Quote Originally Posted by Hyrist View Post
The grief tactics and issues is some of the things I want buttoned up, on behalf of those who would rather play fairly. Even in a PVE game like FFXI, grieving tactics were used, and used a plenty in the early days. And while some particulars look back on it and say it's exciting and memorable - the truth of the matter is, when it was being done, people were furious, angry, and worse, little gets done about it, even though it was a clear ToS violation.

People will grief one another if you let them, and the sad fact is fair play needs to be enforced strictly if it is to exist. That clashes directly with many of the 'open' concepts people like to romanticize.

There are several ways to get around this, or at the very least encourage comradeship somehow. Healthy rivalry instead of a degenerative one.

And then there's this feeling that I can't shrug off about HNMs that doesn't settle well, and take this as personal opinion.

I want the sensation of hunting something, and that's been missing in pretty much any MMO set up involving world bosses. I absolutely adored Dark Ixion's set up. An epic mob that you had to chase down and claim in a specific way. And it could FLEE from you. You had to coordinate with your LS not just to fight the monster, you had to catch it.

I really hope they institute that at least a few of the HNMs in this game. If anything, that would get me excited about the content more than anything else.
I agree fully with you that developers should climb every mountain, so to speak, in order to make the game as immune to griefing practices as humanly possible.

I think those figurative mountains include, however, the task of finding ways of making open-world content grief-proof. This is one of those cases in which I believe going "instanced" and giving up openness would amount to throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath waters of grief.

Another line that should be drawn, by the way, is the differentiating one between competitiveness in the open world and griefing practices. Competing for prey has, in my experience and that of many others, increased the excitement of the open-world environment, whereas deviousness of purpose, and the intent of reducing the effort you and your linkshell invest, at the expense of my work and the effort of my linkshell, are a completely different category of things.

R