I've played a lot of HON, which has a solution of sorts - if you're good enough at the game, your automatic rating will increase, and the game will give you team mates who also have high ratings, none of which can be griefers, or their rating would be lower.

If you're new to the game however, you will start off with a low rating and be grouped up with griefers, so... it's a double edged sword.

Its the most fun to be a griefer if you can bug other players and be good at the game to boot. So design the game to accommodate these players but not encourage their play style. Encourage proper teamplay gameplay style with perks and incentives for good team play (keeping each other alive).

In a team deathmatch, ensure players on the same side can "team up" to accomplish goals together separate from griefers on their side. Make failure personal and accomplishments shared amongst those that have accomplished it. In combat the first goal should always be survival. As a team, it should be designed that players can survive longer when they're taking care of each other. A player should never feel underfoot even if they're trying to be. Griefers will fail at survival first if the game design relies on team play since their lone wolf game play style isn't designed to succeed. It shouldn't be fun to be a griefer.

To boot, make it easy for players to teach griefers to play well. Tactical requests should exist in every team/co-op game. The ping system is dated and useless. A player should be able to choose another player(s) on their side and issue a basic tactical requests (waypoint location, engage target, retreat or aggro suppression). Positive reinforcement like incentives for success (success and incentive decided by the player) encourage "proper gameplay" while not reprimanding someone for deciding how they want to have fun. A basic ignore system (like chat ignore) to deal with tactical spammers should do the trick. You don't need to choose a leader you need the choice of following good leadership.

An important thing to keep in mind is that griefing can be very difficult to define. Your description of "rambo players" is a perfect example of this, as skilled players will appear very rambo-esque to the less experienced. In L4D, one of my friends and I would often blitz to the end of a level, trying to not stop for anything. We won tons of games doing this, but unfortunately our other friends thought we were griefing because they couldn't keep up. One might assume that we were abandoning them, yet somehow both of us always made it to the safehouse together. We definitely helped eachother, it was just too fast paced for others to handle. With this in mind, I would be careful about automatic anti-grief systems as they can actually punish your skilled, hardcore players. Alienating them is a huge mistake.

An important thing to keep in mind is that griefing can be very difficult to define. Your description of "rambo players" is a perfect example of this, as skilled players will appear very rambo-esque to the less experienced. In L4D, one of my friends and I would often blitz to the end of a level, trying to not stop for anything. We won tons of games doing this, but unfortunately our other friends thought we were griefing because they couldn't keep up. One might assume that we were abandoning them, yet somehow both of us always made it to the safehouse together. We definitely helped eachother, it was just too fast paced for others to handle. With this in mind, I would be careful about automatic anti-grief systems as they can actually punish your skilled, hardcore players. Alienating them is a huge mistake.

Well, a team is only as strong as the weakest link.
As the saying goes

So you really should of cut the pace down and helped the weaker members.. thats what a team is.
It's another issue tho about getting teamed with equally skilled players.

Hi, i have the ABSOLUTE IDEA that can make all games GRIEF IMMUNE.

Bot multiplaying :

Forbid player from playing a multiplaying game, instead a bot is made that inpersonates the player,
the bot learns slowly by watching the player, and starts using the same moveset,
a heristic function could allow extracting the player goals, to allow behaving like him.

For example the player in his seperate machine is satan that has killed everyone, but
on the machines of all other players he is a kind loving person that helps everyone like jesus.

The bot will be immune to all behaviors that are considered griefing or not prethought by the programmers
and thus wont learn them.

There you go, you have your grief immune game.

Bot Battle efficiency: ( Symbol "->" : Pwn )

Hardcoded bots -> Humans -> Human emulating bots.

Hardcoded bots always play better than humans because they know all game rules and have 0 lag, thus they are gods.
Human emulating bots follow a flawed algorithm that a flawed human taught it (Only bots can play perfect).

Advantages:
1) Unlimited amount of players. Can clone same bot.
2) They are still living organisms, its like your dog, it cannot talk to you, but it can play with you,
and do some predefined commands.

Disadvantages:
1) Poor chat dictionary, bots would only be apply to communicate with 5-10 icons (happy, i help you, need help, i leave).

How will infuence the gameplay ? will it make it funnier ?

One might assume that we were abandoning them, yet somehow both of us always made it to the safehouse together. We definitely helped eachother, it was just too fast paced for others to handle. With this in mind, I would be careful about automatic anti-grief systems as they can actually punish your skilled, hardcore players. Alienating them is a huge mistake.

Your talking about specifically co-op gaming with L4D. Or the comp stomp in other games. What you're describing is classic griefing gameplay, you are suppose to work as a team to accomplish a goal. You are dropping the rest of the team under the assumption that you're "higher skill" (chosen tactic to win) is more important then the experience of the players your suppose to be playing with.

The focus of the design I'm talking about discourages this because the type of gameplay your describing is exactly what ruins a co-opertive gaming experience. Play the single player game if you have no interest in enjoying playing with others. The game clearly isn't designed to encourage you to show other players this "better way to play" (the tactic of running to the end) and thats the flaw of the game not you. If it had a simple waypoint system like I suggested you could simply place the waypoint for the other players and enjoy the game the way you suggest. Showing others that this is a superior way to play. Leading by example. Because other players could see your persistent stats of this "better way to play" from past games and you can earn the respect of other players. Giving them a reason to follow you.

I'm not discouraging a skilled player from team play, they're should always be a good sharp shooter in a team but they should be sighting threats and clearing priority targets. Good tactical players should be issuing targets to their team and moving the team safely to the waypoint, using cover, suppression, flanking and prioritizing threats. Good operational player should be able to create objective waypoints to obtain victory in the mission goal (if the game doesn't handle this) and a good strategist should be able to take account for the resources at hand and being obtained and use them as efficiently as possible, allocating them (as weapons, tools, etc) between the groups and creating goals for the teams to achieve (again if the game doesn't handle this already). The last tier is the peoples that populate the game, they should be the defining factor as to why the fighting is happening in the first place and technically could be player driven as well (in an ungodly complex game) these peoples could decide on goals for the strategist to achieve. Every group of players in a game can have a good structure, it should be up to the players to quickly define that structure and achieve the game's goals.

"Authority should be defined by the people that govern it and not by the threat of force." -Barbie, Toy Story 3

What you're describing is classic griefing gameplay, you are suppose to work as a team to accomplish a goal. You are dropping the rest of the team under the assumption that you're "higher skill" (chosen tactic to win) is more important then the experience of the players your suppose to be playing with.[/quote]

But that is not true, as we clearly defined in this topic that griefers don't play to win. We had a winning strategy, just not one that everyone was competent at. Until you consider a wider array of possible ways to play your game (and not to mention, agree on a definition of griefing), designing a way to prevent griefing will either be impossible, counter-productive, and/or impact your target audience.

Winning ruthlessly is totally different to griefing. Griefing comes under Byzantine game theory and is a very hard problem. Often griefers don't care if they suffer as a result of their own mischief. I've read of classic griefing situations where griefers passively protested by forming a human wall in a no-PvP area, or intentionally strengthened monsters, or a tutorial guide trapped his noobs in an area full of dragons, or used replicating monsters to crash a server. Their winning scenario can be entirely outside the game, so very hard to counter. Also griefers have been known to use anti-griefing rules against innocents, e.g. making themselves look like the aggrieved party. It's like hacking. Unless you allow people to do basically nothing, there will always be holes. Now detecting them quickly, auditing well enough to track and undo their actions, etc... that may be worthwhile investigating.

Thanks Jeffertitan. I think the only way to accomplish this is to make failing at the game leave a player in a lesser state of responsibility toward achieving the win condition. Keeping a weak player in a state of being weak unless the weak player chooses to seek help and work towards being better. For example, if players are fighting a comp stomp style game and a player is griefing, the offer for other players to help would be turned down, a weak player may turn it down as well unless they understand that their character can be more effective because of accepting help. The key to making this work is to temporarily remove some of the control from the weak player after they agree to this help, like reducing them to a rail shooter with tactically bot controlled movement, maybe auto-aiming targets, or placing them in a spectator only type role with the responsibility of gathering intelligence for the rest of the team. I might give the character boosts as well to keep them alive longer to accomplish more. The change needs to be visually obvious in PVP situations but it still applies. This helps to weed out the newbs from the greifing.

AI coded to target the weak helps to encourage the team to work together and in PVP, weak players can be made more apparent for enemies to target as well. This weeding out the weak method ensures griefers are targeted for straying from the herd, if you will.

Player allocated incentives are important to encourage the community of gamers to handle "what is proper gameplay" themselves. Instead of focusing on players chastising other players (reporting,etc) , we should focus on giving players tools to bring them together. While in the background the game is designed to shake out those that aim to ruin the experience. I think most importantly a game is defined by how it handles a griefer once its been identified.

I'm thinking public display of gamer skill, put the griefer alone in a survival mode match and allow for "active spectators". Maybe let other players spend persistent score points on arming the waves of AI. Or even having players deployed in the waves along side the AI characters. Its fun, if a player is falsely accused its not a big deal and spectating games is getting to be a pretty big deal.

Remove griefing from the equation as much as possible, don't try to work around it.


*EDIT*
Oh, the -1 probably wanted me to solve the issues as well.

The issue I have that needs to be addressed is in regards to the MMO portion of the discussion, as multiplayer is certainly quite different.

Scenarios/Battlegrounds: Why rely on them? Is it because you don't feel you can include enjoyable PvP game aspects without them? If you remove them from your plans you instantly remove the capability to grief within them, either through lack of activity or actual ruining of fun.

What do you do instead? Provide an open world experience where the players can interact in various ways, but not in a FFA PvP atmosphere. FFA PvP is a bad idea for an MMO in our current development world.

"But that kills realism! If I see someone I want to be able to kill them." :: Seriously? It is a game. There needs to be restrictions put into place to ensure the enjoyable aspects of a game. There are several different ways to handle player interaction in an open world environment other than FFA PvP. There is the RvR system established by Dark Age of Camelot which can only truly work if PvP lands and PvE lands are almost always separated, potential for realm invasions is too cool to ignore completely. There are simple faction systems. You could rely on Guild vs Guild combat rather than larger factions if you so choose, but for me the solution is a combination of several different mechanics blended to make an enjoyable, yet still risky game world.

For the solution I have in mind I would prefer to save the details for dedicated teams that would see it through to completion. An evolution from Ultima Online without the FFA PvP problems. Being able to steal is a must for the solution to thrive.