatigue, 1 or 100 Health wounds, etc. If you never took damage because you don't fight, like crafters, you'd never take Wounds.

Health and Action wounds were healed by advanced medics known as (unsurprisingly), Doctors, at hospital buildings or specially equipped field camps. They used special medicine to do this. They had to get the ingredients for this medicine (usually things like animal meat/bone or various plant life) and craft it themselves. Further, they had to specifically apply their medicines to each patient, so there was a lot of work that went into a doctor and pretty much everyone respected them.

Entertainers healed Mind wounds and Combat Fatigue. Mind wounds could be healed in field camps, but Combat Fatigue could only be healed at a cantina. Entertainers didn't need anything to do their jobs, really. Inexperienced dancers would occasionally fall over, but it didn't do anything to their performance. Inexperienced musicians simply wouldn't have a bunch of instruments, but they didn't do anything beyond make a different noise so it didn't matter. Also, to get XP from healing someone, you only needed to stand there and do your thing until someone came by and typed /watch (for dancers) or /listen (for musicians). You would then gain XP with no further effort. This made them a lot more attractive to :effort: types and they were generally a lot less respected than doctors.

The buffs you're referring to are from high-level flourishes that a troupe can accomplish, and people needed to party up with the troupe to get them. Entertainer buffs only lasted about 20 minutes anyway so most fighters didn't bother getting them.

Bugging out a troupe didn't stop people from being healed by their performance, it just stopped the troupe from earning XP. Besides, even if it did stop the healing there were so many loving entertainers in these cantinas. I'm talking dozens, easily, every day and night.

Coolguye fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jun 4, 2012

Oppenheimer
Dec 26, 2011

by Smythe
Could you at least play that famous cantina song from the movies?

Rixen
Feb 18, 2005

Have you had your Reich today?

Oppenheimer posted:

Could you at least play that famous cantina song from the movies?

Yes you could, actually I think that was one out of about three songs in the game.

Antifa Spacemarine
Jan 11, 2011

Tzeentch can suck it.
Entertainers weren't meant to just be entertainers. Keep in mind SWG allowed you to pick your class from a tree. Entertainer was pretty much a self-contained class and you would still have many skillpoints left over after maxxing it out. It also came with weird bonuses to I think melee defence, which was one of the strongest PVP damage types weirdly enough. Entertainers were meant to be a sideclass that helped buff teammates before battles in camps and then did something else during the fight, not a full scale AFK buffbot.

Control Volume
Dec 31, 2008

Ribbo posted:

The white rabbit aggroed on being targetted, so yes IDing it definitely got you killed :) It was eventually killed and dropped bunny slippers.

This reminds me of a small grief I did on a Ragnarok Online private server. This private server had monsters level up every time they killed a player for whatever reason, and occasionally you'd see people sacrificing themselves to a poring (one of the weakest enemies in the game) to get it to max level and have it one-shot any newbie who tried attacking it. It was a bit of a novelty but nothing really that interesting.

However, there was another area that was very popular for lower level players to level up called the culverts, which housed the Thief Bug. The Thief bug was rather weak, but it aggroed anyone who got close to it and it moved extremely quickly. Me and a couple guildmates had the idea to make a couple of newbie characters and suicide over and over to a single thief bug until it was level 99. The entire level was shut down for about an hour since it murdered anyone appropriately leveled for the dungeon, and players couldn't avoid it because it was so ridiculously fast. The bug finally died when another guild brought a high level player to kill the thing. Unfortunately for most of the playerbase, though, we seemed to open up a Pandora's Box of sorts, since nearly every popular leveling zone with aggressive mobs started having super mobs at random points in time, and the server eventually disabled the feature.

e:
A sort of related story: Some other RO stories have mentioned dead branches which can summon monsters in town. Well, this private server included plants (stationary mobs that drop herbs when killed) in the dead branch database. The plants, however, bugged out slightly when summoned; they were no longer stationary, and had the ability to attack. They had the slowest movement in the game and only had an attack that did 1 damage. But, due to being buggy, they also had the fastest attack rate possible within the game engine and could stunlock players with a ridiculous volume of attacks. The plants also had ridiculously high defense, so once they had gained a couple of levels, they were also impossible to kill without a dedicated effort. What resulted was an entire town being on alert and constantly shifting popular hangout areas around because of a slowly moving death plant.

Control Volume fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Jun 5, 2012

Dr_Amazing
Apr 15, 2006

It's a long story

Control Volume posted:


A sort of related story: Some other RO stories have mentioned dead branches which can summon monsters in town. Well, this private server included plants (stationary mobs that drop herbs when killed) in the dead branch database. The plants, however, bugged out slightly when summoned; they were no longer stationary, and had the ability to attack. They had the slowest movement in the game and only had an attack that did 1 damage. But, due to being buggy, they also had the fastest attack rate possible within the game engine and could stunlock players with a ridiculous volume of attacks. The plants also had ridiculously high defense, so once they had gained a couple of levels, they were also impossible to kill without a dedicated effort. What resulted was an entire town being on alert and constantly shifting popular hangout areas around because of a slowly moving death plant.

This would actually be really cool. It'd definitely keep things interesting and cut down on people macroing and idling by the bank. More games should have the occasional trifid attack.

Enos Shenk
Nov 3, 2011


One of my favorite ways to glitch out WoW back in the day was taking advantage of some rather interesting quest monsters Blizzard had laying around. In one zone you were sent on some quests that involved fighting cultists. The gimmick with one stage of these quests was some of the cultists were immortal until you did what the quest expected of you.

From what I remember, the quest was intended to work something like this: Go fight the cultist, when he reaches 1 health he does a fancy shielding move. At that point you're supposed to run over and activate some kind of item on the ground to break his shield, then you can finish him off. The potential for hilarity was that the "shield" went away on its own after about 30 seconds, at which point the cult guy would behave like a regular mob.

So every now and then when bored I'd head out to that zone, beat up one of the cultists, wait for his shield to fade then start kiting him somewhere fun. Since the quest doodad had never been touched the monster would stay at 1 HP forever. As long as you did damage to the mob every 10 seconds or so it would keep chasing you.

The easiest place to take one was to Stormwind, the Alliance capital city. Once you got him inside the gates the mob would start to pick up a hilarious number of city guard NPCs, usually quite a few players as well. As long as you kept the things attention you could lead it up into the Stormwind Keep, and tangle the monster up with this guy named Bolvar. See, back in vanilla Bolvar had basically unlimited health and crazy high damage, since at the end of a long important questline Bolvar would solo-fight a bunch of dragons.

So what happens when a monster that cannot be killed gets in a fight with an NPC that cannot be killed? A very rewarding amount of chaos. The combatants would stand there and punch each other in a neverending battle. The only way for the fight to end would be a server crash, or more likely someone petitioning a GM who would de-spawn the mob. The city-wide general chat would typically go nuts with people yelling about the bugged monster, some people thought it was amusing but most just raged. Also, that big long involved quest that ended at Bolvar? Yeah, since he was busy fighting an immortal cultist that quest would glitch out horribly if someone tried to turn it in while this was going on.

But one day we decided Stormwind was too easy. It only took around 30 minutes of walking backwards slapping the mob to drag him to Stormwind. So we set our sights on the other major Alliance city, Ironforge.

See, the path from where the monsters spawned to Stormwind was something like this:



Fairly simple. But to get to Ironforge you had to travel quite a longer distance. So a friend and I gathered ourselves an immortal rage-generating cultist from the zone and headed off. We followed the usual road route up to Ironforge, which required you to go through a place called Blackrock Mountain. However, as soon as we got there the mob glitched out and refused to enter the mountain.



We were dissapointed in this result, but determined to accomplish our mission. So we went back to pick up another cultist, and set out on a much longer, much trickier route.

We dragged the mob over to the ocean and jumped in, making our way around the entire continent in the water. The trick in WoW was if you went too far into the ocean away from land you got into a "fatigue" zone which would eventually kill you. So we had to balance swimming backwards, trying to stay close enough to land to avoid death, all while smacking the mob every 10 seconds or so to prevent him from resetting.



This finally worked, and we got our new friend into Ironforge. Since there isn't any convenient immortal NPC there we decided to take him over to where the dwarf king hangs out. But things went magically wrong along the way.

As usual the NPC city guards and other combat NPCs glommed onto the monster. Usually they just sit there and beat ineffectually at him, but eventually one of the guards caused enough damage to start tanking the cultist. The hordes of guards and shopkeepers and blacksmiths and players locked into some kind of death-wobble where the combat would move slowly through the city, drawing more and more fighters.

As I recall the GMs must have really been on the ball because this cartoon-sized ball of fight only lasted about half an hour before the cultist was despawned.

Alas, I believe it was when the Wrath expansion came out Blizzard added tighter controls to mobs. Most of them nowdays have a "leash" range where if they get too far away from their spawn they reset.

Kerbtree
Sep 8, 2008

BAD FALCON!
LAZY!

Enos Shenk posted:

Alas, I believe it was when the Wrath expansion came out Blizzard added tighter controls to mobs. Most of them nowdays have a "leash" range where if they get too far away from their spawn they reset.

Even at 70, kiting wasn't what it was - you started to see quite a few slow-immune elites, and while there were things like taking that big loving fel-green corehound in Shadowmoon Valley for walkies all the way to Shattrath so it'd pick a fight with the NPCs there, there were quite a few slow-immune fast-moving elites between lv60 and 70.
Especially since you can't downrank spells any more (as )the days of Faxmonkey are long gone, he tries, but it's not the same any more.

Kerbtree fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jun 5, 2012

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ohnorobot
Nov 24, 2006

10> OH
20> NO
30> GOTO 10
Even meaner than the immortal cultist kite, Vanilla WoW had another mob who would spawn in the same area. Doomlord Kazzak was a world raid boss who would heal back to full health every time a player he engaged dies. This was to keep people from dying and just running back to the fight from a nearby graveyard, however when he's sucessfully kited to a major city full of squishy low level characters, he is nigh immortal. And if players didn't kill him in time, he would start spamming high level shadowbolts hitting everything in sight.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-982380251124231965
Unlike most mobs, his arrival was less of an annoyance and more of an emergency.

Another grief in burning crusade involved a redesigned Kazzak. In BC he would cast a debuff that would cause the player to do a raid wiping explosion if they run out of mana. A particularly malicious paladin could get the debuff and bubble shield themselves long enough to hearth to a major city. Then after finding a large group of chumps near a mailbox or auctioneer, cast lay on hands to use their entire mana pool at once, effectively suicide bombing your capital city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4lUdGThBo8

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