|
A Pinball Wizard posted:The simplest griefs are the best: back in Ragnarok Online, an acolyte or priest's portals could be set to go pretty much anywhere you'd been, and people would go mad when you dropped them. I had a friend who basically only had one portal slot set to something useful, the other ones were set to dead tiles that you couldn't get out of (before items that teleported you around were easily attained- or at least common knowledge), and he lucked out once, occasionally maps were 'down' and you couldn't access them normally, but he had a warp there and would literally just send people into their doom. I like to imagine their game crashed after taking that portal, as it tried to load an inaccessible area, and then when they could finally log in again hours later, wonder where the gently caress they are and how to get out. Early Ragnarok Online most people didn't go very far, I knew many people who would grind 20 levels in a single dungeon, only going to the closest town for healing items and to sell junk. Simply going from Prontera to Morroc (a relatively easy and quick trip) was unknown to many, and going from a wooded European style area and loading in the desert confused more than its fair share of new players. Comic fucked around with this message at 14:35 on May 13, 2012 |
#
?
May 13, 2012 14:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 15:27 |
|
|
WAR FOOT posted:If you really want to grief DotA2, just join any game and comment on how similar it is to LoL. Easier than that. Change your steam name to "League of Legends Pro" and join a game. Bonus points if you feed.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 14:34
|
|
|
waspinator posted:Easier than that. Change your steam name to "League of Legends Pro" and join a game. Extra bonus points if you play terribly as well.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 14:39
|
|
|
Disclaimer: Ragnarok Online is a lovely grindy MMO full of weeabos and pedophiles and is surviving on microtransactions so please do not play it. Ragnarok Online is one of those games that, after playing for a while, you realized was built for griefing. All the gameplay mechanics make it very easy to make other players very angry. 1. The mob train This one is a very simple grief and a lot of new players even do this one accidentally without realizing it! Mix two simple rules, get one easy grief stew: - In RO enemies have no 'leash'. You can have an enemy chase you for hours and it won't give up. - Enemies also have no 'aggro'. The rule is simply attack whatever is closest. Therefore a clever player would soon realize he could drag 30+ enemies behind him while looking for an unsuspecting target! Of course, you can prevent this from happing to you by having a Fly Wing, an item which teleports you to a random location nearby. Ironically, my favorite target for this type of grief, the high-level wizard, often carried a highly popular item known as a teleport clip, which is basically a fly wing that lasts forever, saving you a lot of money and carrying weight. Unfortunately, unlike a fly wing, it has the specific drawback of not being able to be used if you're casting. Guess what wizards do a lot that for some reason can't be cancelled in RO?  So imagine you're a wizard and you just started warmin up your fireball or whatever and all of a sudden someone runs straight for you with a couple dozen pissed off enemies in tow: you're hosed, you know it, but there's nothing you can do but shout profanities into your chat box in exasperation.2. The dead branch Nothing made me realize RO was a game for griefing more than this item. This loving item. The dead branch was a pretty common item that, when used, summoned a random enemy - anything from the lowest level slime to very dangerous high level enemies that any player in their right mind would teleport away from as fast as their fat fingers would let them. These enemies persisted until the server reset, which in RO's case, was almost never. There are so many ways to use a dead branch griefingly! You can go to a newbie zone and summon a bunch of strong enemies, shutting it down until high level players come clean it up. You can go to a bot-heavy map and shut down someone's item-farming business. But no, these aren't enough. You see, if you were a individual who obtained a large amount of wealth through shady dealings like me, you had access to a lot of dead branches. A LOT of dead branches. On my last day, I bought every dead branch I could. I must have had thousands of them, I know I had as many as I could carry eight times over. I went to the smallest, most crowded map there is, and started unleashing the chaos. Every square inch of that map became a wriggling, deadly mass of enemies. Any player who entered died instantly. (I managed to stay alive because using a Fly Wing grants you temporary invulnerability, while still allowing you to use more dead branches.) The best part of this grief is that after some trips back to town to pick up more branches, I had created so many enemies that the server crashed. It's always nice to leave on a good note, and knowing that I had stopped close to a thousand players from playing for a couple hours was good enough for me. The best part about this grief though is that the game developers never removed the dead branch. It still works this way to this very day. In fact, a rarer item called the Bloody Branch was created which always creates a very powerful monster is now buyable...with actual money. 3. The death penalty Doing grief #1 on a high-level player is it's own satisfaction. Death in RO is very punishing. When a player dies, they're sent back to whatever town they saved in, which without a priest to give you a portal (which can cost a good amount of money itself), could be up to fifteen minutes of walking to get back to where you were. (Also many routes to high-level grinding areas had lots of annoying and dangerous enemies which could also kill you, sending you back to start over again.) But the best part of getting someone killed is the EXP loss. Oh, the precious, precious EXP loss. 1% of a level may not sound like much, but at higher levels this can be as much as an hour of constant grinding lost from a single death. This EXP loss literally made a lot of good friends quit the game, since at higher levels that 1% per hour is actually achieved by doing risky things like killing a dozen enemies at a time - play it safe and you're looking at more like 1% every 2 or 3 hours! And if you're not max level yet you can forget about trying to kill some bosses - you're pretty much guaranteed to die several times over and it just isn't worth losing all that EXP you grinded out. So Manslaughter, you may ask, how do I extract the EXP out of a player's soul intentionally and savor their tears? Why it's quite easy! Do grief #1. However, the most skilled players are too keen to fall for this trick...so it's time to resort to bannable offenses. There are certain maps in RO which have no aggressive enemies on them which are scenic or newbie-friendly maps. Sometimes, players will go AFK on these maps for some reason or another, expecting to be fully safe. In this game? Yeah right. Simply find another player and use the dead branch in grief #2 until you get something good then run. Dead branch enemy proceeds to have it's way with AFK player. 1% exp loss...a good start! Now, you can resurrect players in RO if you're a priest (or have an expensive item called a Yggdrassil Leaf). Resurrecting a player in RO automatically pops them alive - no need to confirm on their end. So what you do is you resurrect them and get them killed a couple dozen times, and they'll come back to their dead corpse with weeks of grinding wasted - and there's no combat log in RO so they'll have no idea who it was or how it happened. 4. The hostage situation Okay, I admit this one isn't so much a grief as much as a strategy for winning, but drat if it isn't frustrating to be on the bad end of. In RO the endgame consists of guild vs guild fights to take over castles called the War of Emperium. These castles function like several maps joined together. The standard strategy to win the WoE is to set up a good defense in your castle at specific choke points, taking out anyone who tries to pass; to take a castle you have to get to the Emperium at the end and kill it. Taking a castle kicks everyone out who isn't in the killing guild. With this rule came a clever strategy: assault a castle and kill the defenders, but don't kill the emperium; instead, get it to low health and set up your defense. If the enemy tries to come back, you can just kill it and kick them out! Manage to coordinate two characters in different guilds that are very fast specifically designed to kill emperiums and you can prevent an entire guild from taking their castle back for the entire war. 5. The bosses This isn't a grief either but just how the game is but god drat if it isn't the stupidest thing ever so it deserves a spot here. EVERY BOSS in RO is only one SINGLE enemy on the server that often had a several hour respawn timer. This means that the boss was up for grabs by ANYBODY so good luck ever killing one. Also the bosses wandered around their map randomly so you had to search an entire map to find a boss. Also, once players had figured out the exact amount of time it took bosses to respawn, they had a huge advantage over other players since they could just go to where the boss is the minute it spawns instead of wandering around looking for it for an hour. 6. The priest All of the griefs mentioned above (and the portal grief mentioned by other posters) wouldn't be possible if it weren't for this class. Priests had a multitude of abilities which hosed with gameplay. You can portal players to bumfuck nowhere, sure. But the priest also had three helpful spells and one debuff spell: heal, blessing, agility up, and agility down. The three helpful spells normally were used to make friendly players stronger...but for some  reason, the RO engine let you use these spells on monsters. While a player is fighting an enemy, you can sit there and spam heals on it until the player dies. You can cast agility up and blessing on enemies, making them stronger and move faster. Of course, agility down can be used on enemies, but this has the unintended side effect of making them unable to be grouped up with other enemies and killed in groups. Teleporting around and agi downing random enemies pissed off players a lot more than it should.7. The game Overall though like any bad game if you played Ragnarok Online legitimately you were griefing yourself. Why? Because the game is hilariously easy to bot and the simplicity of enemies and lack of effort on the part of the game master team and the fact that almost all the good items had a 1 in 10,000 drop chance that people kill each other in real life for practically put a big sticker on their game that said 'use automated programs to play me!' Seriously, just look at this video. Every player you see disappearing/appearing is a bot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4BMnBWcyMU And then since the game is so esoteric you can whip up a 'bot site' that gets hit by google and idiots will download your 'bot' that you made (which requires your username and password of course!) which 'crashes' (sends the information they typed in to your hotmail) and then you can harvest the accounts like delicious grief-candy.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 15:25
|
|
|
Manslaughter posted:2. The dead branch There was a time in which you could use this in town. Where all the merchants would sit in lines AFK as people purchased their potions and such, possibly going hours without checking on the character. You don't even need a great deal of dead branches, just one good one that doesn't get taken down particularly fast after releasing it in the midst of the town plaza. Seeing Prontera scattered with merchant corpses knowing you've just prevent someone from profiting for the next x hours until they log in wondering what killed them in the middle of town was a great feeling. (Ragnarok Online is terrible do not play it)
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 17:28
|
|
|
The only thing worth doing in RO is going on high rate private servers and pulling off #4.  Even that is debatable.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 18:34
|
|
|
Manslaughter posted:2. The dead branch This one is extra-fun when you realize that RO monsters can level up. So if you get a sufficiently dangerous monster, you can feed it bodies until it reaches level 99 and becomes even faster, stronger and tougher. Or just let it happen naturally.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 18:55
|
|
|
That kind of begs the question: Is WoE timed? If it isn't, couldn't you theoretically get to the hostage situation point and then spam dead branches in the room with to make it an inhospitable hellhole to both teams? I wish I'd known that game was so griefable when I looked at and dismissed it years and years ago.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 19:30
|
|
|
bucketmouse posted:That kind of begs the question: Is WoE timed? If it isn't, couldn't you theoretically get to the hostage situation point and then spam dead branches in the room with to make it an inhospitable hellhole to both teams? WoE ocurred at set times throughout the week. I think it was something like 1-2 hours on wednesday and friday or something like that. I recall griefing with a sage spell called abracadabra, maybe someone with a better memory of this awful game can explain it as I don't recall the specifics. It was kind of like the random effects you get from playing a wild mage in baldurs gate 2.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 20:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 15:27 |
|
|
I guess this would be a perfect place for a story from yesterday. I'm sure everyone has heard of the new mod for ArmA 2 that's really caught on, Day Z. For the uninformed, Day Z is basically "that zombie game" everyone always discusses when they talk about a dream zombie apocalypse game. It's a large, open world multiplayer mod for the military sim ArmA 2. It's clunky, has a bad UI and has a learning cliff rather that a curve, but this mod has put sales through the roof. The idea of the mod is simply to survive. The undead are everywhere in towns, but towns are where you need to go to scrounge around for guns, ammo, food and water. Yes, you need to eat and drink to survive of course. If the looming threat of starvation, dehydration and hordes of vicious, flesh-eating zombies wasn't enough, the biggest threat in the game is other players. There is no limits on PVP. Any player can kill any other player, whether in a desperate attempt to get food or water they so badly need or just because they want your things. Hell, there doesn't even need to be a reason really. When you die, that's it. You start over. All of your things stay on your corpse and you respawn somewhere at random with the near-useless starting loadout. This game is mean. Very mean. That doesn't stop some players from trying to be nice though. This is where our story proper begins. Having found a salvageable bus, a few goons were hanging out in a town and trying to fix it up enough to drive it. That's when we got word that some of the other pubbie players had got a helicopter working. What do they do with their amazing helicopter(armed with two powerful machineguns mind you)? They play "airline" and start ferrying people around and generally spreading the wealth and fun of having quick, easy transport in a game where the next town over could literally be a half-hour run away. We wanted that helicopter. We had a plan. Simpa, another goon who didn't have the feared [LLJK] tag that seemed to scare other players on instinct at this point, managed to convince the helicopter to come pick him up. Our plan was that he'd approach the helicopter but not get in. I'd wait in the bushes nearby and shoot the pilot, at which point he'd hop into the pilot seat and fly away, effectively taking all of the passengers hostage as there were no parachutes. Like all good heists, it didn't go as planned. The helicopter landed and when Simpa approached, I shot the pilot in the head. Before Simpa could get in another man leaped into the pilot seat, who I also shot. One of the other passengers leaped out of the back and managed to shoot Simpa in the chest before I could shoot him, causing Simpa to bleed out pretty fast. A man jumped on the gunner seat next and I shot him in the face, but now I had to reload. As I did, a new pilot took over and managed to fly the chopper into the sky, retreating to the northwest. If we couldn't have it, nobody could. Having reloaded, I took aim at the chopper, right below the main rotor. I fired and saw a metallic flash where the bullet impacted the rotor's workings. I feared that nothing happened, until I saw the rotors beginning to slow, then whir to a stop in mid air. The entire chopper with all of it's remaining passengers plummeted from the sky and slammed into the ground, exploding in a massive fireball and killing everyone instantly. The entire field was now covered in dead bodies and wreckage, I had ended the zombie apocalypse's friendliest public transportation system essentially just because I felt like it.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2012 20:42
|
|
