Griefing - A Discussion

[Ashe]

Griefing is doing something with the intent to interrupt someone's gameplay. I don't consider actually playing the game of LoL to the extent that its intended to be played as griefing. Now, with that said, it then follows to the WoW example that I often hear. That being that while on a PvP server, your intention is to compete with the other faction for every resource and goal in the game, thus excusing corpse camping and such. I think that's up for argument, as not every person's goal in this game (I understand that not everyone shares the same goal in ANY game, just to get that out there) is expected to be of that nature.

In WoW, one is being competitive with their own faction as well, so should the argument about corpse camping and such apply there? You are competing in different terms in this argument. For example, a former member of this forum was in my guild raiding with me during BC. While I more or less got along with the guy fine, I fully well know that if we interacted under different terms I would have one opinion of him that he completely supported himself - he was a griefing dick. He loved doing it. He was notorious on the server for that shit and WoW wasn't the only game he stated he did it on. He quickly got bored if he couldn't do something to piss someone off, and that's where the difference lay. He wasn't competing with players at the game - he was just trying to get them frustrated and raged enough so that they wouldn't participate back. In other words, just fucking with someone till they left game and therefore had no opposition.

There's a difference between pranking, teasing, etc and griefing. I have a fair number of times gone to a lower level area and seen a group of low levels doing something like grouping to fight yetis and in the middle of their struggle I dive bombed in and hit my aoe fear button and scattered them, which basically wiped the group. It was a moment where the hilarity (to me) justified it, but it doesn't actually excuse it. I was being a dick and fully well knew it. I did it, had my laugh, as we all do occasionally, and then moved on, not doing something dumb like camping them. They went back to what they were doing with no further interruption. I've had my moments where someone went to leap off a high cliff into the water safely and I would (hilariously) throw water walking on them at the last moment on each of them, watching as a number of people splatted into the water and died instantly, completely unaware of their spell. I did this a number of times at random as a bit of an in joke, leaving the guild to pay attention to their buffs. Were people pissed? Not really, though occasionally someone would get annoyed at the couple of silver repair cost, but it was an issue where we just ressed the dead and moved on, getting a small laugh out of it.

This is different from what the other guy did, where he'd get on the largest mount he owned and go stand on top of the mail boxes to keep people from using them, then if someone said something to him about it and how they had to go to the opposite side of the city to use the only other mail (at the time), he would start sending them letters over and over to keep them checking it. He'd repeatedly go to lower level areas and find the most helpless people, watch them as they just barely almost killed some elite they needed for a quest, and at the last moment as they were about to finally succeed, he'd run up and kill them then spit and walk off to wait till they were almost done with a five minute long quest fight again.

I don't even consider ganking to be griefing as that falls under general expectations of game play, but its frustrating nonetheless. In LoL, I wouldn't consider a five man group going around killing weaker players to be griefing as that brings them closer to their goal of winning the game without their intent being to cause the other team to rage and dc, playing a fair but competitive game. I wouldn't consider backdooring to be griefing either, as its an effective strategy that only works against a team that is countercomped or single minded enough to not be able to do a thing about it. I WOULD admit that both situations are quite frustrating to play against, but that's the nature. Actual griefing in LoL would be that Anivia that keeps walling her teammates to interrupt what they are doing, or diving into the enemy towers repeatedly, or announcing to the other team every move their team makes, etc. The guy that nade spams the spawn in Friendly Fire games or team flashes all the damn time in non Friendly Fire games. The guy that stands in the hallway and prevents the team from getting through.

That said, I've laughed my ass off at some (a minor few) specific griefing videos on youtube. I've laughed, but it in no way detracts the asshole component. I also very strongly feel that sportsmanship is a component to games and with that I feel that dcing on your team in a team game or dcing against your opponent in something like Magic Online (to force them to wait ten minutes for the victory that you were one "pass priority" button click from) or raging and screaming "you fucking faggot" over and over or afking, no matter how pissed you are at the game, is just as much griefing as the actions of the person that lead you to respond this way.