Excellent article.
As a PvPr I often get tagged with the title "griefer." I don't want to take away your fun, I just want to destroy you. There is a difference. I want to find someone in your group, or in your numbers, that can give me a challenge.
I will give you an example. In AoC I played a Necromancer named Arendt. Arendt loved to PvP, I made Arednt a female, and as short as possible. Why? Harder to hit, harder to see, and a bit more demoralizing to my enemy for the ends of defeating them.
When the server I was playing on first started it really was a fun time, you could attack anyone anywhere (except for cities) and this often led to huge fights. I often ran with my cous or a friend and we'd take down people twice our level, we even once took down a level 80 Tempest of Set as level 40s. Those are the things we were looking for, but you can ask many of the people we generally encountered, we usually didn't kill people who conned grey to us. Why? No point. They didn't give us EXP, and they weren't in our way.
We would sometimes happen upon groups of players spawn camping the first rez point in a zone. A player would have just come into the zone and only gotten that one rez point and was unable to spawn at another one should they choose. This angered me, and my cousin was apathetic. My cousin asked "Why should we have to babysit them?" I responded "Why not crush those 80s doing it?" We would often times put our leveling on hold and just take out the griefers for fun. As with bullies, they were very weak, usually a stealth character who really did not know how to play. I generally play as part of a team, and compared to solo even duo becomes exponentially better, and there were usually very few of them.
The players that were getting camped would thank us and I would tell them that their best bet in situations like those is #1 to make friends or #2 to just log off and come back later. Most PvPrs do not really care about new players getting griefed. In Age of Conan it wouldn't have been possible as a player to stop all of the griefing even if I wanted to, because they only had to show up in one place while I would have had to guard them all which would have stopped my progression entirely.
I have many stories like this, about protecting against griefing in Age of Conan, but let me tell you how this one ends. My cousin eventually left the game because he was bored. The game didn't provide the type of challenge that he needed and some of the mechanics were horribly out of whack (Gem exploiting and stacking.) I stayed with it a bit longer, but I most of the time ran solo because no one played alongside me quiet as well as my cousin. If anyone had played AoC up to the release of the PvP system they experienced the same thing as I did. Most of the high level PvP took place in Kheshatta, and most of it was duels. As a reanimation necromancer, not only was this not fun, but it was not challenging either. I kept at it for about a month and everyone began to start to hate me on Bloodspire. Why? Because I would interrupt their duels. I was in a game that went from complete and utter chaos, pvp knife at your back at any time, to a game of dueling. So I was labeled a "Griefer." I engaged in non-consensual PvP on a PvP server and I was labeled for it.
I read through these articles in the Issue 200:Good Griefing and I realize that many of these people who were labeling me as a griefer had many of the same false associations and conclusions that writers of these articles have. So why am I writing this account? Simply to say that I am not a sociopath (as labeled in correspondence with one of the columnists) I am just a pvpr looking for a challenge.
This story does have a happy ending though, me and my cousin have no found the game EVE. I am 3 months into the game and I am enjoying it immensely.
Shamus Young, thank you for writing this article, I hope your colleagues at the escapist will read it and give it some thought.
As a PvPr I often get tagged with the title "griefer." I don't want to take away your fun, I just want to destroy you. There is a difference. I want to find someone in your group, or in your numbers, that can give me a challenge.
I will give you an example. In AoC I played a Necromancer named Arendt. Arendt loved to PvP, I made Arednt a female, and as short as possible. Why? Harder to hit, harder to see, and a bit more demoralizing to my enemy for the ends of defeating them.
When the server I was playing on first started it really was a fun time, you could attack anyone anywhere (except for cities) and this often led to huge fights. I often ran with my cous or a friend and we'd take down people twice our level, we even once took down a level 80 Tempest of Set as level 40s. Those are the things we were looking for, but you can ask many of the people we generally encountered, we usually didn't kill people who conned grey to us. Why? No point. They didn't give us EXP, and they weren't in our way.
We would sometimes happen upon groups of players spawn camping the first rez point in a zone. A player would have just come into the zone and only gotten that one rez point and was unable to spawn at another one should they choose. This angered me, and my cousin was apathetic. My cousin asked "Why should we have to babysit them?" I responded "Why not crush those 80s doing it?" We would often times put our leveling on hold and just take out the griefers for fun. As with bullies, they were very weak, usually a stealth character who really did not know how to play. I generally play as part of a team, and compared to solo even duo becomes exponentially better, and there were usually very few of them.
The players that were getting camped would thank us and I would tell them that their best bet in situations like those is #1 to make friends or #2 to just log off and come back later. Most PvPrs do not really care about new players getting griefed. In Age of Conan it wouldn't have been possible as a player to stop all of the griefing even if I wanted to, because they only had to show up in one place while I would have had to guard them all which would have stopped my progression entirely.
I have many stories like this, about protecting against griefing in Age of Conan, but let me tell you how this one ends. My cousin eventually left the game because he was bored. The game didn't provide the type of challenge that he needed and some of the mechanics were horribly out of whack (Gem exploiting and stacking.) I stayed with it a bit longer, but I most of the time ran solo because no one played alongside me quiet as well as my cousin. If anyone had played AoC up to the release of the PvP system they experienced the same thing as I did. Most of the high level PvP took place in Kheshatta, and most of it was duels. As a reanimation necromancer, not only was this not fun, but it was not challenging either. I kept at it for about a month and everyone began to start to hate me on Bloodspire. Why? Because I would interrupt their duels. I was in a game that went from complete and utter chaos, pvp knife at your back at any time, to a game of dueling. So I was labeled a "Griefer." I engaged in non-consensual PvP on a PvP server and I was labeled for it.
I read through these articles in the Issue 200:Good Griefing and I realize that many of these people who were labeling me as a griefer had many of the same false associations and conclusions that writers of these articles have. So why am I writing this account? Simply to say that I am not a sociopath (as labeled in correspondence with one of the columnists) I am just a pvpr looking for a challenge.
This story does have a happy ending though, me and my cousin have no found the game EVE. I am 3 months into the game and I am enjoying it immensely.
Shamus Young, thank you for writing this article, I hope your colleagues at the escapist will read it and give it some thought.
