Gameplay: Grief Forgiveness

[Lartnev]

Originally Posted by Malorn

tl;dr - fix the heuristics, don't add unncessary complexity to the game.

Agreed. Grief is a cruel mistress when it should be a fair mistress.

At first I thought that the forgiveness system should work in reverse, you're forgiven unless proven guilty. The reason was simple: players will first need to know they've been teamkilled (I sometimes don't notice in heavy firefights), second they have to know it was accidental, and finally they need to know/remember there's a forgive system on a menu screen. But then there's the opposite scenario where players flag a teamkill as deliberate when it wasn't for vengeance or just general trolling.

When I've seen forgive systems implemented they're undermined by the amount of angst generated by people not using it correctly. In short: I'd much rather see players angry at the system than at each other.

The grief system is designed to hold you to account for your actions. Should you be driving so fast in a crowded courtyard? Should you have thrown that grenade, was the 5 enemy kills worth the grief? etc.

I believe the frustration (and desire for a forgiveness system) comes from bugs or inconsistencies that lead to injustices in the system, just as Malorn pointed out earlier. A couple of cases of my own would be when the Striker used to lock on to friendly aircraft by mistake and when a full Galaxy was shot down but the pilot got grief for "crashing" on the people bailing out.