Good Grief Charlie Brown!

Whether you play like Lucy, inflicting damage on anything friendly for the thrill of it, or you accidentally hit friendlies in a crowded fire fight. There is a grief system in place that tracks the amount of damage inflicted to prevent rogue TK'ers from controlling the pace of the game and ruining everyone's fun.

Every time you damage a friendly object, player, or vehicle, you will gain grief points relevant to the amount of damage you cause. It doesn't matter whether it's armor or health ... it's still a grief.

As you accumulate more grief points, you will attain higher penalty levels:

• Level 1 (0-600): You are gently reminded, via a help window, of why it's a bad idea to kill friendlies and how the grief system works.


• Level 2 (600-1000): You are warned, via a pop-up warning in the center of your screen, that killing friendlies is a bad idea and will eventually cause you lots of problems. This warning pops up 3-4 times before you hit the next level.


• Level 3 (1000 plus): Weapons lock. Yup, they lock all your weapons and reduce your max throttle speed to 10% (so that you can't ram anyone). This weapons lock lasts for 20- 30 minutes. It's VERY annoying and should be avoided.


• Level 4 (1600?): Account Ban. Congradulations, you just got yourself grounded from playing Planetside. To get from Grief Level 3 to Level 4, with weapons lock enabled, is a serious chore and is only going to be possible by serious griefers. Not sure yet if this is a perma-ban, or merely a 72-hour ban. Better get to kissing some butt.

Each time you gain a grief point, an indicator flashes on screen to let you know it happened. Grief point totals are easily seen on your character page (for reference).

Grief points dissipate at a steady, but slow rate, based on real-time. In other words, if you mess up, just be careful for a while, and the grief points will go away naturally. This dissipation rate is too slow to be useful to griefers, but will fix issues for those that accidentally kill a friendly.

If you damage a friendly who is a member of your Squad, then you do NOT gain grief points. This is to allow Squads to sacrifice members occasionally to achieve an objective. It's also because Squads are self-policing in that if someone is griefing other squad members, you can always just kick them out of your squad and the normal griefing rules then apply. You probably won't be reinviting them anytime soon anyway).

Grief points are set on a per account basis. It's totally automated. Players will not have to cast votes. This eliminates the possibility of switching accounts to avoid grief points.

PlanetSide offers players several methods to help protect against grief players. Warfare and rivalries between players, squads, or outfits within the same Empire are considered grief play. To ensure that player objectives are always as clear as possible (i.e. fighting with other Empires, not your own), any intentional team-killing will be considered grief play and will result in penalties. All players in an Empire fight for the same cause, regardless of squad or outfit affiliation and no outfit outranks another in the field of battle. Outfits that regularly engage in grief activity are subject to being disbanded. We have implemented an in-game grief tracking system, but we also offer live Customer Service Representatives to help to address the situations that technology can't. To contact your CSR in-game, type "/appeal" and click the "New Ticket" button. Next, select a category and describe the issue you are experiencing, including the name of any other players involved, their Outfit tag and the location of the incident.