Pedro
Quoting myself here 
Griefing (wikipedia definition) is institutionalized in EVE. The EVE cryptospeech definition even tones it back to what everyone else calls ganking /lol.
Denial doesn’t make things go away though, nor does the fact that in a game like EVE griefers “hide in plain sight”.
I’m going to say that I think the ability to gank was always intended otherwise there would have been mechanisms to stop it, not just punish it.
Well, if you are going to fall back on that, then there is no more room for discussion. It isn’t “inane” to note that Eve is a competitive, open-world PvP game where players are intended to irritate, harssass, confront, attack, trick, declare war on, steal from, and dominate each other. In that sense it is a “griefing game” as that is all intended:
Warping across a single star map shared by tens of thousands of fellow ‘capsuleers’ isn’t all that draws people to Eve Online. Ironically, it’s the supreme hostility of that experience, felt in every aspect of CCP’s art design, that’s made the MMOG so intriguing to outsiders and valued to its players. The candy-coated socialism of most MMOGs is nowhere to be found in this space, where everything – freedom, fame, loyalty and survival – has its price. Nothing is certain but death and taxes – the cloning and insurance companies see to that.
“Eve is very dark,” confirms creative director Torfi Frans Ólafsson. “It’s harsh. It is supposed to be unforgiving. The original designers played a lot of Ultima Online, which was a fantastic sandbox game, and it allowed you to be very devious and very immoral in the way that you played. What they loved about it is that player killers, the griefers – people who just went around and killed other people – became so unpopular that other people banded together. Good started fighting evil, and without true evil you can’t have true good. So you had these bands of righteous people chasing player killers, and those player killers were the original Eve designers; they created a game about that mechanic.”
So yes, if you consider anyone who forces unwanted interaction on you a “griefer”, then Eve is full of them as the game was built by player killers and griefers to specifically enable that gameplay. But that isn’t an interesting point. I am more taking issue with your claim of your definition that most Eve players “[derive] pleasure primarily or exclusively from the act of annoying other users” as per your Wikipedia definition. I have rarely seen that in my years playing Eve. That is anecdotal and maybe reflects where I have played the game, but I really have seen no evidence such behaviour is widespread.
I find that after all the years, these semantic arguments bore me though. Just define griefer however you want - it might make discussion harder and more confusing, but you can use the term however you choose.
Faylee
Griefers are a significant factor in how new players experience EVE.
And EVE players have been happy about this since well before Elena here was born.
One of the things I look for when I check out EVE again (which I do every year or two) is if people still suggest that a good way to get started in EVE is for new players to strike up a conversation with people who just ganked them. This is supposedly a way to get PvP advice and perhaps even ISK /lol.
It’s a torturer’s technique: tell the victim “I have to do this, but you choose whether it’s on the left side or the right side” /lol.
Some people don’t mind. Some do. For example I don’t personally care about being griefed, but I don’t play with griefers. How will “poor Elena” ever find a Corp?
CCP haven’t cared in the past - their mantra is the same as the players’: “EVE is a sandbox, so it’s not our fault, and it’s not our responsibility”.
I don’t know or care if EVE’s “low retention rate” is the same as “EVE is losing customers” (it’s one factor among many). But if EVE wants to increase the retention rate, EVE needs to welcome kinds of players that have been deliberately driven away on the past.
Faylee, Pedro
I could provide examples of being griefed, but then I know (100%) that someone will call me a whiner.
And nobody will point out just how stupid that is.
Here’s something indirect:
I last started playing about two weeks before Alphas were made available (I started with a trial, and converted it to an Alpha).
At the time, CODE had a representative permanently in Rookie Help, threatening negative consequences if they didn’t buy a full-price mining license.
As far as I know, nobody (not even the chat moderators, who are ISD or something like it) cared about the effect this might have on people who don’t like that style of play. They learn that not only is ruthless oppression of weaker players possible, it’s CCP-supported, and it starts in the cradle.
Tragicomic.
There’s a block button for a reason. ISD shouldn’t have allowed that though in my opinion.
Ganking and griefing are not the same thing. Except in EVE’s bittervet cryptospeech.
They are both well defined terms. When you see them used in wikipedia, you know they are using the standard definitions.
Seriously?
Drac
I never lie in forums (which doesn’t make me immune to mistakes of course)
To be exact it probably wasn’t 23/7, but it felt like it.
The CODE guys didn’t even understand what they were doing. And you can’t blame them. Anti-rookie play (and forum behavior) had been the norm for years.
Players were still proud to be “selecting the best of the best of the best” for EVE.
BTW: The overall impression was still reasonably positive (perhaps more than it should have been).
“Magic School Bus Mike” was active at that time (and still is AFAIK). EVE Uni and “Red vs Blue” were mentioned fairly often. Those three made up for a lot
I believe you and it fits with my thoughts on certain CODE players.
Some of these players got very upset about changes that softened the game in their opinion and went into scorched earth mode to punish CCP for daring to balance ‘their game’. Their objective was to attack CCP by removing the life blood of the game new casual players who paid with real money.
The player you mentioned was one of them. And I bet CCP left him in that channel in spite of people flagging him.
That CODE player knew exactly what he was doing.
She also deliberately ignores arguments and explanations, calling it “crypto speech”, simply because she has nothing to say about that.
It’s like flat-earthers ignoring arguments made by physicists because it’s “crypto speech”.
Nobody redefines common, well-defined words in order to more effectively convey the truth.
The drift in EVE vocabulary says a lot about EVE players as a group.
Using it to divert a discussion says a lot about the person doing so.
BTW - I would use softer terminology if it worked. I increase the “temperature” of the words I use only when I need to.
Our vocabulary is part of EVE’s culture.
Look up the word. Culture.
Learn how it works.
How it develops.
How important it is.
You’re like a flat-earther telling a physicist he’s using “crypto-speech” so you can ignore him.
Solstice
You should consider what your posts mean before hitting the reply button. Perhaps you should read them first?
Sure, as soon as you stop using dumb excuses just so you can ignore what people are saying. Pedro up there is smarter than most of us combined and you don’t get to insult and ignore him by throwing around your ■■■■■■■■ about “crypto-speech” just because you have nothing valid to respond.
We’re not doing “crypto-speech”.
It’s part of our culture.
It makes perfect sense.
It’s perfectly valid.
Look up the word and learn what it means, you flat-earther.
My observation is that it’s in the minds of those who hate ganking, that ganking and griefing are the same.
Even looking through the wikipedia article, it becomes apparent that the meaning griefer is not entirely consistent over the various MMOs. While there is griefing in EVE, people coming from more protective games may well apply the term to valid game activities here. It took me a few months to understand how this differed from wow (or second life)
The talk page of the article is quite interesting.
In the EVE forums, I usually see it the other way around - as in the posts I reacted to earlier.
It seems likely our experiences differ a little though. I’ve spent more time in MMO “free-fire” PvP servers than PvE servers.
My experience in PvP servers is that everyone knows what “griefer” means, and don’t conflate it with “ganker”. Exceptions occur, but generally only during discussion of specific incidents (is two kills and ten minutes wasted griefing? Some people think so, but not many or special cases ( for example “graveyard camping” in structured PvP areas is generally unpopular among the victims) .
I remember “ganking” morphing into “griefing” more often on PvE servers which have limited “open world” PvP. But it’s generally small-scale - perhaps because the game provider is likely to make such environments optional.
The normal “baseline” meaning of “griefer” is in the first sentence of the wikipedia article (slightly paraphrased):
“A player who deliberately irritates and harasses other players within the game”.
Clearly:
BTW I think it makes sense to limit boring PvP, and I think one-sided PvP is boring. But that’s a different discussion. Boring play is problematic because people don’t generally like to pay to be bored - but it’s the exact same problem as “grinding” for resources. Lots of things are fun, or at least bearable, in reasonable amounts, but unacceptable in excess.
Don’t project your mindset on others. One-sided PvP is only boring for you, because you decide to be the victim and blame others for all your misery, instead of playing the prey part properly. I personally have fun with one-sided PvP in both roles, hunter and prey, and I’m not alone.
EDIT: About prey, in EvE you actually can properly play that role, because the game is balanced around PvP. I would guess in more restrictive and PvE oriented games, you have little ways to avoid being mocked by others, except crying to the mods.
Tipa
Please read the whole paragraph.
There’s a limit to how much I should be expected to tune a post like that to protect against “cherry picking”.
That’s the game - open-world competition for resources and power. If that turns some off, better than learn that earlier on. They will be happier overall.
That said, rookie chat probably should not be used for that purpose. Perhaps mentioning that permits exists and are legal and valid game play, but not selling them. That seems to be edging on the “taking advantage of newer player’s inexperience” provision of the rookie griefing rules. I’m sure someone eventually put a stop to it, probably as soon as the next Monday morning when the GMs got to the weekend tickets.
I never said such things don’t happen and I don’t disbelieve you when you say you have seen things like this happen. But they really are outliers, a tiny minority of what goes on in Eve Online and are against the rules. I’ve seen multiple players get warnings or sanctions for inadvertently interacting with new players in protected starter systems and it is something CCP takes seriously. Orders of magnitude more players are bored out, or confused out of the game or decide it isn’t for them than are “griefed” out of the game by genuine bad actors.
I’m not sure what more you want CCP to do.
Most of the “griefing” people say goes on in Eve Online is just players realizing a full-time, PvP sandbox game experience complete with loss and spontaneous interactions with other players isn’t a good fit with the expectations for the game. Perhaps there a more things CCP can do to align expectations and ease players into the competitive game more effectively, but fundamentally, Eve just isn’t a game for everyone, which is perfectly fine and normal. No game has universal appeal and the best games don’t try to.