Griefer - Wikipedia

Methods of griefing differ from game to game. What might be considered griefing in one area of a game, may even be an intended function or mechanic in another area. Common methods may include, but are not limited to:

• Intentional friendly fire, or deliberately performing actions detrimental to other team members' game performance in primarily shooter games.
  • Wasting or destroying key game elements
  • Colluding with opponents
  • Giving false information
  • Giving information about your team's whereabouts to an enemy team
  • Faking extreme incompetence with the intent of hurting teammates, or failing an in-game objective
  • Deliberately blocking shots from a player's own team, or blocking a player's view by standing in front of them, so they cannot damage the enemy[5]
  • Trapping teammates in inescapable locations by using physics props, special abilities, or teleportation
  • Intentionally killing oneself
• Actions undertaken to waste other players' time.
  • Playing as slowly as possible
  • Trapping and imprisoning players for extended periods of time to deny their ability to play on a server.
  • Hiding from an enemy when there is no tactical benefit in doing so
  • If a game interface element has no time limit, leaving their computer (going "AFK"), potentially forcing the other players to leave the game (which may incur a penalty for leaving), like Among Us.
  • Constantly pausing the game, or lowering its speed as much as possible, in the hopes that their target quits in frustration
  • Standing on top of important non-player characters (NPCs) to block other players from interacting with them.
  • A powerful player entering an area intended for lower-level or less experienced players and using up or hogging otherwise available limited resources, as can be sometimes seen in MMORPGs or grinding-based games
• Causing a player disproportionate loss or reversing their progress.
  • Destroying or vandalizing other players' creations without permission in sandbox games like Minecraft and Terraria
  • Driving vehicles backward around lapped courses in multiplayer racing games, often done with the intent of crashing head-on into whoever is in first place
• Using exploits (taking advantage of bugs in a game).
  • Illegally exiting a map's boundaries to prevent the enemy team from winning
  • In a co-op or multiplayer game, destroying or otherwise denying access to items, without which other players cannot finish the game
• Purposeful violation of server rules or guidelines.
  • Impersonation of administrators or other players through similar screen names
  • Written or verbal insults, including false accusations of cheating or griefing
• Abusing the in game reporting system with mass reports to trigger a bot to automatically ban another player.
• Spamming a voice or text chat channel to inconvenience, harass, or annoy other players.
• Uploading offensive or explicit images to profile pictures, in-game sprays, or game skins.
• Kill stealing, denying another player the satisfaction or gain of killing a target that should have been theirs.
• Camping at a corpse or spawn area to repeatedly kill players as they respawn (when players have no method of recourse to prevent getting killed), preventing them from being able to play. Camping can also refer to continuously waiting in a tactically advantageous position for others to come to them; this is sometimes considered griefing because if all players do it, the game stalls, but this is now more commonly considered a game design issue, and in games where defeating a juggernaut its required, it is more likely that juggernaut which will camp.
• Acting out-of-character in a role-play setting to disrupt the serious gameplay of others.
• Luring many monsters or a single larger monster to chase the griefer, before moving to where other players are. The line of monsters in pursuit looks like a train, and hence this is sometimes called "training" or "aggroing".[6]
• Blocking other players so they cannot move to or from a particular area, or access an in-game resource (such as a non-player character); the game Tom Clancy's The Division was found to have a serious problem with this at launch, where griefers could stand in the doorway out of the starting area, trapping players in the spawn room.[7]
• Intentionally attempting to crash a server through lag or other means (such as spawning large amounts of resource-demanding objects), in order to cause interference among players.
• In Catan (board game), repeatedly refusing to trade with another player, making plays which disproportionately harm a certain opponent's winning chances with no obvious benefit to themselves. Can also lead to a kingmaking scenario where a player is deliberately given the win, usually to spite another.
• Smurfing, the process of creating extra accounts and deliberately losing games to enter a lower skill rank than is appropriate, before playing at full skill against lower-ranked opponents, thus defeating them easily.
• High-skill players deliberately losing in matches against low-skill players (usually due to shortage of players), causing the low-skill player's skill rating to artificially rise so that they will be routinely pitted against opponents they have no chance of winning against in the future.
• Impersonating an enemy to trick someone into attacking the griefer, so that a player is flagged as having attacked the griefer. A notable example of this is early on in Ultima Online, where players had a scroll that could change their appearance to that of a monster, with the only way to tell the difference between them and a real monster being to click on them and read their name. Attacking a monster-disguised griefer would flag the player as a murderer, causing the town guard to kill the player.
• Starting a vote to kick someone in hopes of others blindly agreeing to do so, so that the griefer faces no repercussions while other players have unwittingly gotten rid of an innocent person.

The term is sometimes applied more generally[8] to refer to a person who uses the internet to cause distress to others as a prank,[9][10] or to intentionally inflict harm, as when it was used to describe an incident in March 2008, when malicious users posted seizure-inducing animations on epilepsy forums.[11][12][13]