One of the cardinal rules of any MMO is that only opposite factions can kill one another. But it's a hard cruel fact that sometimes, folks in your own faction tick you off. In today's column, we pontificate about how nice it would be to take out some of those people. Read on!

Have you ever been in an instanced PvP match and one player decides to badmouth the rest of his team and completely ignore the objectives of the map, sometimes even resorting to helping the other team? Ever been in a raid and some noob warlock joins your PUG group and pulls the boss, gets the raid wiped, laughs, and then leaves?

Yeah, me too.

Read more of Hillary Nicole's Pokket Says: Killing Your Faction Softly.

This is a reason why I hate most people. I actually would like to see such a button in games, it may actually deter people from being @$*holes, but the problem is if you can only use it once perday, the person could still harass you after you've used it once, and the user wont be able to get the proverbial monkey off their back for 24 hours.

I also wish their was a "punish jerk" button, but it just isn't possible.  You know the first thing that would happen is you would join a raid, someone would view your spec and tell you that you have a point out of place and you need to fix it immediately.  The second you don't agree to rearrange your whole spec on the spot, BAM, you have just been jerk punished.  They then laugh and boot you from the raid. 

Here is another scenario.  I was by myself questing and this ranger shows up in the area and invites me to a group.  I decline because he hasn't spoken to me and I am just finishing up my quest.  He says "WTF??" and then proceeds to pull half a dozen mobs and use one of his abilities to pass the aggro to me.  I don't even have a chance to run and I died.  I was SO pissed that I wanted to fly out to his house Jay and Silent Bob style and bodyslam him off the front porch.  He could have just as easily hit the "punish jerk" button on me because I wanted to solo quietly, or worse, gotten me killed and THEN jerk punished me for extra harassment.

I would love a punish jerk button, but in the hands of those jerks it would just be another tool of harassment.

I can't stand these folks either but don't see how your idea would make things any better. I can definitely see how same of those same wonderful folk could use that for griefing purposes adding a whole new level of frustration.

Best to just blacklist them although with cross server dungeon finders it does make holding these shmucks accountable for their actions hard to accomplish. 

Nice article.

The title got this stuck in my head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKOtzIo-uYw

Before DAoC you could do this easily, because there were no factions, as far as factions are known  today. The guilds were the factions and people made names for themselves on the servers.

Real life has griefers.  Those people who whip into the parking space you've been waiting for, people cut in line, people take all the free samples, people eat food that isn't theirs in the lunch room refrigerator, people go on welfare rather than get a job, people get lost in online worlds rather than call their RL buddies.  I'm sure everyone has wished they had a gun so they could shoot those people from time to time, but you don't because normal people don't shoot other people over parking lots.

There are griefers in video games, but they only have as much control over you as you allow them to have.  At least in video gaming you can log out and go do something else rather than getting your blood pressure up.  Maybe real life needs a "Logout" button more than video games need a "Vaporize Azzhat" button.

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Thats the great thing about battlefield, you may not be able to shoot your  team but a grenade, c4 or a well place rpg will make a building fall on their head!! 1 <3 C4.

It would be abused, yes. But damn it would be so satisfying.

Battleground AFK'ers? POP! @$$hat training your party? POP! Ninja-looter? POP!

One of the reasons I am looking forward to ArcheAge, and liked UO and such in the past, is you CAN cap your own factions fools, with penalties in AA sure, but they might get the message sooner or later...

Good article. After reading i had to wonder why your video's don't have the fluidness of your articles.

Factions are dumb ideas in MMORPG anyway.  FFA games are much better since everything is run by guilds, and they can assign punishment as desired in very horrific and creative ways.  Faction MMORPG's are really like a baby version of real MMORPGs.  What is the point of factions anyway?  To force some people to be friends?  What if those people are jerks?  Well then you get situations described by Pokket.  The solution is to NEVER PLAY A FACTION MMORPG EVER AGAIN!!!  People have been saying this for years and yet we still get tons of faction based mmorpgs.  If you get griefed on one of these faction mmorpgs then you deserve it since you should have known better.

Originally posted by BigHatLogan

Factions are dumb ideas in MMORPG anyway.  FFA games are much better since everything is run by guilds, and they can assign punishment as desired in very horrific and creative ways.  Faction MMORPG's are really like a baby version of real MMORPGs.  What is the point of factions anyway?  To force some people to be friends?  What if those people are jerks?  Well then you get situations described by Pokket.  The solution is to NEVER PLAY A FACTION MMORPG EVER AGAIN!!!  People have been saying this for years and yet we still get tons of faction based mmorpgs.  If you get griefed on one of these faction mmorpgs then you deserve it since you should have known better.

Factions are there to provide a storied ideology to the conflict.

If you were going to have a WW II game would you have lots of small warring city states or would it be axis against allies? Which of course are factions.

If you were going to have a game based on ancient greece you would have warring city states. Those city states "could" be guilds but they can also represent many different factions.

It has nothing to do with "being a baby mmo" and more to do with defining the conflict and the ideology that goes along with that conflict.

Axiom: any tool to combat griefing is a tool to inflict griefing.

Now what would be interesting is to see algorithms that could subdivide factions into like-minded communities just by examining ignore lists.  It would be a lot like the algorithms facebook uses to find friends, but instead it would use ignore lists to calculate likely antipathy levels and just automatically phase out different subcultures/personality types that aren't likely to get along. 

That's why SWG was the best... You could put bounties on your fellow Faction members, and if you were a BH you could hunt them and say. "Just doin my job."

Originally posted by Tanemund

Real life has griefers.  Those people who whip into the parking space you've been waiting for, people cut in line, people take all the free samples, people eat food that isn't theirs in the lunch room refrigerator, people go on welfare rather than get a job, people get lost in online worlds rather than call their RL buddies.  I'm sure everyone has wished they had a gun so they could shoot those people from time to time, but you don't because normal people don't shoot other people over parking lots.

 

There are griefers in video games, but they only have as much control over you as you allow them to have.  At least in video gaming you can log out and go do something else rather than getting your blood pressure up.  Maybe real life needs a "Logout" button more than video games need a "Vaporize Azzhat" button.

 

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I want to shoot all the judgemental people who have a self inflated sense of righteousness.

A button to deal with those people would be neat, but it's impossible to avoid abuse, and abuse of such a button would be even more annoying then what those people do, so you would need another button to punish those people, which in turn would obviously get abused..