Gameplay: Grief Forgiveness

**Malorn** · 2011-07-21, 07:43 PM

The grief system from PS1 already had forgiveness built-in.

It had two components - rate of accrual and rate of decay.

Rate of Accrual

Grief in PS1 accumulated at different rates. If you went on a TK spree you racked it up real fast. However, if you had the same number of kills spread out over a 10 hour period, you would get far less grief.

Grief gain was a function of two variables:
1) current grief score
2) recent grief activity

So if you had a low grief score you would get the minimum amount of grief when you did inflict it. If you infrequently got grief you would also get the minimum. If your grief score was higher, it indicated that you have issues with grief and therefore the system was less forgiving and would give you higher grief amounts. Recent grief activity resulted in being on a killing spree or doing a lot of damage to friendlies would quickly rack up grief and the accrual rate would accelerate.

These two functions can interact, meaning if you have a high grief score and go on a short killing spree you can quickly find yourself in weapons lock.

Rate of Decay

In addition to the accrual rate, Grief Decay worked in a similar fashion and was a function of two factors:

1) Time
2) Current level of grief

Grief decayed over time. The rate at which it decayed increased with lower amounts of grief.

So basically if you hovered around 0-100 grief the grief you gained would be minimal and the rate of decay would be very rapid, usually gone within an hour or two.

I usually had my grief < 100 pretty much my entire time playing Planetside, and that included capping random asshats from time to time. The key was never letting your grief get too high. Once your grief got into the 300+ range then the decay rate was slower and the accrual rate was faster. Even then, 300 grief decayed in a day or two as long as you didn't significantly add to it.

Anomalies due to weapon design

That said, this system as neatly designed as it was, had some anomalies that could cause someone to rack up a lot of grief in a short time. The first was "plasma grenades". Because of the burn-effect of plasmas every tick of the plasma counted as "grief activity", which means it accelerated the accrual rate far faster than other weapons. If you had fragmentation grenades your accrual rate was much slower, even with the same amount of friendly fire. If someone using plasma wasn't careful they could rack up tons of grief and make it hard to work it off for days, especially if they kept using plasma grenades.

Avoiding using plasma was a good way to keep grief rates low.

Lag and warping and weapons with projectile speed also tended to cause grief issues, because at the time you fire them nobody is in the way, but after they leave the gun someone can move in front of them. Weapons like MCGs which had a high rate of fire could quickly rack up 3-4 instances of grief, and then a few more times it would rack up more. This accelerated teh accrual rate, so any further grief would be much worse.

Shotguns tended to be the best weapons to use in terms of minimizing grief. First, they were instant-hit, which limited the warping/projectile delay issue, and second each blast was considered 1 hit, which means that if you had one stray shot your accrual rate did not pick up significantly. So using a shotgun and aiming well with it was a good way to avoid grief or handle a grief cool-down period.

These are characteristics of the weapons interacting with the grief system. I hope that the tweaking they are doing to the grief system is fixing those issues by adding a little more tolerance for weapons that are grief-prone and maybe being a little less tolerant for weapons that aren't grief-prone.

One thing to point out that I loved about the grief system is that if you ran over someone both of you got grief points, because the blame for the incident was equally shared. The driver got grief for not moving out of the way of the victim, and the victim got grief because he was standing in front of the tank. This prevented behaviors where pedestrians were intentionally standing in driving lanes and also encouraged them to get out of the way of vehicles. That's a good behavior to teach so I'm glad they awarded grief for both the driver and the pedestrian.

WarChimp130 · 2011-07-21, 07:49 PM

Again, I'm all for the way the grief system works as far as accrual of grief and decay of grief, my way would give players the power to forgive what they perceived as an accident so those incidents might not tack up in a way that could really gimp a player.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-21, 08:02 PM

1) The grief system is designed for forgiveness. That's its whole purpose - punish those who are reckless and careless, while forgiving those who honestly had mistakes and really nailing the guys going on TK sprees in short order. It does that quite well. Just because you got accidental grief doesn't mean you need to ahve it wiped away. The system will do that.

Grief you get is just a data point in a larger picture. Few datapoints it will forgive you. Lots of data points and it won't.

2) If someone is getting that much grief they need to do something differently, they're clearly doing it wrong.

Soothsayer · 2011-07-23, 09:04 AM

Good points on either side...

Grief system needs to punish griefing without allowing grief system griefers...

Death2All · 2011-07-23, 09:32 AM

Very good points from Malorn. I thought grief system worked well in PS except for how fast it could tend to accumulate exponentially. You could often start a day with 0 grief and accidentally hit a friendly MAX with a deci during an intense tower fight. After that your grief would really start to increase from just the slightest accident.

Obviously, people should be more careful and learn to hold their fire but sometimes it could not be avoided.

I've always thrown around the idea of allowing support experience to lower you grief. Every 100 support XP (assuming this is still present in PS2) lowers you by one grief point. So when people have their accidents they can switch to a support role and start lowering their grief. Just an idea I've had for awhile.

I'm normally good about my grief but some days the fights are just too chaotic and you get careless. I'll often log out if I have more than 100 grief because of how fast it will increase after that point.

I think a system for lowering your grief through support would be generally well received. The only way I could really see this getting abused is someone going on a teamkilling spree and then he has to.....Repair you for a few hours to lower his grief? Punishment fits the crime.

**Malorn** · 2011-07-23, 10:22 AM

The grief system doesn't need supplementary things to reduce grief. If normal everyday behaviors are causing people to rack up too much grief then the formula for grief accrual and/or decay needs to be adjusted.

I don't like the idea for this grief forgiveness because the correct solution is to tweak the grief formulas, not add additional mechanics on top of it.

Getting grief points is OK. Its just a hueristic to determine whether you are someone who made a mistake or someone who is being overly reckless/malicious. It also encourages fire discipline, but getting a few grief points here and there is expected by the system and is normal. You don't need to have means of getting rid of those poitns or a forgiveness system or anything like that. If it is a problem for the average player then the formulas need a little fine tuning. Trying to get external ways of removing the points bypasses the purpose of the system and doesn't fix the underlying problem of the heuristic not being quite right.

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

Death2All · 2011-07-23, 11:20 AM

Originally Posted by Malorn

The grief system doesn't need supplementary things to reduce grief. If normal everyday behaviors are causing people to rack up too much grief then the formula for grief accrual and/or decay needs to be adjusted.

I don't like the idea for this grief forgiveness because the correct solution is to tweak the grief formulas, not add additional mechanics on top of it.

Getting grief points is OK. Its just a heuristic to determine whether you are someone who made a mistake or someone who is being overly reckless/malicious. It also encourages fire discipline, but getting a few grief points here and there is expected by the system and is normal. You don't need to have means of getting rid of those poitns or a forgiveness system or anything like that. If it is a problem for the average player then the formulas need a little fine tuning. Trying to get external ways of removing the points bypasses the purpose of the system and doesn't fix the underlying problem of the heuristic not being quite right.

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

Because healing your teammates to reduce your grief level in an incredibly complex mechanic that nobody could ever possibly wrap their head around.

However, I do see your point. A person should essentially learn from their mistakes, especially with a forgiveness system in place that lowers your grief over time.

I am really interested to see how the new "revised" grief system works. You're clearly in favor of the old one and it definitely worked. There were some kinks here and there so it will be interesting to see what's changed.

Lartnev · 2011-07-24, 05:33 AM

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.