Griefing in Fallout 76 Turns You into a Wanted Criminal with a Bounty on Your Head

Megalith

Megalith

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Todd Howard revealed numerous details regarding Fallout 76 during yesterday’s QuakeCon 2018 panel, and an interesting one involves griefers: online trolls who regularly attack other players will get nothing (e.g., caps, XP) for killing and be labelled a wanted murderer by the game. According to Howard, it was an attempt to “turn the assholes into interesting content." Comic Book and Kotaku have rounded up some other tidbits, which include the new perk system, private servers, and mods.

Wanted murderers appear on everyone else's map as a red star, so everyone else playing knows their rough location, and they have a bounty on their own head which comes out of their own stash of caps. What's more, the wanted murderers can't see where the other players are on the map. It becomes a hunt. Neat, huh?
 
Without seeing how it's actually implemented, it's impossible to know how good it actually is. I'm on the no side of the fence until I see how it's implemented and how that actually works.
 
Mut1ny said:
I don't know how I really feel about this. Reminds me of The Division where other players would purposely run in front of you to make you Rogue and then turn around and kill you.
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Yea, that was super annoying. But the worst is when people were chasing rogues and accidently hit each other. Thus making almost everyone rogue....
 
"PvP in Fallout 76 is semi-optional in the sense that players can choose not to participate in an aggressor’s challenge. Bethesda said that the first few attacks against someone else work like a challenging slap that opens up combat if the challenge is reciprocated. If you don’t choose to engage, you can still be killed, but that’ll label your killer as a wanted murderer. At that point, the killer will appear on everyone’s map as a red indicator and will have a bounty on their head. The killer gets no rewards for the first kill, so if you want to grief others, prepare to have the rest of the server return the favor."

Reading is fundamental.
 
Think of the possibilities for 'Survival' mode. If you decide to be a griefer on the hardest setting, Bethesda releases your real-life name and address. That would be awesome!

Too bad there won't be any Steam achievements like, "I killed someone in real life, and I feel fine."
 
Krenum said:
Makes no difference to me. If I do decide to purchase this game, my sole purpose in it will be to grief other players and make their lives miserable, because war, war never changes.
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This. 99% of the fun is griefing. All they have done is raise the stakes and make it more compelling. :D
 
Gonna be a definite purchase for me. I've been wanting to try out one of these survival games, and this seems like it will do just the trick. How to balance out DooM Eternal and FO76?!
 
Interesting idea but the trolls will find a way.

We will see streams/YouTube vids of players seeing how long they can hold out as the wanted player. Maybe taking as many other players as possible with them. Go out in a blaze of glory!
Made it 26 minutes this time. Let’s hop on another server and do it again!

Ok now I’m interested in the game....

How many times can a player rinse and repeat this until banned?
 
They should just have two servers, one for pissy poodles and one for the big dogs.
 
I wonder if they'll (Bethesda) will place the repeat offender griefers on a separate, isolated server? That'd be fun to watch them go at each other. Even more fun when they try to use nukes. Takes teamwork to get the nukes and I'd imagine the griefers wouldn't work too well as a team. Although several griefers could call a truce and team up to go after a person who's really being a total asshole to them all. Oh the irony of it all. :D

I like the idea of the perk card system and only being able to use 15 points per S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Having the ability to change roles anytime during the game is a huge draw for me.

I do know that one of the first places I'll go to is a mountain top to establish a BoO that way I'll have an excellent view of the shenanigans going on down below and a good vantage point for sniping.
 
Mut1ny said:
I don't know how I really feel about this. Reminds me of The Division where other players would purposely run in front of you to make you Rogue and then turn around and kill you.
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That was my first thought.

I think for it to work you would have to have a way to disable friendly fire. That way if you wanted to kill another player you would actively have to turn off the protection or something.
 
Factum said:
Lots of barrier aggression dected here...
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Barrier aggression? Is that one of those terms the professors use in schools now days?

If Bethesda is going to go out of their way to program this kind of mechanic in their game, you bet I'm going to take advantage of it. Sounds fun to see who the best PK'er can be! I'm getting Diablo 1 flashbacks to when I used to town kill people lol.

I can see it now, stalking a group of people while their taking on a boss, then lobbing a mini nuke at them, take their scrap and run for the hills! :)
 
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This sounds like it could be good times, set traps for the would be bounty collectors and see how many you can take down at once. I am sure there will be groups appear for the sole purpose of chasing wanted people.
 
So could you conspire with someone to go murder a bunch of other people with an alt account, then that player lets you kill them for their (ideally, large) bounty, and then you guys split it or something? Just spitballin' here...
 
Bethesda's Fallout is my favorite computer game, so I've been reading as much as I can, including all the comments sections. Sounds like there's three kinds of people looking at the game:

1. The Solo Player, who still doesn't want to play with other people,
2. The Hopeful Believer, who thinks that Bethesda will crack the case and make it all work,
3. The Griefer, who is certain that s/he can still find the way to make everyone else miserable.

Bethesda hasn't acknowledged that the threads have been filled with griefers ready to take up the gauntlet and ravage the map.

PvP is not a spice, you don't get to add 'a pinch' of it, it's either part of the game or it isn't. Your game could offer several styles of play (like WoW), some of which can include PvP, but then you have to fudge up reasons for people to try the portions of the game they don't like - the game is not a true single experience, and there will always be people whe complain because their favorite portion of the game isn't the dominant portion of the game.

And even if you firewall your PvP and PvE game areas you will still find griefers, even on fully vegan PvE servers, because griefing, like trolling, exists where there is an opportunity to annoy someone. They can exist on the margins, pushing the limits of the rules to mess with other players. Has there been a game company who has solved (or even acknowledged) the social root of the griefer problem? I don't think so. It's because:

1. Griefers are bullies who work inside and outside of a game to be assholes. Making people angry amuses them.
2. Griefers don't judge other griefers - the regular player is not his peer, the regular player is his cattle, and even a shitty griefer is a hail fellow when he is in his own circle.
3. If a griefer isn't being successful he moves on. If a griefer is being successful he is ruining the game for someone else, and it's likely the other players move on (and you're left with a small griefer-eating-griefer server of snot). Either way, you've lost customers and spent development hours trying to make use of unproductive behavior.
4. Their 'energy' (what they bring to the game) cannot be channeled in a valuable way, because they are looking to devalue someone else's gaming experience.

I'll still buy the game. I almost stole from my video card money to buy the supreme edition with the helmet, but they were instantly sold out.

But I might put the game on the shelf until private servers come out.
 
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Simce this game does not supposedly have NPC's, doesn't that mean that griefers also serve a purpose? Cannot they form Raider gangs whose sole purpose is to steal, pillage and murder to gain resources?
 
Krenum said:
Barrier aggression? Is that one of those terms the professors use in schools now days?

If Bethesda is going to go out of their way to program this kind of mechanic in their game, you bet I'm going to take advantage of it. Sounds fun to see who the best PK'er can be! I'm getting Diablo 1 flashbacks to when I used to town kill people lol.

I can see it now, stalking a group of people while their taking on a boss, then lobbing a mini nuke at them, take their scrap and run for the hills! :)
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It's an old term....this video explains it better than words, just replace the gate with a screen:


Like I said...this thread is full of it.
 
This is meaningless. Griefers don't do it to get ingame cash or xp, or even loot. They do it for the hell of it, and to annoy people.

This won't change that, hell it could even make more people want to do it, to see how long they last when marked.

Or better yet, kill the noob, then quit the server and connect to another one.
 
Not_So_Hard said:
The bounty is paid directly out of the murderer’s caps stash. Since they get no rewards for murder, the murderer will lose money when they are killed and the bounty is collected.
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They'll just put all their caps into goods before going out to kill.

I'm pretty sure this will just make them try even that harder. Because this is a challenge, not a punishment.

If it was punishment when they get marked all their weapons should fire roosters like in the cracked crysis.
 
Ocellaris said:
People will just find ways of griefing others without triggering the system.
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People will learn to trigger the system to grief people.

I still like a novel approach like this, but yeah, if it's a system it can be manipulated. This will requireme for constant tweaking.
 
Too bad your perk upgrades will now be a trading card system. I shit you not, they are making your perks into god damn trading cards that you can trade with other players.
 
Mut1ny said:
I don't know how I really feel about this. Reminds me of The Division where other players would purposely run in front of you to make you Rogue and then turn around and kill you.
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Exactly the issue I thought of when I read this. I seem to recall that didn't work out well in The Division, either.
 
Not_So_Hard said:
The bounty is paid directly out of the murderer’s caps stash. Since they get no rewards for murder, the murderer will lose money when they are killed and the bounty is collected.
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Right, but if the griefer is griefing with an alt he/she doesn't care about, and is in on it with the bounty collector (or IS the bounty collector...)
 
alxlwson said:
"PvP in Fallout 76 is semi-optional in the sense that players can choose not to participate in an aggressor’s challenge. Bethesda said that the first few attacks against someone else work like a challenging slap that opens up combat if the challenge is reciprocated. If you don’t choose to engage, you can still be killed, but that’ll label your killer as a wanted murderer. At that point, the killer will appear on everyone’s map as a red indicator and will have a bounty on their head. The killer gets no rewards for the first kill, so if you want to grief others, prepare to have the rest of the server return the favor."

Reading is fundamental.
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Sounds like almost the exact same system from Lineage II. In 2, if you hit someone, your own name, (above your head), would turn blue if I remember correctly. If you don't hit them back after a few seconds, the persons name will start flashing blue and then return to white. But if you hit them back, it's on and both player's names turn Green (I think), and you are now in PvP mode. People who are with you can join in and you can have a grand melee if you wish.

But if the person doesn't hit back and you kill them, you're name will go bright red and stay that way until you are killed, or "work it off". Here's the real crazy part though, PvP in Lineage 2 could cause items to drop from your corpse on death. For awhile even if you murdered a player, sometimes they would drop, you might get one or two drops in regular PvP from a kill. But a red player that is killed could pop like a freaking pinnate.

Items in Lineage 2 were very expensive. They could require weeks to gather the materials or cash to purchase, maybe even months. Full weapon drops were very rare, usually you only got parts. So loosing a weapon or several pieces of armor was like hitting the lottery for the bounty hunter.

Working off your Red involved normal farming of mobs, but high level mobs and 20 minutes work would usually clear your red.

This did not stop griefing at all, and some clans specialized in it. They would roll through as a group and try and sucker a group into PvP, usually they won their troll fights. Sometimes they would just go red on someone just for the chance of a drop back when murdered players still dropped gear. But here is what needs to be understood about this type of mechanic.

If Bethesda is planning to integrate griefers into the game system as they are saying, then the take away is that griefing might be sanctioned activity. There is a chance that there will be ways to profit as a griefer, and hunting griefers could be fun and profitable as well. Players will need to understand this and put their big-boy pants on.

If griefing is not "sanctioned" and integrated into the game in this way, and if there is no potential profit other than the fun of being an asshole to others, then they actually could be missing out on a great dynamic. I would be happy with both, servers that support profit oriented griefing as Lineage 2 did, and servers that don't.

I do wonder at the import of this phrase because it leaves a little room for options "The killer gets no rewards for the first kill"
 
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