Trolls, Griefers, and PVP, oh my.

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By Ravenhawk | November 15, 2006

Okay, so that doesn’t actually fit the wizard of oz tune. Sue me.

I was reading some stuff on mmorpg.com yesterday when I came upon this article. Now, I’ve been a reader of that site for quite some time. I find it a great place to find new games to play as they have some good quality standards that ensure that games that haven’t really gone anywhere don’t get on the list.

So the last thing I expected when I went to read was an article by one of their staff writers was troll-baiting of their own community. The article basically discusses how griefing, the repeated PKing, body camping, etc. of people who’re a much lower level than you, is the fault of the developers for allowing pvp. While I agree that game developers need to implement things to prevent slaying of nooblets more often. There is the ever-obvious “PVP Area” idea, but many “Hardcore PKers” Don’t like that. Namely cause many of them, like the article writer, don’t want to fight foes which are necassarily pvpers. The unwilling PvE targets are much easier to kill.
In many games, building a character who is effective in PVP requires very different stats than that of the PVE. Personally, I don’t understand why more developers don’t implement simple blocks to griefing. Like setting it so PVP can only be done within certain level-limits. If you can only kill people within 5 levels of you, the PVP is a lot more challenging.
Flyff had an interesting way of going about it with their bounty/karma system. Whenever you killed it’d effect your karma. I believe it went up if your foe was a higher level than you and down if they were lower. As your karma got lower, you’re name’s color changed. Other players had quite the incentive to slay players with low karma. Not only would it make their own karma go up for killing the “bad” person. But if you have negative karma, when you’re slain in PVP you drop items or money.
On top of this, the person who died would then go to a prison island, where they would have to do a quest to get off. Add to this the fact that anyone can set a bounty on a player’s head. Bounty hunting quickly became a popular sport. Yes, people such as Dan no doubt still existed. I know they did. But they would die, losing their items, money, and quite a bit of time getting out of the jail.

All in all, developers just need to create ways to deter griefing. At the same time, the grievers need to learn that just because the possibility is there does mean they should be an jerkwad.
And if they do, it’s their fault, not the game maker’s.

Until next time, Comrades.