Grief Forgiveness

[WarChimp130]

First let me say I like the idea of Grief in the game. It keeps players from being jerks to each other on the same team and ruining the fights. I definitely think it should be included in PS2 and in a much similar fashion. Incurring a certain amount of grief should punish you and eventually get your character locked.

However I'd like to see a system in place for forgiving grief. If there is one thing I learned it's that when you put a few hundred people in a small space and give them weapons, accidents are going to happen. I'd like to see method in game to forgive those accidents.

I think when a player incurs grief against another player, that player can go into a menu and forgive that grief against them. It wouldn't be something that pops up immediately, and the griefer would take the grief initially. But on death or whatever, the griefed player could go into a small menu, select the players name and forgive that grief if he knows it was an accident. Or he can not forgive it, it's entirely up to the griefed player.

Now to prevent that from getting annoying and you are going in to forgive 1 point of grief, only make it an option if the player incurs say, 20 points of grief or more.

So say for instance you are running across a court yard not paying attention and a Prowler runs you over coming around the corner. Clearly it wasn't intentional, but say the player gets whacked with 50 grief points or something. Wasn't trying to be a jerk, just happened, you forgive the grief and that player goes on about fighting the enemy.

I know there have been times I've been cruising along and accidentally nailed something and got a big chunk of grief, and some days are worse than others and before you know it you are facing a mountain of grief. And the players I've nailed haven't been pissed, they know it's a mistake. And I've been the guy on the other end of it too, I had a long time friend accidentally whack a couple of vehicles in crowded CY and before you know it he's catching crazy grief. I would have gladly forgiven it.

I just think it would be a good way to keep grief in the game for the players that deserve to get griefed but gives the players the ability to forgive a mistake and keep their fellow soldier from a weapons lock. Give the power to the players.

[Hamma]

I like this :D

[Bags]

I have never been above one hundred grief unintentionally, and I don't hold my fire when friendlies strafe in front of me or stop my tank if someone runs in front. My point? Unnecessary unless you are intentionally shooting friendlies.

[WarChimp130]

It's been a while, but doesn't grief get worse if it happens within a short time? I seem to recall getting really nailed with grief thanks to some friendly Maxes who wanted to play a game of catch the Deci during an interfarm. Some weapons are certainly more prone to catching grief with also. Pretty much anything with splash damage is a good way to catch some grief, especially a plasma thumper.

I'm not saying a player who deliberately and intentionally plays like a selfish jerk shouldn't get grief, I'm just saying the player who gets griefed should be empowered to forgive if he feels it wasn't intentional.

[Malorn]

The grief system from PS1 already had forgiveness built-in.

It had two components - rate of accrual and rate of decay.

Rate of Accrual

Grief in PS1 accumulated at different rates. If you went on a TK spree you racked it up real fast. However, if you had the same number of kills spread out over a 10 hour period, you would get far less grief.

Grief gain was a function of two variables:
1) current grief score
2) recent grief activity

So if you had a low grief score you would get the minimum amount of grief when you did inflict it. If you infrequently got grief you would also get the minimum. If your grief score was higher, it indicated that you have issues with grief and therefore the system was less forgiving and would give you higher grief amounts. Recent grief activity resulted in being on a killing spree or doing a lot of damage to friendlies would quickly rack up grief and the accrual rate would accelerate.

These two functions can interact, meaning if you have a high grief score and go on a short killing spree you can quickly find yourself in weapons lock.

Rate of Decay

In addition to the accrual rate, Grief Decay worked in a similar fashion and was a function of two factors:

1) Time
2) Current level of grief

Grief decayed over time. The rate at which it decayed increased with lower amounts of grief.

So basically if you hovered around 0-100 grief the grief you gained would be minimal and the rate of decay would be very rapid, usually gone within an hour or two.

I usually had my grief < 100 pretty much my entire time playing Planetside, and that included capping random asshats from time to time. The key was never letting your grief get too high. Once your grief got into the 300+ range then the decay rate was slower and the accrual rate was faster. Even then, 300 grief decayed in a day or two as long as you didn't significantly add to it.


Anomalies due to weapon design

That said, this system as neatly designed as it was, had some anomalies that could cause someone to rack up a lot of grief in a short time. The first was "plasma grenades". Because of the burn-effect of plasmas every tick of the plasma counted as "grief activity", which means it accelerated the accrual rate far faster than other weapons. If you had fragmentation grenades your accrual rate was much slower, even with the same amount of friendly fire. If someone using plasma wasn't careful they could rack up tons of grief and make it hard to work it off for days, especially if they kept using plasma grenades.

Avoiding using plasma was a good way to keep grief rates low.

Lag and warping and weapons with projectile speed also tended to cause grief issues, because at the time you fire them nobody is in the way, but after they leave the gun someone can move in front of them. Weapons like MCGs which had a high rate of fire could quickly rack up 3-4 instances of grief, and then a few more times it would rack up more. This accelerated teh accrual rate, so any further grief would be much worse.

Shotguns tended to be the best weapons to use in terms of minimizing grief. First, they were instant-hit, which limited the warping/projectile delay issue, and second each blast was considered 1 hit, which means that if you had one stray shot your accrual rate did not pick up significantly. So using a shotgun and aiming well with it was a good way to avoid grief or handle a grief cool-down period.

These are characteristics of the weapons interacting with the grief system. I hope that the tweaking they are doing to the grief system is fixing those issues by adding a little more tolerance for weapons that are grief-prone and maybe being a little less tolerant for weapons that aren't grief-prone.

One thing to point out that I loved about the grief system is that if you ran over someone both of you got grief points, because the blame for the incident was equally shared. The driver got grief for not moving out of the way of the victim, and the victim got grief because he was standing in front of the tank. This prevented behaviors where pedestrians were intentionally standing in driving lanes and also encouraged them to get out of the way of vehicles. That's a good behavior to teach so I'm glad they awarded grief for both the driver and the pedestrian.

[WarChimp130]

Again, I'm all for the way the grief system works as far as accrual of grief and decay of grief, my way would give players the power to forgive what they perceived as an accident so those incidents might not tack up in a way that could really gimp a player.

[Malorn]

1) The grief system is designed for forgiveness. That's its whole purpose - punish those who are reckless and careless, while forgiving those who honestly had mistakes and really nailing the guys going on TK sprees in short order. It does that quite well. Just because you got accidental grief doesn't mean you need to ahve it wiped away. The system will do that.

Grief you get is just a data point in a larger picture. Few datapoints it will forgive you. Lots of data points and it won't.

2) If someone is getting that much grief they need to do something differently, they're clearly doing it wrong.

[Soothsayer]

Good points on either side...

Grief system needs to punish griefing without allowing grief system griefers... :D

[Death2All]

Very good points from Malorn. I thought grief system worked well in PS except for how fast it could tend to accumulate exponentially. You could often start a day with 0 grief and accidentally hit a friendly MAX with a deci during an intense tower fight. After that your grief would really start to increase from just the slightest accident.

Obviously, people should be more careful and learn to hold their fire but sometimes it could not be avoided.


I've always thrown around the idea of allowing support experience to lower you grief. Every 100 support XP (assuming this is still present in PS2) lowers you by one grief point. So when people have their accidents they can switch to a support role and start lowering their grief. Just an idea I've had for awhile.

I'm normally good about my grief but some days the fights are just too chaotic and you get careless. I'll often log out if I have more than 100 grief because of how fast it will increase after that point.

I think a system for lowering your grief through support would be generally well received. The only way I could really see this getting abused is someone going on a teamkilling spree and then he has to.....Repair you for a few hours to lower his grief? Punishment fits the crime.

[Malorn]

The grief system doesn't need supplementary things to reduce grief. If normal everyday behaviors are causing people to rack up too much grief then the formula for grief accrual and/or decay needs to be adjusted.

I don't like the idea for this grief forgiveness because the correct solution is to tweak the grief formulas, not add additional mechanics on top of it.

Getting grief points is OK. Its just a hueristic to determine whether you are someone who made a mistake or someone who is being overly reckless/malicious. It also encourages fire discipline, but getting a few grief points here and there is expected by the system and is normal. You don't need to have means of getting rid of those poitns or a forgiveness system or anything like that. If it is a problem for the average player then the formulas need a little fine tuning. Trying to get external ways of removing the points bypasses the purpose of the system and doesn't fix the underlying problem of the heuristic not being quite right.

tl;dr - fix the heuristics, don't add unncessary complexity to the game.

[Coreldan]

I have never been above one hundred grief unintentionally, and I don't hold my fire when friendlies strafe in front of me or stop my tank if someone runs in front. My point? Unnecessary unless you are intentionally shooting friendlies.

My thoughts too. I doubt you really can get too much grief unless you mean it.

[Death2All]

The grief system doesn't need supplementary things to reduce grief. If normal everyday behaviors are causing people to rack up too much grief then the formula for grief accrual and/or decay needs to be adjusted.

I don't like the idea for this grief forgiveness because the correct solution is to tweak the grief formulas, not add additional mechanics on top of it.

Getting grief points is OK. Its just a heuristic to determine whether you are someone who made a mistake or someone who is being overly reckless/malicious. It also encourages fire discipline, but getting a few grief points here and there is expected by the system and is normal. You don't need to have means of getting rid of those poitns or a forgiveness system or anything like that. If it is a problem for the average player then the formulas need a little fine tuning. Trying to get external ways of removing the points bypasses the purpose of the system and doesn't fix the underlying problem of the heuristic not being quite right.

tl;dr - fix the heuristics, don't add unncessary complexity to the game.

Because healing your teammates to reduce your grief level in an incredibly complex mechanic that nobody could ever possibly wrap their head around.

However, I do see your point. A person should essentially learn from their mistakes, especially with a forgiveness system in place that lowers your grief over time.

I am really interested to see how the new "revised" grief system works. You're clearly in favor of the old one and it definitely worked. There were some kinks here and there so it will be interesting to see what's changed.

[Malorn]

I would ask a simple question - What is the problem that grief forgiveness is solving?

I am discussing complexity from a stability and reliability standpoint, not as if the actual concept was somehow difficult to grasp. Complexity and difficulty are not the same thing. Engineers know that you only make something as complex as it needs to be. The more variables you start throwing into it the less predictable and reliable the system and the more likely someone will find holes with it and it will fail to do its job. Simplicity is good.

[Death2All]

I would ask a simple question - What is the problem that grief forgiveness is solving?

I am discussing complexity from a stability and reliability standpoint, not as if the actual concept was somehow difficult to grasp. Complexity and difficulty are not the same thing. Engineers know that you only make something as complex as it needs to be. The more variables you start throwing into it the less predictable and reliable the system and the more likely someone will find holes with it and it will fail to do its job. Simplicity is good.

I never said there was a problem with it per se. I did however bring up the idea of an additional mechanic to lower your grief through support rather than the traditional waiting for it to slowly tick down.

Because healing your teammates to reduce your grief level in an incredibly complex mechanic that nobody could ever possibly wrap their head around.




I meant this ironically but now I'm starting to believe it.


Let me stress that that I agree the current systems works fine as I've said before, but in addition it would greatly appease me if there were an added mechanic that allowed you to reduce through via support XP. Either way it goes I could care less. The likelihood of them actually implementing this idea is low I'm sure, but it's worth the shot of expressing the idea.

[Malorn]

Well, I disagree with adding complexity to the system unless there's a problem that needs to be solved. I think it does its job just fine and there isn't much that can't be fixed by tweaking the numbers a tiny bit.

Also if you're doing support activities your grief will naturally go down faster. Its a lot harder to get grief if you aren't shooting your weapons. :)

[Lartnev]

tl;dr - fix the heuristics, don't add unncessary complexity to the game.

Agreed. Grief is a cruel mistress when it should be a fair mistress.

At first I thought that the forgiveness system should work in reverse, you're forgiven unless proven guilty. The reason was simple: players will first need to know they've been teamkilled (I sometimes don't notice in heavy firefights), second they have to know it was accidental, and finally they need to know/remember there's a forgive system on a menu screen. But then there's the opposite scenario where players flag a teamkill as deliberate when it wasn't for vengeance or just general trolling.

When I've seen forgive systems implemented they're undermined by the amount of angst generated by people not using it correctly. In short: I'd much rather see players angry at the system than at each other.

The grief system is designed to hold you to account for your actions. Should you be driving so fast in a crowded courtyard? Should you have thrown that grenade, was the 5 enemy kills worth the grief? etc.

I believe the frustration (and desire for a forgiveness system) comes from bugs or inconsistencies that lead to injustices in the system, just as Malorn pointed out earlier. A couple of cases of my own would be when the Striker used to lock on to friendly aircraft by mistake and when a full Galaxy was shot down but the pilot got grief for "crashing" on the people bailing out. :mad:

[WarChimp130]

I don't think it's that complex of a concept. If a player wants to forgive grief they can, if they don't then the system works pretty much exactly the same. Under my system the griefed player never even has to look at it if they don't want and play as always. It simply gives an option to forgive an accidental griefing that incurs a high level of grief.

I don't see how giving an extra option that empowers the player is a bad thing. It doesn't interfere with actual intentional griefing at all and simply exists to forgive accidents.

[Malorn]

It's not all that complex but it undermines the system, and its unnecessary. If the heuristics are correct then the average joe player that demonstrates decent fire control skills and doesn't go on TK sprees should never be even remotely in danger of a weaponslock and he should have a low, stable grief score that might fluxuate about 100 points.

There is no need for any grief forgiveness at that point because the system works as expected. Then you don't have "please forgive me bro!" or other such stuff. In the middle of a battle people don't have time to be doing that, and the incidents outside of a battle should never be significant enough to cause problems with someone's typical grief score.

It should "just work".

One big advantage and if there's anything I would like to see implemented around this, is SOE statistics (hopefully ones we have access to as well) regarding the grief levels of players, and the grief generated by specific actions/weapons.

I'd love to be able to look at my character's grief score and see a breakdown like a pie chart about where that score originated. Is 90% of my grief from throwing plasma grenades? Running over friendlies? Etc. If you know where your grief comes from you can better correct whatever actions caused it.

Then on the other end SOE and hopefully players as well can look at the overall grief distribution of where it is coming from. Throwing out the outliers (very high grief players) allows them to look at the distribution of grief among the average player, look for anomalies, and then tweak them.

Going along with this would be the ability to fine tune the grief generated from any action in the game. They can use the data + the fine tuning to normalize the grief generation across all actions in the game.

If you put in grief forgiveness or other things it skews results and as stated before...its just unnecessary. If they get the heurstics right you simply don't need it and it will just add additional actions for players to do and social issues ("zomg, so-and-so didn't forgive me after I accidentally hit him!! what an ass!"). There is no problem forgiveness solves that can't better be addressed by fixing the hueristics.

[WarChimp130]

I'd say another issue of concern will be the fact their is no 3rd person vehicle movement in the game. So when you are backing up or turning to the side, it's going to be much more difficult to tell if somebody is around you. Lots of people gonna be getting whacked, lots more grief.

[Malorn]

If accidental grief due to that sort of stuff is more prevalent then they'd have to tone down the amount you get since it is a more common occurrence.

Or give vehicles 3rd person. I thought they had mentioned vehicle 3rd person, but no infantry in one of the videos.

Then again, Battlefield games don't have vehicle 3rd person and I don't really have issues accidentally running over friendlies.

I think PS warping had a lot more impact on that sort of thing than we might think.

[NewSith]

Or, you can make it so that firing upon enemy causes grief to go down. Slower than you got them, but faster then you lose them in idle. Like some sort of buff to griefpoints loss.

[BorisBlade]

I'd say another issue of concern will be the fact their is no 3rd person vehicle movement in the game. So when you are backing up or turning to the side, it's going to be much more difficult to tell if somebody is around you. Lots of people gonna be getting whacked, lots more grief.

Well they are only removin 3rd person from infantry. No one in their right mind would take it away from ground vehicle pilots. It would be a nightmare to drive in first person. Hop in a deli or marauder and see how well first person goes. Cant see squat, its very hard to maneuver well. Heck basic driving is a pain in the ass in first person, let alone tryin to move in and around things at high speed in combat.

[Firefly]

I do not forgive.

My hate keeps me warm.

[Bruttal]

I dont even want a greif system in place. rather a reverse vampuric effect. you shot a friendly the damage you done to him is done to you and you just healed him with your HP

[Bags]

I dont even want a greif system in place. rather a reverse vampuric effect. you shot a friendly the damage you done to him is done to you and you just healed him with your HP

I can't wait to run in front of friendlies so they kill themselves.

[Brusi]

Or, you can make it so that firing upon enemy causes grief to go down. Slower than you got them, but faster then you lose them in idle. Like some sort of buff to griefpoints loss.

This is almost exactly what i was thinking of... If you have been doing say at least 300% more healing to friendlys or damage to enemys than to friendlys in the previous 100s or so, then grief gained from friendly damage should be minimal.

This may not cause tank drivers to hit the brakes to avoid friendly softies who insist on crossing the road while listening to their ipod during the heat of a battle, but it will def punish drivers who don't avoid softies in safe areas with no enemies around.

Think this would also work well for tower plasma spamming as well. As long as more of your nades are getting past the friendlys and into the enemies, then you shouldn't be accruing grief so fast.

Rezzing or healing the same person you grief might lower it quicker too?

[Brusi]

I dont even want a greif system in place. rather a reverse vampuric effect. you shot a friendly the damage you done to him is done to you and you just healed him with your HP

so then... flail = 1 shot AoE complete heal + self destruct

[Krowe]

Friendly fire happens. It is inevitable.

Its only natural to assume that punishment gets handed out. However, it seemd kinda ridiculous how every bullet into a friendly magically traces back to you.

[Malorn]

Friendly fire happens. It is inevitable.

Its only natural to assume that punishment gets handed out. However, it seemd kinda ridiculous how every bullet into a friendly magically traces back to you.

It must or there is no accountability. Accountability is the whole point of the grief system and without it you have griefers gone wild.

[Brusi]

People need to be taught to avoid friendly damage almost as much as people need to learn not to shoot through their mates.

I mean, gawd sake... i want it to punish players that zig-zag in front of you, or into friendly crossfires or run down the centre of a hallway in a base or into an nme CY and get hit by the friendly Flail that has been bombarding the same spot for 20mins!

Oh, well.

[Malorn]

People need to be taught to avoid friendly damage almost as much as people need to learn not to shoot through their mates.

I mean, gawd sake... i want it to punish players that zig-zag in front of you, or into friendly crossfires or run down the centre of a hallway in a base or into an nme CY and get hit by the friendly Flail that has been bombarding the same spot for 20mins!

Oh, well.

They sort of do that for vehicles where getting run over gives you grief points as well as the driver. I'm sure there's a way to work that sort of thing into infantry combat. I agree that running in front of people and causing them to get grief is dumb and is itself a form of griefing. Its harder to get right hough, which is probably why they avoided it.

It also has the potential for abuse. If for example I got my entire platoon to kill someone once the platoon would get very little grief, but the player we killed would get more. In fact, we could drive someone to weaponslock that way. While running someone over in a vehicle it's a lot harder to organize things that way. So the vehicle grief works but infantry grief...not so much.

I would like to see some way for that accountability to stick though, but it just has so much abuse potential. There's ways to curb it but its hard.

[Lartnev]

I mean, gawd sake... i want it to punish players that zig-zag in front of you, or into friendly crossfires or run down the centre of a hallway in a base or into an nme CY and get hit by the friendly Flail that has been bombarding the same spot for 20mins!

They got punished by having less health than when they started ;)