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

[Mike23Ua]

20 minutes ago, Atkvin said:

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).

What if it’s the experienced players who are griefing the newbies?

I have had people join my worlds as Wes or Moose Woodie and then destroy my bases, sure it’s not as effective as just crafting a torch and burning a base down, but there’s a weird kind of admiration that goes into watching a guy moose charge your base.

Lately ALL of Klei’s content updates have made it ridiculously easy for an Experienced player to “Grief” the Newbies.

Here let’s count a few examples shall we? 
An experienced player can bell bond every single surface Beefalo and then put them in the underground ruins or archives a place no noob is going to realistically be able to get to- no surface Beefalo means no Beefalo Wool for Winter Hats or Beefalo Hats, no Additional Bernie’s for Willow either.

An experienced player can also find the Terrarium, kill Eye of Terror, put nightmare fuel into it and then spawn Twins of Terror, get them into phase 2 (the phase where they’re eye opens into mouths and can destroy bases) then they can summon them with a literal spin-the-bottle type odds on any poor sucker just trying to survive.

An experienced player can ALSO board a ship with a newbie, eat a whole bunch of sanity reducing foods and laugh as Wavey now wrecks said noobs boat.

An experienced player can ALSO create the rain and moon books as Wickerbottom and make any newbie Woodie or WX78’s life an endless hell.

Last but most certainly not least- Experienced players can go find Moon Quay Island kill a bunch of Powder Monkeys, gather a bunch of Trinkets and then “Die” near a poor new player to force them into being Wonkey.

Its almost like Klei is designing DST as if it was still a single player game franchise..

This game is a pure disaster to try and play with random strangers online.. but it is the nature of DST and there’s little they can do to change it.

My best advice to give to you is to always have a full base prototyped but not placed in your inventory at all times…

And since you can literally carry an entire base around in your pocket like Pokémon in Pokeballs.. any griefing that is done can be replaced with the “Spares” you had ready to place later.

[Atkvin]

14 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Its almost like Klei is designing DST as if it was still a single player game franchise..

No lol, to me it feels more like Klei is catering towards experienced players whom firstly, are still playing their game - and more importantly playing on private servers with friends, which is arguably the best way to play anyways. Similar to how they no longer put much thought into pvp, it would be stifling to try to design around and griefproof mechanics that could be used against players on entirely temporary public servers.

Destroying resources is hardly new to DST by the way. A Wigfrid could intentionally or unintentionally destroy the entire world's population of beefalos because they went on a hunting spree too many times, or even beginners could rely on beefalos too many times to fend off hound attacks and giant bosses. Until recently cacti and reeds wouldn't be renewable once burnt up on day 1 by griefers or by natural summer wildfires, which was a point of contention brought up multiple times on the forums.

In any multiplayer game, the experienced player will have an edge on a newbie, and they may use that power maliciously. Before any of these new mechanics players could cause earthquakes underground, put out firepits at night, eat mandrakes to put everyone to sleep, burn it all to the ground, etc etc. To try to fight against it is futile.

(Though I'd never consider myself a griefer, I fondly look back on a non-pvp minecraft server where I was able to trick a poor fool into eating a poisonous pufferfish by holding down the eat button but stopping before completion of the action... It was hilarious.)