The grief system: How can it be fixed?

[Peacemaker]

I think the grief system in the game is terrible. I hate getting 50 grief because some idiot ran infront of my tank. Or ran into a corridor I was firing down. Take your pick, the system needs to be improved.

I'd suggest no grief unless you kill a team mate, but that doesn't work. Then jackasses will shoot you down to barely any health with no consequences.

Let's hear some ideas!

[DviddLeff]

I have no problem with the grief system.

The only time I ever came close to grief lock was when I certed Thumper the first time and was careless.

[Rbstr]

Peacemaker has shot you in the back X times in the last minute, do you wish to punish him? [F2] Yes, [F3] No

Something like that.

I never found the grief system to be that bad though. You could do a ton of team damage before the consequences showed up.

I got grief locked once...but it was a bug stemming from a hacked AMS in a courtyard I OSed. Counted like 10 Barney kills as being friendlies.

[morf]

The problem with the current grief system imo is that is disproportionately punishes players with higher play time due to it's universal decay rate. I would like to see it measure the amount of damage you do to friendlies vs. The amount you do to enemies. A certain amount of friendly fire is to be expected. So for example if we determine that 90 percent of the damage you inflict should be against hostiles, then for every 10 damage you do to an enemy, 1 grief point could be eliminated. The idea here being it could measure a players carelessness better than just looking at the amount of friendly fire over time.

[Bags]

Grief system works well. Can't remember going over 150 without trying.

[FastAndFree]

Shit happens, sometimes you kill friendlies in busy assaults, sometimes they just plain jump in front of you, and sometimes you don't see that cloaker before you open up with the main gun.
But has anyone ever got a weapon lock from accidental hits?

[Sirisian]

But has anyone ever got a weapon lock from accidental hits?
Having gone on grief streaks before I took a break from the game I doubt it. Obviously the more damage you do in a short amount of time the more grief you get, but even when I was blindly using flails I never got enough to lock my gun.

The OP is making it sound like he gets grief locked everytime he plays. If that's the case then he's probably being really careless. Maybe he just wants a way to hide the grief warning?

[CGar]

Planetside had one of the best grief punishment systems I have ever seen.

I couldn't really see it getting much better other than a few tweaks here and there where you racked up absurd amounts of grief for small things.

[Rarntogo]

I haven't even gotten close to grief lock since the Pounder was an AI max. (good times btw!) The only time I got over 400 since then was if the outfit went on endless Lib runs for a week straight or something. I like the grief system as is.

[Miir]

I was pretty satisfied with the current grief system in PS.

But if I was to make a suggestion it would be to base it on friendly kills rather than just every time you hit someone friendly. Perhaps you could still get the warning but only if the friendly is killed do you get grief points.

The main reason is it's hard to control where people go inside bases and towers. They are there to play the game to their own style. If that means rushing in ahead of everyone guns blazing. I say go for it. But I mostly get grief when someone like that runs in front of me while I'm shooting.

If it was changed to per death it would likely minimize grief caused by situations I just described.

But as I said... the current system seems to work ok that's the only tweak I'd do if I could.

[Bags]

Thumper would be a lot stronger if you only got grief for kills with it.

[Peacemaker]

I've never gotten weapons lock. I just find the current grief system could use some improvement,

The problem with the current grief system imo is that is disproportionately punishes players with higher play time due to it's universal decay rate. I would like to see it measure the amount of damage you do to friendlies vs. The amount you do to enemies. A certain amount of friendly fire is to be expected. So for example if we determine that 90 percent of the damage you inflict should be against hostiles, then for every 10 damage you do to an enemy, 1 grief point could be eliminated. The idea here being it could measure a players carelessness better than just looking at the amount of friendly fire over time.

Adding something like this would make it so you could base the grief system on a much smaller scale. Getting as much as 50 grief points at a time is gone, and consequences could be enabled sooner. I did not make it clear but I felt that TKers need to be punished, and the current system doesn't do it right. Putting grief against a ratio of damage you do to hostiles makes a lot more sense.

[Daala]

I farm XP through support. this ratio talk makes me sad, since my output is surrogate :(

[CutterJohn]

Only change I would recommend is adding a forgive option, and friendly vehicles do not damage friendly CE, infantry, or vehicles if under 50% speed.

It might also be nice if outfits can set each other as grief free.

[Grimster]

I don't see a problem with the grief system either.

I mean sure sometimes if I by accidence hit someone with the main cannon or maybe in a corridor fight I have rarely to never seen myself get more than 100-150 grief which really isn't that much.

So what is the problem if you get some grief points off an on? It's not like they are a permanent record for you. :)

[Hamma]

I think it's a great system that just needs a few tweaks is all. For example, you have a lazy asshat OS a friendly vehicle pad because the line is to long. That shit should result in insta-lock.

But sadly - it's hard to make such a system "smart"

[morf]

I've never gotten weapons lock. I just find the current grief system could use some improvement,



Adding something like this would make it so you could base the grief system on a much smaller scale. Getting as much as 50 grief points at a time is gone, and consequences could be enabled sooner. I did not make it clear but I felt that TKers need to be punished, and the current system doesn't do it right. Putting grief against a ratio of damage you do to hostiles makes a lot more sense.

Right. Because different players have different playtimes, a grief system that decays on real world time doesn't get it right. A griefer who plays 1 hour every 3 days is allowed to cause far too much mayhem, while a benevolent player who plays 10 hours a day needs to walk on eggshells to avoid stacking up enough grief to get locked after a few days. And you can't use online time because people can sit online and idle 24/7. So the only logical way to solve the problem is to look at your friendly fire compared to your positive contribution. By allowing your good deeds to offset your mistakes you have a better indicator or recklessness or maliciousness then you do by simply saying "count the amount of friendly fire over xxx hours."

[TheRagingGerbil]

Only tweak I could think is to allow faster decay of grief for doing support activities, other than that, system works great.

[Timantium]

I like the grief system as is, it doesn't penalize you until you get like tons of grief and if you are squadded with someone you don't get any grief for hurting them.

The reason to have one is obvious, and taking friendly fire out of the game is silly.

I think it's a great system that just needs a few tweaks is all. For example, you have a lazy asshat OS a friendly vehicle pad because the line is to long. That shit should result in insta-lock.

But sadly - it's hard to make such a system "smart"

I think they should put in an achievement for "friendlies OSed." Then make them wear that badge of shame on their armband and the empire would always know who to stay away from.

[wildcat140679]

I believe like many already pointed out that Planetside had a very solid anti-grief system and doesn't need much tweaking if any at all.


My view on the whole grief system is that it force players to use there weapons/vehicles more responsibly, to anticipate your surrounding allies there move's and trying to reduce friendly fire miss haps (or road kills) when ever possible.




Most friendly fire incidents occur when your under enemy fire and most people there first reaction is "Evade!"

Take a back door corridor fight for example. It still amazes me how often people start strafing left and right trying to dodge enemy fire, while there is more than a full squad of allied guns trained at the back door all shooting at the enemy. If the enemy fire doesn't kill the poor fool, the wave of friendly fire send to the enemy surely will.


There are countless of situation, where I've seen friendly units dying, because they ran back and forth through friendly fire aimed at the enemy. Those who dealt damage, are penalized with grief points and this isn't always right.
And I believe this is the part people like to see changed in the grief system.



So instead of tweaking the grief system, what about adding an other system, that tracking friendly fire received, tracking how frequent you take damage from different friendly sources (not the amount of damage) with in a short time period.

Instead of grief points call them recklessness points.
Not sure if they should be penalized, but it should not be a weapon lock.
Limiting access to certain equipment maybe, I don't know.

Having those recklessness points actively being tracked like grief point and have an (annoying :D) game hint window appear, talking about situational awareness and the friendly fire very likely being caused because of walking through friendly fire and hints a like.

Also, for some players stats being tracked in the player profile for everyone to see, some considered this very important.
Having an impressive 10 to 1 Kill/Death ratio looks great on your character profile, but if that goes hand in had with a sky high recklessness score giving your the title of friendly fire magnet, the picture of a very skilled player changes some what.

Maybe even going as far as changing character armor looks, to name something extreme as having a bullseye painted on you front and back chest armor, screaming I'm reckless be aware or some thing silly.


I don't believe the problem lies with the grief system, but more with those who where reckless and responsible for giving you those grief points due to an accidental friendly fire miss hap

[Azellon]

I can't believe anyone has trouble with the Grief system, to be entirely honest. I've been logged on from morning to night at a stretch and never had any trouble with Grief. As Vanu HA, it can be very difficult to avoid Grief sometimes. Climb into a Magrider and you become a hovering Grief machine (as good as it is at mowing enemies down, it's better at mowing down friendlies). But as long as you're even slightly careful you can avoid punishment. As long as there is no consequence except the little beep every so often, what's the problem?

[p0intman]

tl;dr at the bottom..

the problem the developers struggle with is not 'protecting' people from tking grief play. instead, the balance problem is that a: asshats exist, and b: some people have really shit aim (myself included).

the result is that you must continually prove yourself to be worthy of a weapons lock in order to recieve it by continually shooting people and killing them.

there are also some other people that take it unto themselves to legitimately dislike people for being 'noobs' or generally crap players. in that they use friendly fire and grief as an excuse to spawncamp members of their own empire.

obviously, the easy route would be that damage to your own empire is flat out impossible. that wouldn't really be that interesting, though, and it would force fights to boil down to who has more numbers and better weapons combined into one hallway.

it would remove a learning curve of aiming and learning how to use weapons properly.

but again, you need something in place to prevent true asshats from showing how much of a dick they can be. it should also be noted that anything that gets put in can be used by said asshats to grief people with reverse mechanics.

example: running into the line of fire deliberately to cause others to be weapons locked from grief.

thus the system we have is a decent balance but needs a tweak or two with the above points in mind.

tl;dr: you can't fix it, it'll never be perfect because people are smarter than machines, you can only make it as close to ideal as possible. even then, it'll be a far cry from perfect.

[Traak]

Only change I would recommend is adding a forgive option, and friendly vehicles do not damage friendly CE, infantry, or vehicles if under 50% speed.

It might also be nice if outfits can set each other as grief free.

I like the first part.

However, the second would be abused, because people could just mindlessly and endlessly spam thumpers with no skill or aim. These are weapons, we have to use them with care. They aren't New Year's Eve party favors by flipping some switch.

I'm guessing that framerates will be up and netcode dunceness will be down, enabling more grief-free accurate fire in the next one.

[Tribulator]

tl;dr at the bottom..

there are also some other people that take it unto themselves to legitimately dislike people for being 'noobs' or generally crap players. in that they use friendly fire and grief as an excuse to spawncamp members of their own empire.

This is why grief must be in PS2… just the other day me and 4 other guys where TKed by a one of those guys because we were all in infiltrator and his reply to us when we asked him why was “I don’t like clocker and why do you play clocker any way it stupid” who the hell made this guy GOD; I play the game the way I want to play it if you don’t like it move along. Lately there is been more and more TK’ing at people just because they belong to certain outfit.

I think the grief system should be in game and should be tweaked so that if you kill a friendly away from the battle you should get lot more grief (like in a tower away from the fight or when you stay behind after the fight is over to lay down CE in the base and no enemies are nearby) it shouldn’t be too hard to make it work.

[Goku]

That is FPS gaming for you. Always one dick somewhere to cause trouble. I think the current grief system is fine. I do not see any major need for a system to what you are looking for at all. If someone is being like that towards my group I go right back and TK there ass. I have no issues with getting my hands dirty if it comes to that.

[TheRagingGerbil]

Grief system was fine. I would like to see the ability to reduce your grief by doing support work. IE: healing, repairing, etc.

[Traak]

New grief system:
A) it is impossible to get grief, as any kind of infantry whatsoever, for running into anything, anywhere, at any time.
B) It is impossible to damage, and thus get grief, if you are small-class vehicle, like an ATV, ramming into a tank, Sunderer, whatever.
C) Running a friendly over or ramming him with a vehicle that is of a class where you can cause damage of any sort to his person or vehicle, your vehicle immediately gets slammed down to 1/5th speed for 30 seconds.
D) Rate of Grief parameters: If you kill three (or some appropriate number) or more friendlies in a few seconds, instant weapons/vehicle lock. Not long-lasting, but long enough to make you think about using better aim and/or steering.
E) Two same-class vehicles cannot grief or damage each other. We should be able to have smash-up derbies with friendlies with no grief, if we are all running Harassers or whatever. No damage, no grief, no foul. Sometimes we gotta ram someone outta the muck.
F) While I'm at it, if you run into a heavier-class infantry, you get shoved back, not the cloaker throwing the MAX flying across the stair landing because he ran into him, or whatever.
G) Impending Grief Lock warning tone and screen (not center) message if your Rate of Grief or overall Grief points are approaching lock zone.
H) Running over your own CE garners you no grief.
I) Blowing up your own vehicle: no grief
J) Terraced Rate of Grief locks for worse Rate of Grief offenses. 20 friendly kills in a minute, for example, should get you no-stamina walking pace, no access to vehicles, and no trigger capabilities for five minutes. Higher penalties for higher rates.
K) There are many adjustments that can be made. Killing the same soldier twice in a short period of time, grief lock.

Don't make it so traitors can damage tons of equipment, CE, other players, terms, before logging off for a week with 999 grief. Make it so their rate of grief is also taken into account, not just overall grief level.

[Wahooo]

I think it's a great system that just needs a few tweaks is all. For example, you have a lazy asshat OS a friendly vehicle pad because the line is to long. That shit should result in insta-lock.

But sadly - it's hard to make such a system "smart"

Although I find that level of asshattery frustrating to say the least, I don't want to be instalocked for OSing 3 friendly flails that are ignoring the comalls to stop flailing the CY so we can finally move in, or OS the friendly AMS that is so badly placed it is preventing the deployment of 2 others, again after ignoring several comalls to move the friggen thing.

OT, PS's current grief system is fine as is. Not perfect but I don't see the ability to improve much without introducing exploitable issues.

[Mirror]

The problem with the current grief system imo is that is disproportionately punishes players with higher play time due to it's universal decay rate. I would like to see it measure the amount of damage you do to friendlies vs. The amount you do to enemies. A certain amount of friendly fire is to be expected. So for example if we determine that 90 percent of the damage you inflict should be against hostiles, then for every 10 damage you do to an enemy, 1 grief point could be eliminated. The idea here being it could measure a players carelessness better than just looking at the amount of friendly fire over time.

I think we have a winner.

[mefy]

They should definitely allow a much faster rate of grief reduction if you have high grief and go play a support role for awhile, forces you to do some good for your empire and are rewarded with much quicker grief reduction so you can get back in the battle to TK more friendlies with your thumper!

[Xyntech]

Especially since everyone will have access to spawning as a medic.

[Bruttal]

No friendly fire?. bullets pass though friendly or stop bullets IDK but the current GREIF system Blows I hated it since its inception. It did get better but I still hate it.

[Xyntech]

No friendly fire?. bullets pass though friendly or stop bullets IDK but the current GREIF system Blows I hated it since its inception. It did get better but I still hate it.

Without friendly fire, the game will be all about spamming area of effect weapons. That can work for some games, but in general it's a pretty ugly thing and it would be terrible in a game like Planetside.

If friendly fire is turned on, there must be consequences to deter people from hurting or killing their own team.

The grief system filled this role nicely. It's not always perfect, but it's the lesser of the evils.

Any improvements that would make the current grief system more accurate in punishing bad behavior or would help players make up for their mistakes quicker is fine by me.

[Tasorin]

I liked the grief systems in PS1.

Like many of the posters have said, you either had to be really unlucky, going full spray and pray, or actually trying to grief people in order to push being grief locked.

The thing you should be concerned about is client security and detection for hacking and exploiting, and how hard is SoE going to crack the whip on it. If there is one thing that ruins a FPS for me it is rampant cheating and nothing being done about it.

[sylphaen]

I share the opinion that the PS1 grief system was fine in PS1.

Grief was based on damage/frequency and a right combination of the two made the penalty go exponential:
- Repeated fire with weak weapons on a friendly and your penalty per shot would increase.
- High damage shot on a friendly and you would get a big penalty. And an even bigger one if you shot a friendly again shortly thereafter.
- Do both (e.g. thumper) and you would soon learn that a grief-lock was a pain in the ass. There is no way would be able to grief a friendly after getting grief locked (excepting trying to get in their fire range to force grief on them).


IMO, if there should be a tweak on the grief system from PS1, it would be to allow shooting people who are grief-locked without penalty. If they hurt they empire enough, they should be punished for it. The problem with that though is that if someone got there for any reason other that purposefully griefing, he could receive so much abuse from other players that he might just stop playing altogether.

A change that could be really useful is to track grief at an outfit level. With the PS1 grief system, it's technically possible to keep griefing an individual by spreading the grief points between all other players griefing him. Penalties should be inflicted if your whole outfit promotes griefing. Of course, that would not prevent an unassociated group of players from griefing someone in the same way.

It's not because PS2 is free-to-play that the grief system should be lenient towards griefers because innocents are involved (i.e. players who hit friendlies by mistake and cause unintended damage). On the contracy, we could expect a lot of griefers along with the hackers we keep mentionning. In fact, a problem I see is that if accounts are free to create and unchecked, it might possible to circumvent the whole grief protection and create throw-away accounts to grief people.

The grief system is there to K.O. griefers and teach innocents to learn to aim correctly or HOLD FIRE when there is a clusterfuck. It was like debt: the less you have, the more risk you are able to take


I did my share of mistakes, had my share of griefpoints and got grief-locked 4-5 times over the span of PS1 lifetime. Grief-lock is a bitch (try driving a vehicle at 10 MPH speed limit...) but it still allowed you to play support !

Getting rid of it was simple and there was no shortcuts:
- decert special assault
- stop using any AoE weapons
- stay back in base assaults
- hold your fire in doubt


So to sum up:

Yes, it made your life miserable but that was the purpose of the system.
Not a griefer but bad aim ? Get some friends, be part of a team and join a squad/platoon. If you join a random squad and are that terrible, the squad leader will know how to /kick and never invite you again.
Learn to hold your fire.
There should be no way to speed up grief recovery.


______________


Originally Posted by morf :
I would like to see it measure the amount of damage you do to friendlies vs. The amount you do to enemies.

That was already in place: if you do a streak of shots against a friendly (i.e. griefer/payback/careless behavior), the penalty per shot will increase for each additional shot and you will get your grief points very fast. No excuse for repeatedly shooting friendlies since the big red numbers in the middle of your screen along with the awful/horibble grief sound were a pretty clear message that you are doing something wrong.

Stray shots here and there (i.e. accidents) never penalized with grief as much. I think the cap was at +50-75 points per hit so for a huge blooper (e.g. aurora salvo in a tower with friendlies), you would get penalty large enough to make you be very careful about your shots (Aurora shots on friendlies started around 20-25 and VERY quickly went up to the 50-75 limit) but not so hard that you could not participate in the fight anymore. (however, doing it again would definitely put you out of the fight for the night or force you to be careful for the next few days).


The idea here being it could measure a players carelessness better than just looking at the amount of friendly fire over time.

Yes, the role of the grief system is to control behaviour. Careless players were penalized less than griefers because their intentions were different but they were still being penalized nonetheless, and rightly so.

The more careless you were, the faster you would reach grief-lock. Being a griefer would definitely make you reach it fast and get you out of here.

Only change I would recommend is adding a forgive option

It would definitely be nice though it might be complicated if grief is still on a per shot basis in PS2. The no-grief-if-you-shoot-someone-in-your-squad was a similar option in PS1 and it was a nice idea. Plus it was another incentive to stick with your group.

They should definitely allow a much faster rate of grief reduction if you have high grief and go play a support role for a while.

Go farm for 10 minutes and start being careless again ? That would be just enough to grief that one noob you hate and get back to it a few moments later.

PS1 system was fine. When you reached grief-lock, you were locked for 3 to 10 minutes but you could still participate by playing a support role. When the grief lock ran out, you could use weapons against enemies again but a single hit on a friendly would make you locked for 10 minutes again.

Great deterrent to punish griefers or very very stupidly careless people.
(In fact, you did not even need to be that careless for very long. 10 minutes with an aurora + a string of risky shots and you were on the line. An extra 5 minutes in a base fight or a gen hold would finish locking you out.)


If it was changed to per death it would likely minimize grief caused by situations I just described.

But then I could shoot you down to 10 HP before any time I see in an enemy zone. And then you would start doing the same, and then whole outfits would start bringing each other's health down, etc... Having grief only on killshots would not punish that very specific behaviour which brings everyone to a downwards spiral and destroy everyone's fun.

The grief system was there first to prevent grief and second to discourage careless behavior.

If you could not shoot without hitting a friendly, realize that it worked the same way on the other empire. So yes, 10 vs. 3 people in a corridor would favor the 3 since only 2-4 skilled players could shoot without hitting each other.

That's how friendly fire mechanics rewarded skilled/trained/coordinated squads vs. random groups.

Mechanics that reward good players should stay.Yes... That guy strafing in front of you blocking your shots and overcrowding the stairs is an issue but in the end, he is in front and will drop down soon enough. Plus the accidental grief you got from those guys would never put you in the red so you could "spend" grief points if you felt it was necessary to win the battle. Kind of like debt but without the built-in interest mechanics that will get your hide.
:D

___________

mmm... Longer post than I expected...
:(

[SKYeXile]

The problem with the current grief system imo is that is disproportionately punishes players with higher play time due to it's universal decay rate. I would like to see it measure the amount of damage you do to friendlies vs. The amount you do to enemies. A certain amount of friendly fire is to be expected. So for example if we determine that 90 percent of the damage you inflict should be against hostiles, then for every 10 damage you do to an enemy, 1 grief point could be eliminated. The idea here being it could measure a players carelessness better than just looking at the amount of friendly fire over time.

Yup..thats the problem, alt of people ehre say they have never reached grief lock, thats fine for only playing 3 every second tuesday, but when you play...well sometimes 24 hours straight...AKA BR23 patch. and your greif decays at the same rate as everybody else but your mutlipler gets higher and higher, you run into problems.

A better Map would help things, its hard to detirm what frindys are a level bellow you or above you in a tower, makes spamming doorways with thumpers hard because there always a dick who wants to camp at the door with a vanguard barrel poking him in the groin.

Anyway it should definatly be damaged 90% based like you suggested. it should also track proper Tkers, aka doign 100% HP damage to somebody.

I dont often deliverly tk people...i have done afew outfit events and obviously alot of duels, and i think there is something with bailing counting at friendly kills...no idea how i have this many max kills either...

but something for a comparison.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v629/SKYeXile/standardkills.jpg

116,645 infantry kills.

13237 friendly kills.

129882 total
10%% friendly kills, if my maths isn't derped ona friday afternoon.
as i said, greif locked MANY TIMES.

[xSlideShow]

I like how no one said anything about being run over by vehicles and getting grief locked. I think the only it's happened to me is when I was trying to avoid ALL friendlies all together and I'd have the random mag. Pop me I'd die of course... You know cause it's fair. Then get grief locked?!?!

That was when I used SA for the first time. Something to make you drop that cert. Then when I tried to use a BFR I had a similar incident with other vehicles running right into me just racking up my grief for me. Thanks.

I think that's my only real problem with the grief system I can't think of any other times... Learned how to control my fire so most times I'd hit friendlies was 1 lasher bolt. Unless it was on purpose.

[Malmatik]

The only way I see the grief system being remotely close to fair is an algorith that aaccounts for the following:

1. Present encounter area
2. Aoe damage capable weapons in that area at a given time.
3. The compression of the factions hallways and such. Or outside tower defense.
4. Distance from target
5. Number of players hitting a particular player given a force compression (Higher forces compression less grief)
6. Faction dispersion..less opposing factions in an area the more grief you get for friendly fire.
7. Power of weapon used vehicle or otherwise

Probably missing some stuff but if you machine gun a guy down should be alot more grief then a guy getting caught in the aoe shock wave of a tank or a launched grenade etc.