The grief system: How can it be fixed? - Page 3

Xyntech · 2011-11-17, 07:04 PM

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

Bruttal · 2011-11-17, 07:05 PM

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 · 2011-11-17, 07:15 PM

Originally Posted by 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.

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 · 2011-11-17, 07:24 PM

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 · 2011-11-17, 09:50 PM

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.

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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.

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mmm... Longer post than I expected...

SKYeXile · 2011-11-17, 10:56 PM

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

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 · 2011-11-18, 12:18 AM

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 · 2011-11-18, 01:24 AM

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.