My friends don't want to play anymore (griefing)

@bababooey said in My friends don't want to play anymore (griefing):

@ghostpaw
I hate to break it to you, but he has a point. The thread is about grieving and the trash talking etc goes a long with it. Lol I don’t mind sometimes trash talking and taunting, but some go to the extreme and calling people racial words or being degrading to woman as my wife and I have encountered is a bit much. The reporting system for Xbox is horrible and you have to navigate multiple menus etc, so it’s not just as simple as reporting, heck more often than not, the person your trying to report isn’t even on the list. Now imagine trying to go through all that while playing an always online game.

Where did I ever say that is okay? Seriously? But how do you expect Rare to police that? We can report it and then block them. Are we saying Rare has to staff each ship with an employee monitoring communications? If I want to ensure I never hear abusive language then I can block communications from other crews. How could Rare possibly stop that from happening? Even the mall cop in the scenario above has to know of the verbal assault first. What do you propose (other than private servers) for addressing it if giving us tools to block communications from others is not sufficient?

Look through this thread and tell me one solution the OP proposed that addresses intercrew communications. They said they wanted PvE servers and the ability to switch back and forth on the fly.

@watcheyewendigo You can misrepresent and twist my words all you like. People are able to read for themselves what I have actually said. I do not endorse griefing, racism, sexual harassment, verbally assaulting others, and so on.

You started the thread by sharing scenarios that you say drove your friends away. We tried to help you understand how you can better deal with those situations. You also received considerable pushback on the idea of switching between PvE and PvP when it suited you. You made a claim that not implementing your plan is harming the game (Amazon reviews). I responded with another point of view on that that. When Katt shared her well-considered point of view, you switched topics to communications that are not tolerated by Rare, Microsoft, and a significant proportion of the player-base (myself included). When I explained the tools you have available for dealing with verbally abusive players, you stopped just short of accusing me of victim-blaming. Yet you did not tell me one idea that would address the same issue. Switching between PvE and PvP would not do anything about it. I am content to let this thread die off like the countless others just like it did before.

@khompewtur said in My friends don't want to play anymore (griefing):

Did you just "standard normal distribute" right here in public?!?!?

I did! I hope no one noticed my elevated leptokurtosis.

It's not 'griefing', it's playing the game.

That's not to say it isn't a problem, but to call it griefing is to blame the players entirely. For their verbal harassment, fine, but for in-game actions; the game allows them and it is the responsibility of the devs to make it fun and fair.

Plenty of good suggestions were made to help with this, as well as bad ones such as 'PvE servers' and 'an arena mode'. All the good suggestions were ignored and at least one of the bad ideas will soon be in the game, giving me no reason to come back to it. Rare have signalled their direction of travel and likely won't change course.

@watcheyewendigo

Before I start I'm not saying I condone what happened. I get a lot of us are saying this and then talking about how we should have done this, or not done this.

Its not that we are defending it, it justs that these instances affect us all differently.

First and foremost, the words used against you, said against you, are not exclusive to females. Sexual preference has nothing to do with it. Now granted certain words are used more often when a certain genders are involved but nothing is exclusive. Thats just the internet. Its trash talking. Some competitions in the gaming community get way more vulgar than that and no one gets emotionally effected by it.

Myself included. I have never felt offended or felt like I should have been offended by anything anyone has said to me. I don't know if that's because I might have some wires crossed in my head, but I just never cared enough about another persons choice of words to effect me in any way.

Harassment and verbal harassment is strictly based on morality and emotions. Thats all it is. We as a society see it as something harmful because of the emotional response the victims of these events have. Some are afraid, others riddled with emotional scars and tears, while others in pure anger and hatred. The morality comes with what happens because of the emotional response. Some people get hurt, some commit suicide, others commit acts severe acts of violence.

Not everyone reacts the same way though. Thats the problem. Which is why this is such a hard issue to address. You might think what happen to you was disgusting, but if that happened to me I would think of it as another day in the park. I wouldn't bother reported the players because I see no harm nor do I care what happened. Myself and a lot of others probably react this way in general.

You think what you are discussing is griefing when no griefing has been done to you. Only verbal harassment.

You being attacked is not greifing, you being spawn camped is not greifing. You were verbally harassed. Why is the verbal harassment not greifing? That is because you could stop it from continuing if you wanted. Pure and simple, you could have muted the chat. Greifing is when you are helpless to stop the incident from happening.

Again I'm not saying that what happened to you wasn't bad. Just clarifying what is and what is not greifing.

If you are being spawn camped, scuttle. If you are being verbally harassed. Record the players in questions, then mute your mic so you don't have to listen to their garbage anymore. Take it as a learning experience and just be prepared for the next time it happens.

@bababooey Everyone will go through this at least once and you should take it as a learning experience. The first time I had to report someone for potential hacking, they did not appear on my recently played. So I instead learned how to set up the recording function on the xbox live and anytime I was suspect I would record the players and the get the names in questions.

There are ways to do what you need to do. Ask learn and adapt.

Sick of getting through half a voyage and being chased by trolls for 2 hrs. They dont give up. You sink them, they come back. Theyre not looking for treasure or anything. They literally want to do nothing else but ruin the game for other people.
I work 2 jobs and dont have 4 hours to spend getting trolled.
I used to love this game. But its just an irritating waste of time now.

I don’t think you can say that people using effective strategies like camping rich areas is griefing. it’s exactly what would have happened in the pirate age, but I agree you guys who don’t want to engage should have an option besides just switching voyages/avoiding ships to enjoy the pve aspects more. I would support a random server jump feature, both for those who want more pve and as a way for pirates to find more prey ships to attack. I mean, in my opinion the other players are like the volcanos. Sometimes a volcano goes off mid voyage or right as you’re collecting your loot and just ruins everything. But that’s life and you just gotta be like ok well now we have to sail a few miles off and come back later. If the other ship won’t leave, ally with another ship and team up against them, then share your voyage spoils. I think piracy is what makes this game exciting, it wouldn’t even be that cool to make 10k in gold if it was just an hour of running around, puzzle solving and skelly bashing. the risk of a crew of cutthroats coming and ruining my day is half the excitement to me.

@dyfrin This argument, which can be summed-up as 'PvPers don't care about others game experience' puts 'the cart before the horse'.

Those who hate open-world PvP have no consideration at all for others experience. PvPers do though, because we have to: we can not effectively fight someone in a game like SoT if we are not considering their experience of the game and how they are likely to respond.

The same can not be said of those who suffer from 'griefing', who go on long-chases where the pursuer never gives up, but seem incapable of understanding why they are being chased. They do not understand or care about the perspective of the aggressive crew, which is why all their suggestions for 'improving' SoT have been awful and one-sided.

If I didn't want someone to chase me when I was playing SoT, I behaved like a wasp does: no one chases wasps, they run from them. By acting aggressively I'm suggesting I have nothing to lose, no loot on-board, no reason to be engaged with if there is a chance that I will sink them. If I save more loot than I lose from this, it works, which it did.

Player-based solutions like this could have been better supported by Rare, who instead ignored all such suggestions in favour of top-down designer-mandated fiddles and player segregation. Now they've started down that road, they won't stop. SoT is alive, but the game I hoped it could be is dead.

@bababooey My answer wasn't 'turn round and fight'. If you have to 'turn round' first, then you've already failed and are more likely to end up fighting. If you're potentially trouble from the start, your chances of being in a fight are far lower. Ask anyone who focuses on PvP about their frustrations getting fights to actually happen.

The fact that they initiate means they are judged to not have any loot, meaning there is no extrinsic reward for getting into a fight with them, meaning even if the other crew is inclined towards fighting they will be wasting their time. Fighting for the sake of it is usually the result of an excessive amount of time spent where no potentially lucrative target turned up. It creates a paradox: people avoiding fights advertise that they might have something to lose and therefore there's a reason to fight them, but the opposite is the case for people seeking fights.

Suggestions whereby confrontational players would be given the means to determine lucrative targets without solely having to interpret behaviour were utterly ignored. All the PvE-favouring and PvP-excluding suggestions were terrible and by 'many suggestions' you mean the same few suggestions ad nausem: they flooded the forum constantly with barely any changes but each time the OP thinking they were a novelty. One of them however is being introduced shortly and unsurprisingly it's the people who hate open-world PvP who are most excited about the arena.

It will be the only source of reliable extrinsic rewards through competitive gameplay, which is one reason why arena-modes have destroyed open-world PvP in every single open-world game which has introduced them.

@knut-skallagrim said in My friends don't want to play anymore (griefing):

I've found myself some griefers who kept spawnkilling me and my friend without us having anything (anymore) in the ship, all while it was sinking aswell (very sad picture), and we didn't chase anyone since we were coming back from our first voyage. We saw them just in time, had basically no loot just a couple of chests and were nearby an outpost and went straight to sell, those guys come and kill us, once is fine, twice is ok... 8 times when 5 of them on the ship spawnkilling you got family problems, so here are my 2 cents
The game is too punishing when you lose your ship against other players, in pve it is completely fine since there are ways to prevent that or to have a fair fight somehow, but if your ship gets sunk by the umpteenth galleon that has such easy life vs the sloop you can probably say bye bye to hours of playing and that is way too bad tbh, bad in a way that it incourages people to play and behave as bad guys just cause they know how much its bad (the bullied became the bully syndrome and all that), one should lose a percentage of the loot, but still gain something out of the time spent (other than the so fond memories of getting spawnkilled and that glowing green ship). So if you get sunk by PLAYERS you (the loser) should get something like 25% of the loot the moment they sell it themselves, and even higher percentage if their crew size is bigger (and they get 75% as maximum payout with stolen loot which is fine i guess) OR when it despawns in sea. This way its ofc incouraged to sell and fight for the loot to gain 100% but it is not a complete drawback the moment you get your bum ganged (lets face it the problem is when a crew of 4 noobs crush his galleon into your lil sloop), and at least its not complete wasted time. For me its fine really since i'm just noob at the game and when i'll get good it will prolly be harder to be boarded and i like to play aggressively myself, but i understand those who want to play safe and don't have a whole day to sink if the voyage went badly for one reason or the other. I got plenty of friends like that, friends i would like to keep playing with this awesome game and i want to defend them aswell, and all in all i think they're right. If a crew of same size fights for my loot for me its fine, if i could get back 1/4 of its prize even if i played it badly it would be awesome, but if i get killed by a crew 1,5 or twice my size or even worse an alliance then their prizes should be nerfed (and mine preserved). That's how i think should be a "super fair" game, i like the risk of losing the loot, thats what makes the game thrilling and the scouting role so useful, but there should be ways, even a bare minimum, to address the difference of crew sizes since not everyone has a 4 manned crew
And since there seems to be people doing this even when there are no loots, then the solution is that those griefing themselves become the loot.
There should be a way to contain this kind of players by triggering a mission to chase them down serverwide, if they sink same ship too many times in a row or kill same crew too many times in a row. It might seem ludicrous but we need an enormous white flag as item, i know it sounds weird but i act as if anyone was enemy and this is for a simple thing, ships used flags to communicate so there should be a way to raise it and at least show that you are not gonna attack anyone, then ofc if you hit while you are using the white flag then it will automatically switch to the pirate flag and the game itself could trigger missions to chase the pirates using the flag off the map, everyone chasing off a pirate flag galleon would get loot by killing it and the loot amount would ofc grow if they were big grief..erm..pirates and etcetera etcetera. Who wants the pvp gets the pvp, who wants to kill griefers gets to kill the griefers, who wants to have just fun and has a little crew at least ain't back to square 1 when a team of 4 nebs decide that yes, galleon is quicker than sloop and that yes, that makes them pro at the game

Just no.

This is for @bababooey too and a lot of other players.

No matter what, someone spawning camping you for 5 hours, 8 days, 20 weeks, or for all eternity, it is not Greifing. I don't care how much time was spent doing it.

By choose to respawn you are deciding to engage and try to fight back. If you don't want to be spawn camped. Scuttle.

Also I hope you all understand what spawn camping really is. Its where someone dies IMMEDIATELY after spawning or while spawning. Not the one where you actually spawn in, run to a location and fight THEN die again.

Again I care not for length of time. By not scuttling you are choosing to be spawn camped. Yes I am blaming the victim. It is your fault that you are being spawn camped. Scuttle your boat.

Next to the players arguing about a Galleon rolling up on your 2man sloop or even solo sloop.

You do realize the only players who complain about that being imbalanced are the PvE Community right? PvP players CHASE 4man galleons in 2 man sloops ALL THE FREAKING TIME. You know what we get called? The 4man crew calls the smaller 2man sloop crew, GREIFERS, TOXIC, TRASH, and so many other things.

PvP'ers have experience with everything in the game. Everyday we get better, wiser, and learn more and more about the mechanics of the game. Why? Knowledge is power. Ability is strength. So many times I've heard in the forums "Yeah I used to complain a lot when I first started playing the game. PvP'ers would always just show up and ruin my day. I played more, learn how to PvP, and really learned how to play the game." They end up agreeing with us.

You can't use "well I we were just a 2man sloop against a galleon." since again PvP'ers are rolling out sinking 4man galleons with 2man sloops. Just admit it and say "we are not good enough at the game so we want a handicap" because thats all it really is.

Learn how to play the game, adapt, pick up some lessons from an actually PvP'er.