Anti-Aliased: Crime and punishment in MMOs

You're grinding in World of Warcraft's Stranglethorn Vale (voted most ganktastic by our friends at WoW Insider) when a level 70 druid finds it hilarious to moonfire your lowbie buttocks and camp your corpse for the next eight hours. You're grinding in Lineage II when suddenly someone completely rips you apart with Demon Sword Zariche, and the proceeds to do it over and over again. Face of Mankind players saw the days of other players killing player character police officers "just because it was fun and easy". Final Fantasy XI players dealt with the controversy of monster player killing, known as an MPK. Diablo had the problem of people raising you, killing you, raising you, killing you, raising you, killing you, raising you, killing you... I think you got the point.

Griefing is a problem in MMOs -- a very big problem. As more users enter our wonderful worlds of fantasy and intrigue, more and more of them think it's hilarious to make others suffer and waste time. So why is this phenomenon occuring, and what can developers do about it?

When we get into crime, punishment, and virtual legal systems, that means we get to talk about human behavior. And when we talk about human behavior, that means I get to pull out my psychology background and beat people over the head with it. Seriously, I need some use for this college degree -- it might as well be beating others over the head.

Logging into a virtual world means that we suddenly enter a realm of human interaction without limits. Death is no longer permanent, anything is possible, and our actions are only limited by our imagination and game design. However, it is the same lack of limits that gives rise to things like griefing. If there are no penalties for behaviors we want to suppress, then someone, somewhere, is going to start performing those behaviors if they prove to be beneficial in some way.

And, sadly, griefing is beneficial to the the player doing it. They can derive a sense of power from it, as well as satisfaction in success against a "smart opponent". Some game systems even support griefing, if anyone remembers the gold/item dropping of the Diablo game design days.

From the opposite side of the coin, the environmental penalties aren't so bad either. The player can still continue to play the game, as death is not permanent, they can earn back the money they lost by competing against the game environment, and all "injuries" sustained can be healed with enough game play. While griefers may say that they aren't hurting anyone, little do they know how wrong they are. Why does griefing cause so much anguish on the victim's end?

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman is well known in social psychology circles. Her work focuses on moral motives and moral self-justification - including victims of crime. In a 1985 article, Janoff-Bulman introduced the key difference between victims of natural disasters (hurricanes, lightning, etc.) and victims of crime (robbery, harassment, etc.). That difference was the presence of "ruthless design".

In short, random disasters affect the victim in a humbling way -- they feel that nature or fate has taught them a lesson and they'll learn from it (except the people who continue to build their houses after four floods destroyed the four previous houses, but that's a story for later). Crime affects the victim in a humiliating way -- the victim will feel exploited and embarassed that they were taken advantage of by another person. Nature is random while people act deliberately. In other words, nature doesn't do it for the lulz, but jerks do. (NSFW)

With all of this in mind, how can developers improve upon their games and create systems of justice?

The first thing to note is the difficulty of implementing a justice system into a game; especially when the game's theme centers on player vs. player combat or committing crime. You not only have programming hurdles to leap, but you have difficult design decisions to balance against your universe. You don't want to make the justice system foolproof or complex, but at the same time you don't want it to be easy to avoid or too simple.

Failed examples include the infamous "level restriction" method, which bars players from attacking another player who is X levels lower. This allows low level players to bully higher level players, while the higher level has his hands tied in the matter. Another example includes World of Warcraft's dishonorable kill system, which only registers dishonorable kills for when a player kills a civilian -- not for anything else. If you ask me, killing someone 20 levels lower than you is pretty dishonorable, don't you think? In short, the dishonorable kill system is a example of a game system that does absolutely nothing. It could be cut out completely, and I don't think anyone would notice it was removed.

But, out of all of the failed justice systems, my personal favorite has to be Face of Mankind -- a game with so much roleplaying potential that it ended up collapsing on itself. The whole setup was that upon entering the game, you got to choose a faction. One of those factions happened to be the police of their universe, which allowed you to rise up the ranks of the police department from patrolman to police chief.

If any character in the game carried certain types of weapons on their person, any type of drug, or killed anyone in an unprovoked fashion, they would receive arrest points. Weapons and drugs gave the person arrest points if a member of the police scanned their person with a search monocle. These points allowed a member of the police to slap on handcuffs when the criminal was knocked into a disoriented state by rubber bullets and teleport the offender to DeMorgan's Castle prison, giving them a sentence to serve. The greater number of arrest points, the longer the sentence. Offenders had to either serve their sentence, or could perform menial labor (a rock breaking mini-game) to shorten their sentence. In extreme scenarios, factions could break their men out of DeMorgan's by slipping past prison security and hacking the cell door.

All of this sounds fine and dandy in theory, but in execution it was piss-poor at best. Very few players bothered to follow the laws, preferring to shoot the police players on-sight for no reason other than they carried a badge. Police, for the most part, followed their restrictions in arresting players and the restrictions on lethal force. The police department set up guards at DeMorgan's Castle, but even that fell into chaos as other factions turned DeMorgan's Castle into raid setting. Players would come in, kill all the guards (even if no one was in prison), and then camp the prison. There simply weren't enough police to properly enforce anything, and the systems in place either hindered the department or simply didn't support it enough.

But with all of the problems of the past, there are certainly enough shining gems in the present and future of MMO gaming. EVE Online has already had a large amount of success with the CONCORD police, the bounty system, and harsh penalties of death. Areas of the universe are designated into security sectors, where numbers closer to 1 represent more secure areas and areas closer to 0 represent lawless sectors. This gives new players a very comfortable learning environment and a clear distinction of how much danger you can be in from others in any given zone.

The bounty system supplements the CONCORD police by providing an incentive for players to destroy those with dark histories. If anyone blows you away, you have the right to put an amount of ISK on their head, or add to the bounty already present. These bounties don't expire, and corporations can easily make it very worth a group's while to destroy those who make enemies with the wrong people. This system also upholds dark and dirty setting of EVE, making it a perfect addition to keeping the galaxy relatively safe. But, most players will tell you that the bounty system isn't worth the code it takes up in the system, but that's a story for another time and column. My point is that the presence of the system still gives the players a way to track those who live on the very outskirts of the law.

The last part of EVE that finishes their justice system is the level of penalties a player can receive for having their ship explode. Losing a ship happens a lot in EVE, but absolutely no one wants it to occur to them. Losing such an item, especially a treasured outfitted ship, means you could be sent back months or even years of progress if you don't have your insurance up to date. Even with insurance, you may not be able to get back the same parts at the prices you originally purchased them.

Because of this loss, players loathe putting their ships into situations that may cause them substantial loss. Instead, griefing becomes a game focus -- a griefer is now a pirate. Instead of flying around, blowing people up and losing ammo for an overall loss in assets, griefers extort money from their targets. Obviously, you can't continually do this, as a person only has so much money. Also, as I said earlier, pirates do have their reputations catch up to them. What goes around comes around in EVE.

But, even with all of the good design in EVE, the shining pinnacle of justice is Age of Conan's upcoming prison system. While it's not implemented yet, there is a system of justice being polished up for a later patch.

This anti-griefing system is designed to punish PvPers who feel it's ok to continually kill the same man over and over again while still keeping with Conan's universe. Killing another player will earn you a small bounty placed on your head, making you a target for NPC bounty hunters. If you kill the same person over and over again in a small time frame, expect the bounty to rise exponentially for each subsequent kill.

The larger the bounty, the quicker and more effective the bounty hunters are. You can escape them by going to another country, as bounties are region specific and will wear off after a set amount of time. But, if you get caught, you have two choices: prison or bribery. Bribery is straightforward, you simply pay an amount of money to get the bounty hunter off of your back and reset your bounty to nil.

Prison, on the other hand, is hilarious. If you can't pay the bribe, you are sent to the prison area where you're forced to do some of the worst quests ever created in MMO history. You never liked killing ten rats, did you? So let's make it kill 100 rats, and give you a stick that only does one damage a hit. How about moving 300 stones from one side of the yard to the other?

Herein lies the brilliance of the system. The punishment is still within the context of the game, and not put as a context of time. You must complete these completely inane quests before you're let out. And, while you're doing it, the rest of the population can sit on the prison walls, watch you, and laugh at you. That would, of course, include the person you killed 20 times in a row. Now that person can finally watch as he gets his revenge with you being forced to scratch rats to death.

With inventive systems like this coming into being, we can only hope that the methods of old go out the window. And, with luck, we'll watch some of our lawlessness go out the window with them. When done right, in-game legal systems will provide players with the freedom they need in the game world, and the griefing punished properly with in-game means.

Of course, this is the internet... I'm not going to hold my breath.

Colin Brennan is the weekly writer of Anti-Aliased who really enjoys bonking people over the head with his university degree. When he's not writing here for Massively, he's over running Epic Loot For All! with his insane roommates. If you want to meet Colin and yell at him, you can do so in Second Life during his office hours of 12 PM - 2 PM EST on Tuesdays and Thursdays (SL: Seraphina Reymont), or send him an e-mail at colin.brennan AT weblogsinc DOT com.