Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Griefers on PvE Realms?

This is something I’ve never really understood fully but I hear it semi-regularly in guild chat about so-and-so horde person being a "real griefer". I don’t believe they mean in the sense that this person is killing your quest npcs or destroying all the boars in the area so you can’t complete a quest. They really mean griefer in that the person repeatedly will kill you even if you are 40 levels lower than them.

This is what I don’t understand. We play on a RP realm not a PvP realm. If you opted to be attacked by the opposing faction, they will attack you. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you.

I’m a little more understanding of the frustration of killing npcs or mobs but really is it griefing? There are 70 billion quests to do. If I can’t turn one in here, I’ll just skip away and come back when I’ve completed something else. Yes, it is annoying but most the time they’re not doing it to hassle you. It’s to force other 70s out to play and the only way to alert the enemy to your presence is to attack town guards. If your quest guy jumps into the fray they’re not going to let him kill them just so you can do your quest. It’s an annoyance but a temporary one. You can always count on these world PvPers on getting bored and moving on in short order.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not condone the practice of hassling lower players. I just feel that many players take these events as a personal attack. Like the enemy decided, “Joe the Dwarf is having too easy a time, lets go mess it up”. There are evil people like that in the world but I’m willing to guess that chances are that most of the time they just were looking to start a ruckus with the opposing faction. You just happened to be there.

I may sound a little callus but I started my WoW life on a PvP server before there were battlegrounds. On that server the motto was: “You’re red, you’re dead”. You couldn’t opt out of PvP. It didn’t matter if you were level 20 or level 60. You had to quest in the buddy system and keep more aware of your surroundings at all times. More than once you died because the guy two levels higher than you decided to wait to attack you while you were in combat with a mob. Resurrecting was a waiting game to see if the person waiting to ambush you would get bored and move on or if your cavalry would show up first to help you.

That was the place griefing happened. Where a person would select you out and do what they could to ensure you couldn’t complete what you were there for. Where your corpse was camped and there was nothing you do could about it. Your game play wasn’t temporarily paused, it could completely grind to a halt while you battled against the opposing team for the right to quest there or attempted to try to get away to find new hunting grounds.

It’s due to my background of leveling two characters to 60 on this PvP server that I do not get the “He’s a griefer” talk on my current RP server. If you flagged PvP, you opted to be attacked. If you rezzed while still flagged, you’re still open to be attacked. Sure that hordie could be a nice guy and let you go your merry way but what makes you think he should? Is it really so hard to wait five minutes for your flag to fall off before you resurrect?

The point I’m trying to make is world PvP attacks are rarely personal. Don’t blame the other side if you opted to in to a system that allows them to kill you. Likewise don’t blame them if you continue to come back while flagged and die. YOU are making the decision to be attacked! If there are some pesky enemies fouling up your questing area, find some other place to play. Chances are they will be bored quickly and you can come back and finish what you were working on.

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