Which Game Was I Playing?

Based on a true story.  Sanitized for your protection.

I had an assignment from a non-player character.

I had to proceed to a specified destination and obtain something.

The destination was staffed with hostile non-player characters, as these sorts of destinations invariably are, which I had to eliminate before I could achieve my goal.

While dealing with the hostile non-player characters another player, who was much better equipped, arrived and rendered the assignment impossible to complete.

The player also made it quite clear that this was not an accident.  It was the player’s intention to deliberately create a situation where I could not complete the assignment.

In frustration I submitted a ticket asking for redress of the situation.

Many hours later a representative of the game company responded via an in-game message that the behavior of the other player was within the allowed rules of the game and the company would not take any action on my behalf.

I had been griefed and the company in question was okay with that.  All part of the game they said.

Which game was I playing?

The answer will come next week, but feel free to support your own response in the comments.

45 thoughts on “Which Game Was I Playing?”

  1. syncaine

    If it’s not EVE it will be an interesting story (which is why I suspect it’s not, since I doubt you would take the time to make a post about an issue seen daily on the general forums and long since addressed as ‘part of the game’)

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  2. bluelinebasher

    I voted for Eve — everything fits except one thing: “In frustration I submitted a ticket asking for redress of the situation.”

    Swiping someone’s required loot so they cannot complete a mission is fair game and you wouldn’t get any CCP love. The pirate then ransoms it, or (if better equipped) hopes you took a shot a him while all fancy flashy red.

    Hmm…but you should have known that…so maybe Eve is too obvious…so clearly the other glass has the iocane powder…

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  5. Gaff

    I think it could have been Mystra in Sojourn but for one missing fact. I will simulate the log here:

    Mystra appears in a puff of rainbows and sparkles!

    Mystra laughs in your face!

    Mystra deletes you!

    Welcome to Sojourn….Hit for ANSI support…..

    etc.

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  6. KJP

    As others have noted, while it “sounds like” EvE more than any other, it wouldn’t be a shock if it were any of a couple dozen other games.

    I’d find it hilarious if it turned out to be, say, FreeRealms.

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  7. Wilhelm2451 Post author

    @Gaff: I considered adding Toril MUD to the list, but felt it was a bit too obscure. Muddying the water by adding a game that peaked at a few hundred players to a list that is measured in hundreds of thousands seemed like a distraction that would skew the results.

    And, yes, I suppose it could have been any of the games I listed. I bet a bit of research could come up with the right assignment to allow this to happen. But this specific set of circumstances has actually only occurred for me once.

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  9. spinks

    I could easily imagine it being WoW. I remember one of my guildies heading off to Westfall to kill alliance quest mobs because he was bored. We did tell him it wasn’t nice, if that helps.

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  11. Veneretio

    It’s a trick poll, I think. This post is general enough that I think the point here is that it’s actually happened in all of these games.

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  12. dave

    I don’t know if you play on a PVE or PVP server in WoW. I am guessing PVE since you mentioned that you play with your daughter and any father that let’s his daughter play on a PVP server is a dick, which you are not. So WoW is out.

    You said the GM got in touch with you many hours later instead of many days. I think that rules out Everquest II and Warhammer.

    I’m going to have to go with Eve since I have found when I played LOTRO for the trial that the community seemed to be nicer.

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  13. skeezer

    i said LOTRO.

    arent most quest related things in Eve instanced? i live Eve through this site so i only know what he types :)

    i would think its something like wow or lotro, but wow you can easily sit on a spawn point and just get lucky with a tab+attack. i have played some LOTRO, so not sure how easy it is to mess with people.

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  14. Wilhelm2451 Post author

    @Skeezer – Actually, in EVE, you can get into anybody’s mission if you know how to use the scanner well enough. The missions are not instanced, but separated from normal space but are accessible via gates that anybody can use.

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  15. AnkleBiter

    I voted EVE, but I can remember this happening manymanymany times in Diablo II: you’re with a party working towards killing one of the Act Bosses, and some other jerk would come along and skip right to it, and kill some or all the bosses forcing you to start a new game. It payed to make your next games passworded.

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  16. Aurea

    This one doesn’t feel like EVE to me. Fairly certain that if the objective is completed, then it doesn’t matter who did it, unless there was loot involved.

    This one sounds a lot like WoW, where the individual in question repeatedly tagged the spawn mob and continued to do so for repeated spawns.

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  17. Letrange

    EvE – I find it better to think of griefers as just rather harder notorious monsters that only spawn from time to time. There are ways to defeat/kill them. Killing NPC’s = “yawn”. Out-witting/killing Griefers = more challenging. I suspect that’s one of the reasons CCP doesn’t chase them wholesale from the server. They provide that extra level of difficulty that’s missing from NPC encounters in EVE.

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  20. Jacob

    Your story could certainly take place on a World of Warcraft PvP server. If another player comes along and interferes with your quest, you are expected to resolve it through PVP.

    On a WoW PVE server interference is not tolerated as much, because you have less ability to fight back, but on a PVP server the GM should tell you to gather your friends and fight back.

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  22. Happy Wlad

    Warhammer

    EVE is too obvious. I think you would only post this if you wanted to say something about CS if it were EQ2, LOTRO and WOW and nobody really likes reading stories about bad CS. Im betting, however unlikely given your limited time in WH, that someone got into your realm’s PvE area, made some mischief and you werent expecting that.

    Wlad

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  23. p@tsh@t

    Something tells me that there’s no way you’d submit a ticket for something like this in Eve…

    I might be with Melmoth on this one…

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  24. syncaine

    How ‘impossible’ did the other player make it?

    100% impossible? Impossible for YOU, but still possible for others? Impossible for that approach of the assignment, but still ultimately possible for you to complete that assignment at a later date?

    (How lame would the answer be if it’s None, and this happened to you in some tiny F2P game you tried for 5 minutes? But I have more faith in you than that…)

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  26. pjharvey

    I don’t think it’s EVE. You would call for help and blow the crap out of a single griefer, or just leave the mission for another day, as everything respawns with each server reset.

    I don’t think it’s WoW either. If it were PvP you would be dead, not the mobs, and whilst kill-stealing isn’t against the rules if someone over-levelled deliberately kill-steals to grief an lower-levelled player the GMs will not ignore the issue. It happened to me and I got a positive response.

    I went with ‘none of the above’, if only because I am unfamiliar with the other games.

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  27. Wilhelm2451 Post author

    @syncaine – 100% impossible to complete the task. Waiting for a respawn, for example, was not a work-around.

    Hrmm, I was going to let the answer wait until next Friday, but I might have enough responses to move it up.

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  29. Wilhelm2451 Post author

    Oh, and I should probably clarify the last item, the “none of the above” like option. You should only select that if you don’t believe this situation could arise in any of the listed games.

    I am not such a jerk that I would list out this scenario and then end up saying it happened in some game not listed.

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  31. Sara Pickell

    Hmm, sounds to me like the kind of griefing that takes place in games like WoW or EQ2. The biggest reason this doesn’t feel like EVE to me, is simply because you can just easily cancel the mission and move on. No real reason to get so invested in the seven thousandth run of Damsel in Distress. Of course, I’ve also found not as many EVE players approach it as logically as I do, so it’s still mildly believable.

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  32. rcurrie

    I voted for WoW. I’ve been playing since launch and haven’t had this happen to me but a time or two. My reasoning against the other options: Response time of the GM rules our Warhammer & Everquest II (as some commenters have already pointed out). The objective was 100% impossible to complete I *think* rules out EVE since you can simply cancel the mission and try again later at a different spawn location. I haven’t played Lotr much, but aren’t the missions instanced?

    It’s a tricky scenario that can sure happen to some degree in all the games listed. GM’s typically seem to look down on such a situation in WoW, especially on a PvE server (thus I’m second guessing my vote).

    Again, I haven’t played Lotr or Everquest II, but is PvP optional in those games? WoW has the flagged system and does eve, but is there anything in those games that pretty much makes it impossible to attack another player?

    Good food for thought on a Friday afternoon. Is it 5 o’clock yet?

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  36. Stropp

    Eve does sound too obvious, but in the others as far as I know players can’t stop you completing a quest since you can always go away and come back later. It would be a highly motivated and persistent griefer to hang around on the off chance the other player would return ‘soon.’

    I voted Eve, but I suspect it’s the last option, None of these fine games.

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  37. Bhagpuss

    I voted for LotRO because that would be the most interesting if true.

    I’ve not played EVE or WOW so I have no idea what their CS policies are.

    I’ve always found SOE CS to be impeccable in their courtesy and efficiency, and moreover in nearly ten years I have had cause to contact them less than a dozen times. I am pretty sure that, unless you were on a PvP server, intentional and repeated “griefing” to prevent another player from completing a quest would result in CS intervention in both iterations of EQ.

    However, your account is vague enough to leave the possibility that the issue could just be one of “owning a camp”, in which case, as SOE doesn’t officially recognise camps, if your griefer was just clearing a spawn faster than you could, then yes that’s fair play. Not pleasant, but within the rules. There’s really no way for a game to avoid that sort of thing short of making absolutely every combat instanced (which is Free Realms solution).

    In WAR, I would think nothing of an event like you describe. It would be unusual if someone on your own side was doing it, but I doubt CS would stop them. If it was the other side, well that IS the game.

    LotRO, though, would be a bit unusual. My main trouble with that game was people incessantly joining in and “helping” me. Drove me nuts to the point that I only hunted in remote areas where I could actually have a chance of killing my own mobs. But LotRO is designed so that you get quest credit even if you do next to nothing, so it would be quite hard for someone to stop you completing your quest, unless they could one-shot everything before you touched it at all.

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  38. Noizy

    I had to vote for EQ2, just because 1) no one else was and 2) it would make a good story if true. There are so many defenses a player could use, though. “I was doing writs” or “I was working on my lore and legend quest” defenses are the two this player probably used. I’d probably narrow it down to the L&L quest since so many level 80s are scrambling for AA experience to hit the cap.

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  39. sente

    Since I doubt it would be EVE and your “what I play list” includes two games, I would have to go with World of Warcraft.

    If you had listed Tabula Rasa, I would possibly have voted that – it was certainly possible to get in to “impossible to complete” situations quite a lot in fact. But the CMs would have been more helpful also.

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  40. *vlad*

    I voted for WoW. It doesn’t have to be a PvP server at all; a griefer could simply aoe all the mobs in an area, and wipe them out so you can’t get any loot drops.

    I have been to an online wedding in WoW before, where griefers stood on top of the altar, on top of the bride and groom with their giant pets out (Huntards ftw) doing dances & aoe spell effects.
    Numerous complaints were made to GMs by those present, and we were told with wringing hands that the griefers were doing nothing wrong.

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  41. Kairos

    The description doesn’t fit any imaginable LOTRO situation, particularly the bit about rendering the mission impossible. The rest certainly does fit. I’ve had that exact experience while trying to rescue the drowning NPCs in Annuminas, with another player staying in the water until I had killed the guards, then “stealing” the rescue; there, too, a GM said there was nothing they to be doneo. But the mission could be still be completed by waiting for a re-spawn, so the situation described doesn’t apply.

    I’ll vote WoW.

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  42. Morane

    I voted for EQ2, mostly because I don’t know the game. I don’t think there’s any way in WoW to render a quest/mission 100% un-completable. Same with WAR. I didn’t know that in EVE you could get into someone else’s mission but even so you could wait for a server reset.

    So it’s either EQ2 or ‘None of these fine games’.

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  43. mandrill

    I voted for EVE because as far as I know its the only game that specifically allows this type of ‘greifing’ (IMO it can’t be called greifing if it is part of the accepted gameplay) but that seems way too easy. I look forward to being proved wrong.

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  44. Joe

    I voted for EVE, because it fits perfectly and everyone knows it’s a part of the game. Having said that, I’ve never been griefed this way, so I’m guessing that it’s the same with you and this is the first time it’s actually happened.

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