It was either Mel Brooks or Abraham Lincoln who said “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Either way, that’s my mindset when it comes to griefing in video games. These Minecraft videos Team Avolition are uploading to YouTube are the perfect example of this; it’s hilarious to watch, but I would be fuming in my chair if I were the actual target.
Their Valentine’s Day video gave me pause, though. Not because it wasn’t entertaining; it most certainly was. And not because I felt bad for the guys getting their shit ruined; I most certainly didn’t. What sets this particular group of griefers apart from the rest, aside from their ability to cut together an entertaining video, is their sheer ingenuity. If something doesn’t work, they find a way around it. And if the game doesn’t let them do something in a particular way, they hack the game. They have hacks that enable them to fly and teleport and stay in sneak mode indefinitely… and now they have a new one that lets them destroy any kind of block with a single hit. At one point in the video, when the guy is just plowing through the stone walls of a house and the wooden fence surrounding it, someone is heard to comment: “This is the end of servers, right here. We’re looking at the end of all things.”
That’s what gave me pause. This sort of hack, left unchecked, will cause damage to the game by driving away its playerbase.
I’ve read that Notch (the developer of Minecraft) intended the game to be a single-player experience, and that the multiplayer aspect is just a sort of add-on. If that’s the case, he’s got it backwards. Single-player Minecraft gets very boring once you’ve explored your range of action. You can always mine more diamonds, sure, but the only thing you can do with them is employ them in the quest for more diamonds. And you can always explore the randomly generated caves and landscape, but it won’t be long before you’ve seen everything the game can show you. There are always the crazy outliers who are going to build enormous redstone calculators or fantastic roller coasters, but everyone else is eventually going to figure out they’re just digging holes in an empty, sterile landscape.
The real thrill of Minecraft is playing it with other people. It’s logging in to see the new and amazing constructions that have sprung up. Or pitching in with other players to demolish a mountain. Or, heck, even just enjoying the chat while carving yet another diamond mine.
Or, indeed, wrecking someone’s house just to see how they’ll react.
I’ve only skimmed the surface of what kind of mod tools can be installed on a Minecraft server, but they all have this in common: they’re developed by third parties. Which is to say, the core Minecraft team haven’t given server admins anything but the most basic tools to work with. Yes, I can log in and ban someone who has demolished Player 1’s tower, but I can’t undo the damage. At least, not without also undoing whatever construction Player 2 was up to during that time.
With the kinds of hacks Avolition is using, they can quite literally reduce every construction on a server to bare, naked earth in a tiny fraction of the time it took to put them up. Watching someone with this hack from a distance, you would swear the building was just melting. The “bad guys” are winning the arms race. Similar hacks are going to spring up eventually, and on a long enough timeline it will become impossible to have a public server with any semblance of freedom whatsoever.
This isn’t like stealing someone’s kill in Warcraft, or teamkilling someone in a Halo match. In Minecraft, a griefed player can’t just shrug it off and go on to the next game. Yes, that’s part of what makes the situation so funny, but at the same time I’m sure nobody wants to see the game as a whole suffer because of it.
If Notch isn’t watching these videos and thinking about ways to get serious about fixing his game, he really should be. In a way, the people developing and using this sort of hack are an online game’s best beta testers. The message is very clear: the game doesn’t work in its current state.
Of course, Notch already has his 15 million euros. Maybe he doesn’t care about the long-term life of the game. If that’s the case, well, private servers is about the only enjoyment anyone’s going to get out of it. Well, that and Team Avo videos, for as long as they last.
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Brick, I get what your saying, and it’s very noble, but your still not looking at the big picture. Sure, Notch and co. could make a more effective admin tool up, or proper server mods like warp and clan, but this is the Internet. We are talking about a Java game, some thing easy for third parties to rip into, and a group of dedicated people/dicks who are willing to do such a thing. No matter how many walls are put, if you have enough force they will come down.
I don’t really see how that gets to the heart of the matter, though. I don’t really mind griefing so much if it’s done within the confines of the engine (though like Brick I would hate to have it done to me), because that’s just being skillful. Thinking outside of the box.
Hacking the game to give yourself god powers and then griefing is something completely different. There’s no longer any challenge, any skill to it. Now that’s just being a bully.
I think you misunderstood my last sentence. It was a metaphor meaning that no matter how much protection notch adds so that hackers cant hack, hackers will find away around it. I get that griefing is fine in engine constraints, IE Im ok with it, but people will still find exploits and hack the game. It is just the sorry fact about the internet.
I don’t think you read my last sentence correctly. I was making a metaphor about how no mater what notch does to keep hackers and exploiters out, they will find there way in.
I agree that griefing is fun and ok while within the limits of an engine, but some of their hacks take it to far. I am fine with the see through texture pack, or the full bright, but the others are just plain game-breaking. Unfortunately, if people want something bad enough, they will most likely work hard and get it. Same goes for the minecraft hacking community, and its just something that people will have to get used to. People on the internet will find ways to break things, and minecraft is no exception.
Still, the earlier videos were funny as hell! Loved the afk sand, fencing has a whole new meaning, and its great to see them just mess around. Heck, if I ever get burnt out of the game (not likely) ill mess with a few of my fellow builders.
oops… commented on my other laptop, didn’t see it show up, so went back to the newer one… you can get rid of the last comment, and this one… sorry for the mix up
My favourite thing to watch is people (on or off the Internet) discovering that their douchebaggery has terrible consequences. Like those people that pretend to be cancer-striken kids and then murder them when they realised people took them at their word.
What I’m suggesting is that it’d be hilarious to kneecap Team Avolition and burn down their house, potentially with them inside it. “It’s just a game!” Oh, poor diddums. It’s just a house. You’ll be able to move again one day!
I am Not A Fan of encouraging people to not care about things. I AM a fan of irony, though.
That’s imbalanced retribution. One of Avo’s recent videos had them slip into a political discussion; in that alone I realized that while some of their recent methods may be getting extreme… They’re very real people, and all they are doing is playing a game and having fun with it. Are they making a lot of people very upset? Yes. Do I support their general actions? Only from an entertainment standpoint.
Minecraft houses = digital wealth, acquired using a couple of hours of play time. Real houses = REAL wealth, acquired using many years of hard work and contributing to society.
Avo has a solid philosophy. They want to have fun, and anything that happens to them, as long as it stays on the internet, is just collateral entertainment. Everyone who wants to take things IRL has blurred the lines between the real world and reality – did you see that recent video, “Griefing Aftermath,” where those Reddit guys were busy trying to track Avo down? They ended up tracking down the name of one kid who just helped Avo get some tools and were discussing going to his house and trying to ruin his life – get his computer taken away, get his parents to think he is gay, and so on.
If damage stays digital, there is absolutely no reason to get so incensed about something. If anything, you or anyone else should take that as a sign that an admin somewhere is not doing a good job keeping backups or nipping the problem in the bud by preventing things from going wrong to start with.
Things of course change if you start to lose money, fame, and so on when that starts to change…
Kind of strange that Reddit is the bad guy here, huh?
^ I meant real world and VIRTUAL reality. I probably shouldn’t type debates within an hour of waking up.
Exploiting someone in real life through means of the internet is a horrible thing to do, I agree with you on that. But the funny thing about these videos is that its all virtual (unless you count the hours of work that were lost both making a distorting the things). Its all fun and games, and both parties have different views on how to “play” minecraft. I just wish that it was kept with in the limits of the game. Some people get way to attached to things, true, but don’t start getting an evil twitch in your mind about how to get real life revenge.
I think the line between reality and virtual reality are less relevant when you are fucking with someone’s real world joy. When I build on minecraft and put together some structure, I derive a very real pleasure from that. It’s not virtual enjoyment, it’s authentic. And when you fuck with people’s enjoyment or pleasure, it can bring with it very real consqeuences. So the reality is, yeah you are destroying something that belongs to someone in virtual space, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t real emotions tied to what you’ve destroyed. Don’t be surprised if that can have serious consequences.
I think sides of the knee-jerk here are over-simplifying things. Pro-griefing folks (including Team Avo) boil it down to “u mad bro?”, where the real time and effort that goes into a hobby is trivialized. I don’t think the Team Avo guys would, say, go to your house and smash your model Gundams and LEGO sets with a hammer, then justify that with “But they’re not real! It’s just blocks!” the way they do with Minecraft.
On the flip-side are the people who proclaim griefers to be children/virgins/bullies/etc., who only derive joy from destroying the things others create, as though they are somehow deficient humans. This isn’t true either, though; griefers are just in it to have fun. They shut the game off and go to school or work or church just like anyone else.
Watching this feud play out with Reddit is absolutely mesmerizing, because of the two parties it certainly seems like Team Reddit is the one in it to CAUSE MORE GRIEF. Among other things they’ve DDOS’d Avo’s forums and Ventrilo server. Regardless of what it says in the video descriptions, it takes a lot of work to move a web forum or get a group of people organized on a new Ventrilo server. As much work as it takes to build a Minecraft house? I’m not sure, but it’s very clear which of these camps is keeping it in the game and which wants to move on to chucking molotovs through windows.
I am cool with this griefing so long as it stays within the realms of the game rules. Hacking the game for god mode is not cool. Walking up into someones tall tower and dumping a pail of lava in it is very cool. I would be amazingly pissed if someone did it to me, but then it’s a game. I get pissed when I die in other games, too.
I watched a bunch of those videos. I think that the level of hacking they’ve resorted to really reduces the entertainment value of their videos. While what they do is no doubt very mean-spirited, I can appreciate and enjoy watching how clever and ingenious some of their plans are. I really liked their earlier videos where they were simply mere-mortals, playing by the normal rules of the game. They would case a server, make a plan, gather resources, and days later execute an attack that you can’t help but laugh at how brilliant it is. Watching them fly around in god-mode with pickaxes, annihilating enormous buildings in minutes isn’t nearly as entertaining.
F*cking nihilists. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
But really, hacking into someone’s game just so you can destroy all their stuff? I don’t have any sympathy for these Avolition guys.
I’m going to have to disagree with basically everyone here and say that there’s no meaningful difference between real property and ‘virtual’ property.
Spend an hour building something in minecraft, and then avo wrecks it.
Spend an hour building something in your house, and then avo comes to your house and wrecks it. (Out of matchsticks, I guess?)
What’s the difference? In both cases, you could have spent that hour building something unwreckable, or on some superior form of leisure. No matter how virtual everything else is, the time is real.
People are mad because if they’d known they were risking having their stuff destroyed, they likely wouldn’t have built it in the first place.
On the other hand…ten seconds of thought is enough to know that if your server is public, it will get griefed. Twenty more and you’ll realize nobody has ever managed to stop a determined hacker. If you don’t realize it can happen to you, if you don’t plan accordingly…well then that’s an awfully nice bubble you got there.
Further on this same hand, though the time is real, avo’s damage is limited. Much better to get your bubble popped by them in a mostly-virtual game world than to find out the hard way that your security sucks in real life.
Now I’ve calmed down a bit, I can’t say I’m too surprised. Minecraft is an online, persistent game, which means that Bartle’s player types apply here. Go Google that. I’ll wait.
Okay, so griefers are classic Killers: their fun is in messing with people. Minecraft is a classic Explorer game; there’s lots of systems, lots of unknown, and progress comes from exploring it. It’s absolutely useless to Achievers because there’s nothing to achieve, and the multiplayer aspect attracts Socialisers, where Minecraft acts a lot like barn-raising.
Explorers and Killers are diametric opposites, and Killers are anathema to Socialisers. Minecraft simply isn’t sustainable as a multiplayer game, because the game has no way to safely channel Killers into playing more or less nicely.
Wow ass mcdickshitfagbitchesinspacemasturbating
aVo is awesome
I am personaly very tired of griefers on my multiplayer server because they just come in and blow up creations my friends have made. i have recently fixed this problem by adding a whitelist, now only certian people i put on the list can place or break blocks.
dude i was just playing on my friend’s hamachi server…. and notch got on.
AND GRIEFED EVERYTHING. he banned me and my friends distoryed everything.
so listen up people. NOTCH can not be trusted, there are multipole acconts of him. INFORM THE PEOPLE! REPOST THIS EVERYWHERE AND ANYWHERE YOU CAN!