this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
841 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
59438 readers
3098 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I played WoW right when it came out, on a PvP server.
There was already a subset of the crowd just like there back then - some people rushed game progression to have higher levels as soon as possible only to then hang out in beginner areas and "pwn" significantly lower level players.
That's around the time when the term "griefer" was coined.
In these things the real difference is how the servers are structured rather than the human beings: if the architecture is designed so that there is some way to filter players (smaller servers with moderation or some kind of kick voting system that bans repeat offenders), griefers end up in their own griefer instances griefing each other and the rest can actually play the game, otherwise you get a deeply beginner (or people with less time, such as working adults) unfriendly environment.
As somebody else pointed out environments were people run their own servers tend create those conditions at least for some cases (basically if there's some kind of moderation) whilst massive world centralized server environments tend to give free right to people whose pleasure in a multiplayer games derives mostly from making it unpleasent for others (in game-making, griefing is actually recognized as one of the 4 core types of enjoyment - along with achiving, exploring and socializing - people can derived from multiplayer games)
It's amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced "war mode" and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.
What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.
Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren't enough victims to pick on.
I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn't want to grief others would have been relatively easy.