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I remember a story from a friend who played Everquest way back in the day that is more about exploiting a bug than griefing, although there was plenty of grief too. After a patch, someone realized that the interface for firing bows had gotten hosed up. Weapons were normally supposed to have an attack delay, so for bows, you'd make a hotkey to fire, the hotkey would grey out while it was on cooldown, and light up when you're ready to fire again. Whoever it was that initially figured it out discovered that the hotkey would grey out, but you could fire again even while it was greyed out, and if you held the button down would continue firing as fast as your keyboard could send inputs. This turned bows from kinda crappy weapons mainly used for pulling into deathrays. Of course, bows still required ammo, but another class could summon stacks of crappy arrows for free. As word spread, Ranger/Mage teams annihilated every NPC they could in a hail of lovely free arrows. Every banker, guild leader, merchant, boss, quest giver, and city guard. That was on the PvE servers. On the PvP servers there was utter chaos, with mayhem and carnage on a level never before seen. It only lasted a few hours before they took the servers down to fix the bug and rollback the servers, but the resulting grudges on PvP servers went on for years.
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Aug 9, 2013 07:58
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Can anyone link me the Dark Souls griefing video where the guy just chases them around wiggling his arms in a weird way? I've been going nuts trying to find it!!!
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Aug 9, 2013 08:36
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Holiday mms posted:Can anyone link me the Dark Souls griefing video where the guy just chases them around wiggling his arms in a weird way? Two pages back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqacyIaq27o
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Aug 9, 2013 08:49
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Protocol 5 posted:As word spread, Ranger/Mage teams annihilated every NPC they could in a hail of lovely free arrows. Every banker, guild leader, merchant, boss, quest giver, and city guard. That was on the PvE servers. On the PvP servers there was utter chaos, with mayhem and carnage on a level never before seen. It only lasted a few hours before they took the servers down to fix the bug and rollback the servers, but the resulting grudges on PvP servers went on for years. Reminds me of camping Lake Wintergrasp on PVE servers in WoW. All the pubbie retards would do their fishing daily quest out there while I swooped in and stomped them regularly. I got my named reported many times as well as boat loads of hate mail. Too bad the game is worthless now. Not enough metagame anymore. I wish WoW was more of a sandbox and not a theme park.
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Aug 9, 2013 23:16
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Fuzzyjello posted:I wish WoW was more of a sandbox and not a theme park. Sadly it wouldn't be nearly as popular if it was. Remember Blizzard has only lessened the more sandbox options over time. Sandboxes only appeal to a niche of MMO players. Even EVE online hardly cracked 100k active players during peak periods when I played.
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Aug 10, 2013 00:13
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Protocol 5 posted:I remember a story from a friend who played Everquest way back in the day that is more about exploiting a bug than griefing, although there was plenty of grief too. Ooh, I remember that! I discovered it by accident and ravaged a few low level 'neutral faction' players with a lovely bow that I picked up on track on one of the PvP servers (Sullon Zek? Something like that) before it was fixed. I still remember them patching it and referring to it as "Innoruuk's own machine gun".
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Aug 10, 2013 01:15
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Mokinokaro posted:Sandboxes only appeal to a niche of MMO players. Even EVE online hardly cracked 100k active players during peak periods when I played. I think it is possible to create a mass-appeal sandbox MMO. A lot of the biggest-selling games of all time are sandboxes, so it's not like there aren't people who would play it. I'd love to see a relatively unsharded sandbox game with several million pubbies to mess with 
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Aug 10, 2013 01:50
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Lutha Mahtin posted:I think it is possible to create a mass-appeal sandbox MMO. A lot of the biggest-selling games of all time are sandboxes, so it's not like there aren't people who would play it. I'd love to see a relatively unsharded sandbox game with several million pubbies to mess with
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Aug 10, 2013 02:42
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I'm not the type of person to believe that "griefing is an art and should be respected as such" bullshit, but I do find quite a lot of joy in it. Hell, Trouble in Terrorist Town gets very boring after a few rounds so I freshen up gameplay with some "accidents" that may cause death or injury to other players. Whole TTT servers can be hard to grief, but if you can find one person who is prone to fits of hilarious rage, you can channel everything at that one person for as much as a few hours of fun.
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Aug 10, 2013 03:05
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Griefing is an art in the same way that leaning on a bucket of paint and having it spill all over the Mona Lisa is art. vvvv: Had to google it, I didn't know that LHOOQ was by him. That and the french pronunciation thing are pretty funny. Oppenheimer fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Aug 10, 2013 |
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Aug 10, 2013 03:17
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You're absolutely correct, although you probably aren't referencing Duchamp.
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Aug 10, 2013 03:26
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If Everquest is brought up then the legacy of Fansy the Famous Bard also needs to be linked. For those unaware he played on a PvP server and stayed just one level under the required level to be considered free game for PvP, thus nobody could target him and retaliate for his constant Sand Giant trains, among other things 
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Aug 10, 2013 05:38
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Mokinokaro posted:Sadly it wouldn't be nearly as popular if it was. Remember Blizzard has only lessened the more sandbox options over time. Yeah, this never happened. They've only had maybe 70k concurrent users before at the same time, with a few hundred thousand active accounts. http://eve-offline.net/ you can see the login numbers as well as graphs here for peaks. Sandboxes just don't appeal to most people  E: This is for their main server only: http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
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Aug 10, 2013 15:11
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Some images for that discussion taken from http://mmodata.blogspot.com/.  
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Aug 10, 2013 18:57
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What are all those hard drops in EVE about? Like the one in early 2008?
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Aug 10, 2013 19:02
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There are that many people playing Second Life. What the gently caress man.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:02
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Oppenheimer posted:What are all those hard drops in EVE about? Like the one in early 2008? I would guess it's just random variance or unpopular patches.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:03
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Oppenheimer posted:What are all those hard drops in EVE about? Like the one in early 2008? 
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Aug 10, 2013 19:03
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Oppenheimer posted:What are all those hard drops in EVE about? Like the one in early 2008? When Incarna dropped (and CCP made stupid decisions regarding game development, direction, and the inclusion of Pay2Win), there were many in-game protests that resulted in a lot of unsubs.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:10
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PerrineClostermann posted:When Incarna dropped (and CCP made stupid decisions regarding game development, direction, and the inclusion of Pay2Win), there were many in-game protests that resulted in a lot of unsubs. Eve has always been Pay2Win. I thought the Incarna thing was the $80 "microtransactions" for cosmetic items that you could only wear in your 10x10 captain's quarters that would cause your GPU to melt if you left it on too long. Basically CCP took their spaceship game and wasted a lot of development effort on turning it into a "walking around space stations and ERP" game. The end result was very pretty avatars trapped, by themselves, in a single room that they couldn't leave and most people's computers couldn't handle.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:20
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Avulsion posted:Eve has always been Pay2Win. I thought the Incarna thing was the $80 "microtransactions" for cosmetic items that you could only wear in your 10x10 captain's quarters that would cause your GPU to melt if you left it on too long. Basically CCP took their spaceship game and wasted a lot of development effort on turning it into a "walking around space stations and ERP" game. The end result was very pretty avatars trapped, by themselves, in a single room that they couldn't leave and most people's computers couldn't handle. PLEXing isn't really considered Pay2Win, since being "rich" enough to buy a bling ship usually just results in you losing that bling ship. In addition to what you just listed, CCP was also planning on releasing cash-shop-only ships and ammo, allowing you to completely bypass the market system, among other things.
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Aug 10, 2013 19:28
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The new Everquest game is looking to be sandbox city, what with all the dynamic event stuff and the destructible terrain you're supposed to smash your way through to reach dungeons and things. We'll see if it's actually popular, but I'm just wondering how they're going to counter the obvious griefing potential
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Aug 10, 2013 19:55
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baka kaba posted:The new Everquest game is looking to be sandbox city, what with all the dynamic event stuff and the destructible terrain you're supposed to smash your way through to reach dungeons and things. We'll see if it's actually popular, but I'm just wondering how they're going to counter the obvious griefing potential The world regenerates after 5 minutes
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Aug 10, 2013 20:05
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Chomp8645 posted:There are that many people playing Second Life. What the gently caress man. Furries, ERPists, general no-lifers that make the gooniest of goons look like social butterflies...it's sad. This is what people do in this loving game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yx4y3t2IT0 Charliezzz's videos are just awesome. People take their internet dough-people so seriously
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Aug 10, 2013 21:32
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WetSpink posted:The world regenerates after 5 minutes Seriously? That's the opposite of epic. Still, all the things they've said you can do seem like they'll lend themselves well to griefing. Knocking bridges out of the sky? Blasting pits and tunnels? Mobs that change their behaviour according to circumstances, and who will grow more powerful if they can keep killing players and raiding villages? Dynamic content and responsive AI is where things start to get magical
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Aug 10, 2013 21:52
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baka kaba posted:Still, all the things they've said you can do seem like they'll lend themselves well to griefing. Knocking bridges out of the sky? Blasting pits and tunnels? Mobs that change their behaviour according to circumstances, and who will grow more powerful if they can keep killing players and raiding villages? Dynamic content and responsive AI is where things start to get magical All hail the god of unintended consequences. We are its clergy and this thread is its bible.
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Aug 10, 2013 22:36
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Guess I'll be endlessly dying to a rat then leading it to a city so that it oneshots everything!
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Aug 10, 2013 23:17
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Infinite Monkeys posted:Guess I'll be endlessly dying to a rat then leading it to a city so that it oneshots everything! There was a "raid boss" in daoc that gained levels and abilities (and grew larger!) from players he killed. We had a couple of low levels alts and a cleric that could ressurect them camped out where he spawned and if we couldn't get there to tag him first with our main characters, we'd just feed him until he was basically unkillable and exploit-kill him later.
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Aug 10, 2013 23:35
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baka kaba posted:Seriously? That's the opposite of epic. I'd expect this to be heavily instanced. The 14-25 demographic is increasingly incapable of tolerating *any* degree of inconvenience, and SOE isn't the kind of company to make multi-million dollar bets on elves'n'magic under prison rules.
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Aug 10, 2013 23:44
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Infinite Monkeys posted:Guess I'll be endlessly dying to a rat then leading it to a city so that it oneshots everything! Therefore, players would carefully lure enemies towards a resurrection shrine, allow their character to get killed, revive automatically, enemy re-aggroes on the revived character, character gets killed again, etc... After a few hours (presumably AFK), the enemies will have reached the level cap, at which point your character can defeat them for a pittance of XP. Then you lure in a new group of foes and repeat the process. I didn't actually play the original Guild Wars and only heard about this stuff at second-hand, but one guide claims that the process would require 710-1000 hours. Because of the game mechanics involved, it was essentially impossible to make progress towards this goal accidentally, or to do it cooperatively with a friend or clan. You, as a player, had to read a guide and then decide "Yep, I'd like to spend the next few months of my life earning a zero-gameplay-advantage bragging-rights achievement for my MMO character." The only redeeming aspect to the whole story is that at least you wouldn't be paying subscription fees during your months of dickstabbing (because Guild Wars didn't have subscriptions).
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Aug 11, 2013 00:33
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Infinite Monkeys posted:Guess I'll be endlessly dying to a rat then leading it to a city so that it oneshots everything! You could do this in Asheron's Call, the first MMORPG I ever played. Leveling a level 50 mob to 51 took as much xp as a player going from 1 to 2, so low level mobs would quickly end up strong enough to kill newbies, and high level mobs could be made invincible. Kiting invincible monsters to major cities was a popular sport.
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Aug 11, 2013 01:00
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Ancorehraq sis posted:I'd expect this to be heavily instanced. The 14-25 demographic is increasingly incapable of tolerating *any* degree of inconvenience, and SOE isn't the kind of company to make multi-million dollar bets on elves'n'magic under prison rules. Why can't they be like weeeeeeee were, perfect in every way! What's the matter with kids today?
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Aug 11, 2013 16:20
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I don't mind the moonlight swims, it's the Loop the Loop that hurts.
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Aug 11, 2013 18:01
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I have been following this thread for a while, and I would like to add some content of my own to it with stories of an MMO I played known as "The Matrix Online" which I’ll refer to as “MXO” from now on. I’ll probably make several of these posts, as there was a lot of grief going on in that game. I’ll outline the basics of the game and what kept me playing, and my descent from normal player to griefer. It’s a long story, and I’ll try to tell it all for those who like to read these kinds of stories. This will likely be several posts long. I will also be writing this with the help of my friends I made while playing MXO, to fill in the important gaps I miss or misremember. The basics of MXO/brief history of the game Not everyone is familiar with the game, so I'll try to give a brief description and assume you're familiar with the Matrix. You played as an awakened human and worked for either the Machines, the Merovingian (the exiled machine programs), or Zion. You got to do all the cool poo poo like Kung fu, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, using guns and having all the cool looking matrix moves when fighting people. You could also type on an invisible keyboard essentially and use virus type attacks to attack and debuff your opponent, and throw knives at people and use sneak attacks on them to deal a great amount of damage. They also had a tree centered on making an NPC simulacrum to attack your foes, but it wasn’t really that great. It was, frankly, not a good game mechanically. The combat system was pretty craptacular. Most combat occurred in “Interlock”, which consisted of a using accuracy and defense rolls to determine if you hit or missed your opponent, or if you both hit if no one used a special move. You queued up a move for the next round of combat rather than instantly using it. You could also attack out of interlock on other people, but you were limited to moves that obviously weren’t melee-only aside from throwing a kick at someone if you’re close to them. The main draw for MXO was that there was a constantly evolving story, that was done ingame as Live Events. At the launch of the game, it was the job of several people on the Monolith staff to roleplay as characters like Morpheus, the Merovingian, Agents and the like to make a progressing story that players could interact with. The first story arc rotated around an exiled Program known as “The Assassin”, shown below.  I was a new player during this story arc, and my experience with it was limited, but I’ll try to sum it up. The Assassin basically hated the Matrix and wanted to blow it up. He was your typical supervillain. He was made up out of flies, so he was very hard to kill. He also used those flies to infect bluepills, or non-awakened humans, to turn them into balls of murderous flies that tried to kill everything. He ended up killing Morpheus for the Merovingian. OR DID HE? This whole “Did the Assassin REALLY kill Morpheus?” thing played into the Matrix story from then on out. I enjoyed participating in the story, and it is really what kept me playing the whole game. Eventually the game was sold to SOE as most of you who know about MXO know, and only a single Developer remained working on the game. He went by the name “Rarebit”, and to my understanding did Art assets and helped where he could before. I wish I knew more about what he did, but a lot of that information for me has been lost just over the fact that this was a long time ago. Rarebit did, quite frankly, an amazing job keeping the game going as just a one-man developer army. He took over doing the Live Events as well, and kept the story going (with the approval coming from the game’s hired writer, Paul Chadwick, until Paul eventually moved on). I’ll talk more on Rarebit in later posts in detail most likely. Another big part of the game was there was a player group called LESIG which is “Live Event Special Interest Group” that was actually picked by Rarebit to work with him to help RP and do story stuff with him. A lot of them did an incredible job, but there was a fair amount of drama and such that flared up about that. If you were found leaking information to people about Live Events as a LESIG member, you were kicked out. I’ll probably not touch on this too much, and try to only speak of it when it pertains to griefing. I won’t be going over the whole story of the game, as this is the griefing thread and I’m going to try to focus instead on the griefing. I’ll give a background next on the group I played with in MXO. Our Group, Sentience While the group of people I played with went by many names, we towards the latter part of the game became known as “Sentience”. We worked for the Machines and roleplayed and all that. We were composed of a lot of veteran players who had known each other forever. If there was a Live Event, we found it. Every day someone in our group would go out, with intel or not, to find where a Live Event was to tell the rest of us. We enjoyed watching and participating in the Live Events, and actually until much later weren’t even there to grief, despite being accused otherwise. People accused us of being in cahootz with the developer, Rarebit, or that we had inside people with LESIG (we actually had people in LESIG but they did not give us any info ever that was not public knowledge, nor were we aware until later that our friends were actually in LESIG.) the list of accusations goes on. If there was an exploit in the game, we found it. Floating through walls, using mission NPCs to farm NPCs we normally wouldn’t be able to farm, even getting into and using the admin abilities for over half a year undetected. Since we were made up of a lot of veterans, we would also win most PVP tournaments and such (and didn’t even exploit in the tournaments, despite the accusations. Exploits in combat were too easy to see.), so ontop of our ability to find Live Events and our ability to PVP very well, we were a thorn in the side of many players. Basically, we were the Illuminati of MXO. I’ll get more into our griefing exploits again, in later posts. Get to the loving griefing already shirtlord So as I said, the smarter folk in our group managed to learn that admin abilities could be accessed through hex editing certain files. How it works is an item calls a certain ability when you use it. We could change it to where a cosmetic mask that made you looked like an NPC instead called an ability where you could crush someone into a little ball. This was called “Meatwadding”, and was a staple power of an admin-played character that was a supervillain. It was an instant kill on no cooldown. There was also invincibility which could be used as a constant, passive ability. Originally we went undetected using these abilities because we would use them to farm NPCs and such away from players, and would just gently caress around with each other using them. But shortly before that, as the short version of the story, I got banned for making the Developer angry over the years I played. One too many exploits had made him furious with me, and he banned me from the game. The final straw was when I detailed a strategy to fight newly released NPCs and did my first ever guide to the community, to help them actually do the content because I was tired of seeing people never participate in the content. So I was the first to lose my restraint on the use of these powerful abilities. I started making free trial accounts to test out these abilities on NPCs before I set them loose on the public. Things got a little out of hand.     I was testing my abilities on killing Agents that would spawn on you if you were in an area you weren’t authorized to be in, which was a mechanic to get low level players to kill a certain NPC boss to get a keycard to access that district of the Matrix unmolested. For every Agent you killed, two more took it’s place. As you can see above, being able to instantly kill a target vs these Agents was a little spammy. Ontop of that, if an Agent died in the animation where they were taking over a Bluepill, their body was left on the ground until the server restarted (to my surprise). This ended up in me leaving entire blocks of the city just littered in the bodies of Agents. People eventually found this and started to speculate. Posts about it were occasionally appearing on the forums, wondering if maybe this was the return of Neo???  So I stepped up my plans of grief, and started sharing the knowledge of how to use the abilities with my friends, Cap0ne and Ballak.They of course instantly went and started griefing players. We would pretend to be simple people working for SOE at first, and gave out the prize of things like pants in return for killing NPCs that we spawned, or for killing a player since we had the ability to even turn on PVP flags. Posts went out on the forums again, expressing anger at these game admins that were just griefing players left and right! No official response ever came out over these threads, and they were quickly locked and hidden from player sight. We had to step it up more. We went on to pretending to be story characters, roleplaying with players as if we were powerful beings here to destroy the Matrix. We started flipping on PVP flags of everyone around us, spawned NPCs on players left and right, and caused complete chaos. How I wish I still had screenshots of this, but alas I do not. They are lost to a hard drive that died long ago. People were complaining about the now rampant people running around murdering any player that was near anywhere at will. The main area became choked with hostile, angry NPCs, and players could only stand on nearby buildings and watch the carnage unfold. And then, Rarebit quit. He gave his two weeks notice, and said he was going to move onto other things. Everyone knew that Rarebit quitting was the end, and sure enough about half a year later the game was shut down by SOE. I have many other stories to share, most are intricate with drama and probably not as flashy as killing every player in sight. So I decided this would be the best story to tell first. If there’s some interest in more stories (less on the active griefing, but still resulting in many tears), I’d be happy to write them up and share them. I have one in particular that I'll probably write up next about a rare item you could win and the hilarity and griefing surrounding that.
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Aug 11, 2013 20:21
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Zudrag posted:If there’s some interest in more stories Nah, I think we're good. Abusing admin powers to kill a lot of stuff isn't terribly interesting.
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Aug 11, 2013 20:35
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I thought the thing where they made people kill each other by pretending to be admins was pretty good
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Aug 11, 2013 20:39
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The best part about this is that you actually hacked the Matrix. If the admins had any amount of self-awareness they should have made your antics canon.
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Aug 11, 2013 20:42
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I definitely would like to hear more stories about this game.
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Aug 11, 2013 20:54
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Maximum Tomfoolery posted:The best part about this is that you actually hacked the Matrix. If the admins had any amount of self-awareness they should have made your antics canon. This is what I was thinking.
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Aug 11, 2013 20:59
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Hello Sailor posted:Nah, I think we're good. Abusing admin powers to kill a lot of stuff isn't terribly interesting. Admin abuse stories are pretty lame. This guy managed to exploit his way into admin powers and created a loving storyline out of it - I'd say it sorta transcends classic admin abuse in this case.
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Aug 11, 2013 21:09
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