What are your thoughts on the griefing playstyle on klei pub servers

[nimzowitsch10]

Reading JoeW's post about griefing on pub servers a while back makes me believe there may be a disconnect with the community of players that actually play klei pub servers. Everyone on the forums seem to have a strong opinion about pub servers but most never even play them, so I hope that I can hear the opinion of regular pub server players and not people that don't even play on klei pubs. I also wish for civil discussion.

 

The main points for not moderating griefing was:

- They don't want to be bothered with the many griefer reports, and they don't want to appoint any community mods

-  People burning bases is a legitimate playstyle that should be left alone on pub servers.

 

So I'm curious, do regular pub server players actually enjoy playing with the griefer playstyles? I play pubs for the many different interesting playstyles but griefing. It is the one playstyle I don't like playing with. I even enjoying playing with noobs so I can teach them different things, but not griefing.

[Mike23Ua]

https://www.klei.com/games/dont-starve-together
 

“or take your chances with strangers online” Literally part of the product description, Your basically playing like living in the Wild West, Kill or Be Killed.

[Guille6785]

I just don't build anything that I'll care about in an unmoderated server, that simple

[nimzowitsch10]

I hope I can get some responses from people that play pub servers regularly.

[Cheggf]

Loaded question. "I think griefing should be allowed" sounds like what a griefer would say. More like "Klei stopping griefers is an extremely unrealistic task, and even defining griefing isn't agreed upon in the community so how is Klei going to be an arbiter on what's allowed on the official servers?".

[Dollmaker]

25 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Loaded question. "I think griefing should be allowed" sounds like what a griefer would say. More like "Klei stopping griefers is an extremely unrealistic task, and even defining griefing isn't agreed upon in the community so how is Klei going to be an arbiter on what's allowed on the official servers?".

Pretty much, theres no real way for Klei to moderate this. 

Playing with strangers comes with risks, and when you decide to play on a Pub server, you agree to take on that risk. 

[Rylanor]

Griefing is hardly a problem when people can just rollback world at will. Even then, I enjoy playing after successful grief because thats both unique from other servers and presents a challenge to team.

[GenomeSquirrel]

If Klei wants to make it harder to vandalize I'm fine with that, but allowing things to be easily vandalized yet punishing that is not something I like.

[nimzowitsch10]

@Cheggf

Hey buddy good to see you.

I would say burning base is an obvious example of griefing, and people shouldn't be allowed to do that is that wrong?

[oregu]

even if there's no moderation, there are a fair amount of preventative measures. its why starting vote for rollbacking/regenerating is only allowed to people with the dominant playtime (though if you were able to get a couple friends to force regen a server it would be a lot worse than griefing, but that means you'd have to waste 70 or so days on a server if you really wanted to do some damage). you can just kill yourself in an empty server and these measures wont matter, but i suppose you cant make a server unplayable and just ditch the server either. it's not really a case of should or shouldn't be allowed, thats up to democracy.

[DVGMedia]

Majority of the time too public servers are reset anyway. Nearly All the klei dedicated are survival servers Which means the world can just reset when no one is playing.

majority  of the time your work is not permanent unless its on an endless server.
and if you really want to make a base can make it in a secluded location where no one would find easily
like don't base in common areas like pig king or oasis.
or just keep your bases minimalistic
That's usually how I tend to play.

Endless servers though are usually group ran  and have moderation much more than klei dedicated servers.
So those are a good place to help mitigate  griefing.

over the years griefing has gone down significantly with how easy it is to fix via admin mods and also the
vote systems that klei has implemented for standard play.

I feel klei has done a pretty good job in mitigating griefing though the games life span.

[Cheggf]

4 hours ago, nimzowitsch10 said:

@Cheggf

Hey buddy good to see you.

I would say burning base is an obvious example of griefing, and people shouldn't be allowed to do that is that wrong?

And Klei should pay moderators to watch people burning the base? They should trust community volunteers to be impartial and only act on extremely blatant cases like that? Yeah, I'd like it if people who were undeniably griefing were banned. I'd also like if updates came out 3x as fast and with 4x the content while still maintaining the same level of polish. Neither is very realistic. 

[Gashzer]

Nobody owns the klei public servers so its all free game, if you build a base on them, remember just because you built it doesn't make it yours, klei servers are like a mini communism system in action. 

Its the peoples base for anyone to use, burn and take stuff from.

Only stuff thats yours is what is on your person.

[Sikers]

Griefing is one of core playing Willow

[MondayNight]

Wickerbottom, from Beta re-work, after reaching the 16x Grumbles cap-quota, stops further reading and offers a dialogue explanation - "That would be a rather excessive amount of bees, dear". With this precedent in mind, would be very easy for KLei to implement something similar when player tries to directly burn a structure: "I see absolutely no benefit for me and my fellow survivors in doing so" for example, as quotation monologue, and character refuse to pass the (burning) action. Very simple tweak, doesn't impede any sort of game-play style aside the most widespread and easy form of griefing to date - since making a torch day 1 is basic. Sure, one could place on ground, beside said structures, some burnable materials and try to burn indirectly (KLei could also enlarge structure protection with/for 1 tile around it & prevent such bypass to some extent as well), but such course offers counter-measure time for people being griefed. Hammering is still the 2nd most-used shenanigan, but for that griefer would need to do some mining/trip to Mosaic, and most griefers just roam land with torch/Willow's Lighter to find bases and "teach them the flame way" as quickly as possible, no foraging-and-whatnot engaged. Such option can be bundled with default "Griefer Protection".

[_Ellat_]

I like griefing peoples bases.

[Cheggf]

2 hours ago, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

Wickerbottom, from Beta re-work, after reaching the 16x Grumbles cap-quota, stops further reading and offers a dialogue explanation - "That would be a rather excessive amount of bees, dear". With this precedent in mind, would be very easy for KLei to implement something similar when player tries to directly burn a structure: "I see absolutely no benefit for me and my fellow survivors in doing so" for example, as quotation monologue, and character refuse to pass the (burning) action. Very simple tweak, doesn't impede any sort of game-play style aside the most widespread and easy form of griefing to date - since making a torch day 1 is basic. Sure, one could place on ground, beside said structures, some burnable materials and try to burn indirectly (KLei could also enlarge structure protection with/for 1 tile around it & prevent such bypass to some extent as well), but such course offers counter-measure time for people being griefed. Hammering is still the 2nd most-used shenanigan, but for that griefer would need to do some mining/trip to Mosaic, and most griefers just roam land with torch/Willow's Lighter to find bases and "teach them the flame way" as quickly as possible, no foraging-and-whatnot engaged. Such option can be bundled with default "Griefer Protection".

You can burn signs for warmth. You even admit in your own post that it would just stall them for 1 second. 

[Cr4zyFl4mes]

On 7/25/2022 at 2:21 AM, nimzowitsch10 said:

-  People burning bases is a legitimate playstyle that should be left alone on pub servers.

This is only a legitimate playstyle in competitive and madness. In cooperative and social it shouldn't be allowed.

[nimzowitsch10]

@Cr4zyFl4mes

I agree, but klei believes any day 1 player should be allowed to burn all bases with no repercussions to preserve the "chaos playstyle" as joeW describes it.

[BeeClops]

this again. Love the pole results tho 

[DVGMedia]

griefing protection code wise kind of makes the game worse though.

I can understand people are completely untrusting of randoms.
I remember some one killed me with a weather pain (back when you used to be able to do that)
Just because I harvested the honey from the bee boxes.

But to force that type of play style of territory
kind of makes the game unfun and  it can also ruins it for others
Yeah it helps very specific people who enjoy that and want that in a public setting But majority of the time people who really enjoy base design already play on servers with griefing protection mods or they play on their own worlds. 


Like i consider myself more of a nomad player
Hopping from base to base and providing items to the bases. I follow tactics like burning trees in winter  and so forth
and playing on these griefer protected servers actually makes it harder to survive in the game.

What klei did which is leaving it up to democracy and the servers is great.  Its not crazy meddling  to where you can't have a vanilla experience So there is just enough player protection that at most you end up loosing maybe 8 minutes while playing.

I think a thing klei could add potentially is server annoucements for when things that shouldn't light on fire is lit on fire.
Dispite the source. So that way the players and even server owners know what happens when they look at the logs of the servers
And they can evaluate what was griefing and was wasn't

And you do have the choice of what servers you play on.
Be it the ultra modded servers that turn dst into an rpg or your standard vanilla experience.
You get to chose how you play this game.

[Falkenpelz]

Everything I'm reading about this makes me think I should go to Klei official pubs to finally get to play some real PvP

[. . .]

Klei pub server is like Dark Souls, you can be invaded at any time and must be prepared. All they need to do is enable PvP

[abrocator]

I've experienced little griefing in pubs. Those that did were kicked.

[Atkvin]

IMO the only answer is to gate powerful abilities with some potential to grief behind gameplay. Wickerbottom's grimoire book cost increase was a step in the right direction, but indirectly encourages griefing in a different sense as early players will more likely just raid the archives for the recipe. But unlike fire, most of Wicker's books cause impermanent damage/impediments that can be dealt with, or simply votekicking her off to stop her from trolling with them.

It is impossible to moderate griefing, and torches allow anyone to grief on day 1 anyway. You simply have to rely on rollback, and accept that strangers can be jerks on the dedicated public servers (where your progress is completely temporary anyways).