Ode to Assholes: The 5 Greatest Griefs of All Time

Some gamers play for the quiescent satisfaction of complete immersion, that temporary suspension of disbelief that allows one to forget their troubles and journey to another world.

Others play for the thrill of competition, that little burst of endorphins released whenever they show another player what’s what with the business end of shotgun.

But some gamers… some gamers play because they’re assholes. From team-killing to spawn-camping to more creative methods of “griefing,” here’s a look at the 5 greatest ways to crush the competition’s spirit.

Some would call these behaviors anti-social. But — given that there’s a small chance you could frustrate someone into giving up video games forever and devoting their life to curing cancer and the Ebola virus — I prefer to think of them as investments in the world’s future.

#5: Special Delivery

In the game Second Life, anything is possible.

Tech-savvy players can code their own items and sell them to other virtual denizens, making some real cash in the process. Rugs, furniture, entire houses… the sky’s the limit. Hell, for a time, CNN had a digital news bureau operating from within the game.

Of course, such unchecked inventive power was bound to fall into the wrong hands: the Internet’s, to be exact. A majority of greifers in Second Life hail from forums such as Something Awful or 4chan’s /b/ (NSFW).

A popular method of pissing people off is coding boxes whose sole function is to produce more boxes, with then spawn more boxes, and on and on ad infurium. Observe (pardon “mein Deutsch”):

 

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#4: One-hit Wonder

As anyone who has played the game at least once can attest to, Call of Duty 4 isn’t quite what one would call a bastion of maturity.

Racial slurs and homophobic epitaphs run rampant. Insulting, seemingly omniscient inferences into how your mother spends her spare time are common. What I’m getting at is, in the following grief, these guys probably deserved it.

In the game’s “Hardcore Search and Destroy” mode, players only get one life per round. Help your team make the most of it:

 

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#3: Time is of the Essence

Pretending to be a girl to rake in a gilded bounty from lonely shut-ins? Provoking an unstoppable beast into following you down the main street of a crowded city, killing dozens of newbies as a result?

Welcome to the illustrious life of an MMO griefer. Now, the tricks listed above are about as old as the MMO genre itself. Sometimes, we need a fresh take on how to best alienate our fellow man.

In World of Warcraft, one of the bosses can cast a spell called “Living Bomb.” As the name implies, anyone afflicted has a few precious seconds before their insides go Ted Kaczynski. If your pet is unfortunate enough to succumb to the spell, you can unsummon it to keep it from detonating.

But when you resummon your pet, the bomb’s counter is still ticking:

 

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#2: Fanning the Flames

The world of Diablo wasn’t a particularly safe place to visit. Demons poured out from underneath a cursed chapel, and just because you killed them didn’t mean they were obligated to stay that way.

However, the greatest threat to players was… other players. The original Battle.Net multiplayer servers had more holes than the plot of an Uwe Boll flick, and unscrupulous players were quick to exploit them.

Of course, some players didn’t need fancy hacks and external scripts to make other gamers’ lives a living “double Hell” (because technically, they were already there once.)

One popular trick was to flag your character for PvP, set up a town portal deep within the dungeon, and then surround that etheral doorway with a shit-ton of firewalls. Once a new player joined, you’d coax them into using your portal, promising them all kinds of high level, fat loot.

Instead of walking into endless treasure, they’d stroll headlong into this:

Take their items, mock them mercilessly, and wait for a new player to enter the game.
Repeat as necessary.
(Image from LLCoolJD, courtesy of the Something Awful forums.)

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#1: Regicide FTW

Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series, prefers a hands-on approach to his games. In nearly ever iteration of the series, his alter ego “Lord British” puts in an appearance. Since it’s hardly fitting for a character tantamount to God to meet his end at the hands of a measly player, the early incarnations of Lord British were indestructible.

Or at least allegedly indestructible.

During a beta test of Ultima Online, the series’ first venture into MMO territory, a sneaky player named Rainz managed to kill the noble Lord British with a “Fire Field” spell. Garriott had logged onto the game to help stress test the servers, and was actually controlling his character when death overtook him. The August 8, 1997 assassination went down in history as one of the greatest griefs of all time.

Apparently, the code for the game had granted Lord British invincibility, but the immunity wasn’t persistent between game sessions. When Garriott logged on for that fatal beta test, he’d forgotten to toggle his invulnerability.

The incident is the origin of the “Lord British Postulate,” the theory that whenever anything living is introduced into an MMO setting, someone will try to kill it.

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I hope these 5 ways to lose friends have been insightful.

I prefer to liken this list to being shot out of a cannon. I don’t want to do it, but if someone else is going to anyway (and I’m not in the line of fire), you can bet your ass I’m going to watch how it all plays out.