Friendly fire + lack of significant griefing penalty has already hit the inevitable idiocy.

I understand why the decision to have friendly fire is in place. I also understand why the penalty for griefing isn't particularly heavy.

Unfortunately, both friendly fire and lack of significant griefing penalty are a problem in F2P games. Why? Because of what we have going on on Connery currently. We've noticed a trend lately - any time we effectively defend a point for any significant period of time, suddenly our Sunderers get blown up. Then our terminals get destroyed. And then a Max crash hits us and we get pushed out. So we started watching to see what was happening.

Oddly, it was a friendly player blowing them up, then never being seen in the battle again after.

We've been reporting the people we're seeing do it, and if it had only happened once or twice I'd say it was just a coincidence. Unfortunately it's happened like five times tonight. It leads one to the conclusion that people are making throwaway accounts specifically to grief and break defenders.

This is the inescapable problem of having both friendly fire and lenient griefing penalties in place in a game with zero requirements to create an account. It will become an escalating issue if left alone, and as outfits become more organized become a normal tactic. Please figure out something that's a good compromise on this issue - it's bad enough that we have known hacks in the game without people abusing legitimate mechanics.

Welcome to F2P.

I saw this happening yesterday. I was manning an AA turret on one of those round bases during a serious assault from the air, and started taking heavy explosion damage, but couldn't see where it was coming from. I swivelled around just in time to see one of our own heavies rocket me in the back again. We looked at eachother for a second, as my rather slow-working mind tried to figure out what he was playing at. An engineer comes around the corner and, noticing I was damaged, but not realising the source, came over to fix me (unfortunately putting himself between my guns and the traitor), and promptly got machinegunned in the back of the head by the heavy. At this point, I'd had quite enough of his nonsense, so started firing the turret at him, and he ran off back inside (AA turrets not being terribly effective on infantry, as it turns out), I guess to cause more mayhem.

So, it's going on, and folks need to keep their eyes out for it when they're defending. It's pretty darn lame is what it is, but given that we don't typically have time to watch our own team-mates like hawks, I'm not too sure what we can do about it at our end until they reveal themselves.

OH, Oh, I know, pick me!

one Solution: Implement a fusion of Zipper Interactive's vote to Kick system in MAG with the player name list- and combine it with the griefing system detector currently in place


So, if a person does this continuously- and the griefing system has picked them up as having griefed a few times - have it so you and a few others can vote to kick- and after enough votes, he can't spawn in the area- gets auto killed- or something of the sort.


Or you could do the pure approach- after enough votes from members in your squad(or however you want to set it up)- they're gone.




Someone else's idea is to make a griefer who does this significantly - have them pay some of the cost of the destroyed friendly vehicle

I'll offer the solution of the current griefing system, but the penalty is made increasingly stiff when in close proximity to the front lines.

So, if a player is going on his little rampage, and accrues grief points through the usual methods then he would get the normal penalty + an extra penalty for griefing in proximity to the enemy.

Now, the best way to avoid catching innocent players will be to look for specific targets that the player has killed: sunderers, turrets, consoles, and other important, defense critical items. Other players, oddly enough are not much of an issue because they can easily defend themselves or respawn relatively quickly anyway.

A second thought I had would be to apply all grief penalties accrued this way to user specific mac addresses

This has only happened to me once. I was in a mag, pulled back to a safe point behind the infantry lines to repair, started repairing. I was fine for the first few seconds, then I could see my tank was taking damage, kinda slow at first. Note this was a position with a lot of cover. I thought it was some HA from long range taking pot shots at my front armor, figured they'd run out of ammo, since I was outrepairing them. Then the damage per shot increased hugely. I was kinda confused at this moment.

Then I saw the VS MAX unloading shot directly into my rear armor over and over. I'm not sure what weapon he was using, but the tank blew up. I think he had just spawned in to kill the Sunderer there. I shot him a few times. He turned around and killed me. I was mainly curious about his BR. Sure enough, a lvl 1. Note that this battle was hectic enough that if he had fought at all, he wouldn't be 1. Then he walked away, and I never saw him again during the battle.

Honestly, I think the solutions should be a bit simpler. Remember, they're probably using smurf accounts, and it might not be easy to tie the account to the offending players, so I think the solutions should focus on prevention, with some punishment tied in. To start with, disable FF for stations. Vehicle and infantry FF are understandable because they alter the tactics of the game. Station FF has never been a big tactical issue, so doing this is an easy anti-griefing measure.

Also, alter the anti-griefing rules for Sunderers. Let me be honest. Unless you are profoundly incompetent, there's no accidental way to deal more than 80% of a Sunderer's life in damage in a short period. Small arms fire doesn't scratch one. And with a MBT or rocket launcher, that's several shots in a row. We should hugely up the grief points for damaging a Sunderer (don't count vehicle collisions because those have buggy damage), to the point where a single player locks before being able to destroy it.

Finally, I think there should be a silent tally of grief points on critical targets like Sunderers which is tabulated by MAC address. No warning, but lets say a given MAC address does the equivalent of 5 Sunderers worth of damage to Sunderers over one month. At this point, this player is clearly not doing this accidentally, and sanctions could be taken on his highest-level account.

Given that they tend to do this when you're facing the other way, then when you turn around, you basically ignore them because you're naturally looking for enemies, perhaps the most important thing we need is to be told explicitly when we're taking friendly fire, and maybe stick a special marker on whoever did it. I appreciate some folks will consider that easymode or something, but I'd hope we can agree that it's blatant cheating, and people doing it don't deserve any breaks.

One of the worst is "Reaver Greivers" as we call them in the NC in the warp gate - people using a reaver to ram Liberators/Galaxy's to flip them on their roof so they can't be used.

One guy was doing this non-stop on Briggs the other night. We got to the point where we'd spawn our Liberator and fly straight out of the warp gate to pick up the crew.

The other one is Combat Medics doing 'accidental' friendly fire in battles to get the revive/heal XP.

One guy was doing this constantly at one point until everyone turned around and shot him and no one revived him. Of course, he was back in about 2 minute sdoing the same thing.

They need some sort of 'time out' for people who do too many TK's within a certain amount of time. Although I can see this being abused too because I don't know how many times I've been shooting at an enemy and someone has walked through my fire, or even WALKED THROUGH ME and I've killed them not having time to react.

Bumping this, because it needs to stay visible. Smed, you need to have your guys find some kind of solution to this before it becomes the preferred method of breaking deadlocked fights over bases.

How about removing friendly fire up to a certain battle rank, let's say 5 or 10? Griefing would require some extra effort to achieve and as a bonus starting characters get some slack while learning the game.

Perfect example: Two Engineers 'repairing' a Turent. One turns to the other and point blank- kills him so only one person can get the repair XP.

I see this at least once a day; and it's happened to me. And all they get is a warning... a line of text easily dismissed. So what if it locks up my barrel... I'm repairing not firing.

I'd advocate an XP or cert suspension for 5 minutes after griefing someone to death... especially point blank range.

Some friendly fire is unavoidable... that's combat among pugs, but it usually takes more than a couple bullets to kill someone... (and if you are in Infiltrator...learn to aim better)

NO- I think a Traiter icon that makes you visible all over the map... and give everyone... even your own team XP for killing them. Let it last for at least 50 deaths or an hour... which ever comes first. This would also mitigate anyone from finding a way to start another toon on the same server for another faction... and causing mayhem by griefing folks on purpose to help their 'real' faction.

Turn-coats, spies, and traitors exist in war too.

Why there is friendly fire anyway?!
Just stypid add friendly fire.

To try and limit the overzealous use of explosives. This isn't Call of Duty where you can throw grenades everywhere, toss C4 and kill four guys that are currently engaging your team.

All in all, I think weapons lock needs to come in to play faster. Give a counter for it too.. a UI piece above your accrued certs.

The problem is vehicles. The amount of TK's I have by simply driving my vanguard over a road and people crossing said road at the EXACT time I drive by. Do I run people over with intend? No, they just don't look and cross whenever they feel like it and usually means right underneath my vanguard.

So if they increase penalty of TK'ing I hope they at least look after the drivers that have no intend to run over the darwinists.

Sadly, I saw more of this over the past wekend than I would ever expect. And even more sadly, it wasn't just standard griefing most of the time, but let's call it selfish point griefing. Engineers shooting others while repairing turrets for the repair xp, or just to get the turret to use. Sunderers attacking friendly AMS sunderers to get the spot.

Someone in another thread posted a suggestion that they should make it so if you shoot at a friendly, that same damage is returned to you. This makes it you'll always die before someone else dies. Now that's a penalty I can stand behind. If you're dumb enough to shoot at someone, you should receive the same damage back, including explosive damage.

There should be red flags on accounts that do this enough.

How about double dmg back, hes death in a wink if he cant stop doing crap with his gun.

Too exploitable, and too uncontrollable. If that mechanic was in place I'd suicide near constantly due to idiots that like to run in front of /through me while I'm firing. Griefing wouldn't even require aiming - just wander around in firefights getting accidentally hit by friendlies.

That being said, the idea someone had earlier about disabling friendly fire for lower battle rank players would be a good start.

The mac-address would have to be captured by the Launcher/client and sent through. mac-address doesn't go over the internet past the first router/hop just the ip-address. But should be simple enough to implement through the client side app. But you still have people with multiple machines to deal with, unless its a long term ban then they have to go buy another $20 network card

I do like the idea of say BR5 before teamkill enters, let them learn and at least play a bit to grief (maybe 10). Most f2p games have minimum lvl caps for certain activities. Then when banned they lost some time and effort.