MMO Weekly: Griefing Stories

02 Feb 2010 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

I spend a good amount of time reading Reddit; I find it to be an interesting online community, and sometimes the topics that come up are really unusual and intriguing. This week, someone posted a thread asking “What's the most devious or infuriating instance of griefing in an MMO you've ever experienced or inflicted?” Much to my surprise, the thread really took off, and not only were the stories funny, but they often linked to elsewhere on the net. The end result was a bucket-full of funny tales of virtual pain and anguish. Ah, good times.

Anyway, this inspired me. I culled some of the best stories from the thread, sniffed around a bit on the old intertubes, found a few other gems, and mashed the whole mess together here. Without further ado, enjoy the virtual pain:

The Realtor: “A friend of mine played UO where houses which were apparently an expensive thing to get. He would hold open houses under the pretense of selling his house and kill people once they entered the house.” (by NotKumar.)

The Horse Whisperer: Here's a Age of Conan vid we've talked about on IncGamers before. I'd argue it's the most fun you can have with a horse.

The Fake Attack: “I used to do this in UO way back in the day before they cracked down on body looting in town. Whenever you spoke to another character your speech would appear on screen for everyone to see. So I changed the colour of my speech to the blood red that would automatically appear whenever you attacked another player outside of town.

Basically my character would just be running around in town saying PlayerXXX is attacking you To the naive other person they would actually think they were being attacked then proceed to attack you. They would end up getting killed by the guards because they wound up being the aggressors.

Looted sooo much stuff from this trick. If any of you fell for this.....I'm sorry. But man did I get paid.” (by RunAwayPancake)

Sloooooow Poison: “About ten years ago the prime levelling-up/stat-rolling area on Arctic MUD was the Solace sewers. Sometimes a griefer would come by and pkill all the newbies and low-level players. So I would log on my cleric and summon the griefer to a little-known room behind the waterfall. Since the room had no exits (you had to type a keyword to get out), the griefer could not flee. Then I would blind them (can't recite a recall scroll), poison them, and leave. It would take about 10 ticks (minutes) of frustration for them to die. Later I would come back and check their corpse for any interesting loot.” (by Etienne Valejo)

Even Slower Poison: “In World of Warcraft, I followed a low-level character (a Warlock) with my high-level Rogue. The only item I had equipped was the weakest dagger in the game, and it was in my off-hand, so as not to kill them.

I then proceeded to apply Crippling Poison (slows movement speed drastically) and Mind-numbing (slows casting speed drastically) with a move called Shiv, and keep these debuffs applied for extremely long periods of time. This would essentially force them to try and quest/level at ultra-slow paces.” (by ShyGuysOnStilts)

Rich Man, Poor Man: “Back when I played WoW, I'd inevitably be passing through Orgrimmar to finish off some quest or other - by which point I'm hungry or could do with a break. And there'd be beggars - players asking for gold in pathetically cropped txtspk. It's a minor irritation, really - but if they insist on doing it, it can't hurt to mess with them a bit.

So I walk up to them, tell them I've got more money than I need and they're welcome to it (a flagrant lie). I open the trading window with them, slap an arbitrarily large quantity of gold in the trade window and not hit confirm. Then I'd leave the computer, go and have dinner, have a shower, make a cup of tea or do something IRL that needed to be done. By the time I got back, there'd be a log of a few minutes of profuse thanks followed by increasing annoyance, occasionally followed by abuse. But what do I care? I wasn't sat at the computer, and I was tying up some fool's time that they'd otherwise spend bugging people.

As far as I could tell, the record tease lasted about fifteen minutes.” (by Astatine)

A-Holes Attend A Funeral: You know, funerals are sad, solemn events. That's why you and your guild should show up, kill, and camp everyone there.

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