Wait, Minecraft Griefing Is GOOD?!?

Ever since the beginning of minecraft multiplayer one thing has been clear you can either build or destroy it’s the one major choice all players make whenever they are playing minecraft with others some players choose to play minecraft as the good guy being kind to others helping them build and surviving

Together others choose to embrace the freedom and chaos making griefing their primary or sole goal in the game but is minecraft griefing a good part of the game while servers do exist that allow players to grief most minecraft servers these days disallow it while early in minecraft’s multiplayer scene you would

Find a wide array of communities where combat and griefing was the norm these days players seem to hate it and those older servers are all but gone is the lack of griefing and threat from other players ruining the survival in survival minecraft is griefing bad for the game today we talk about minecraft

Griefing and if it’s good or bad but before we do make sure to destroy that subscribe button for me no pressure of course so first of all what is griefing well it can differ from game to game but generally speaking as wikipedia has put it a griefer is a player in a

Multiplayer game who deliberately irritates and harasses other players by using aspects of the game in unintended ways so for example you could say players using n crystals to kill others or blow up their base is an aspect of minecraft being used in an unintended way but then that begs the question is

Griefing meant to be a part of minecraft is blowing up somebody’s base and killing other players with weapons an intended mechanic of the game let’s look at the facts first vanilla minecraft by itself offers very little means for players to protect themselves from griefing if you set up a vanilla

Minecraft server you can protect the spawn disable pvp and that’s about it single player is a similar story by default when you create a new minecraft world mobs have the ability to destroy your base and kill you and the difficulty by default is set to normal now of course you can change these

Settings but a new player going into the game unknowingly is prone to griefing from mobs in addition there isn’t really any in-game ways a player can protect their base from being grieved plugins that allow players to claim land weren’t created by mojang but rather by the community same goes for chess protection

It’s not part of the vanilla game to this day there is no way to prevent a player from destroying your base or accessing your chest in vanilla minecraft so with this information it seems that while griefing in minecraft certainly isn’t explicitly encouraged by mojang and certainly wasn’t meant to be

The main focus of the game as intended by notch it seems like it was meant to be a core element of minecraft i made that same argument in a video i created talking about griefing almost two years ago when i only had 800 or so subs and

Let’s say a more chaotic outlook on the game the comments on that video had some good counter arguments i think it’s not that mojang intended for the game to have griefing and for players to go around leaving a trail of fire and blood wherever they went i think what notch

Really wanted and what minecraft is all about is for players to have total freedom so then if total freedom is the intent behind minecraft then why is griefing still so frowned upon and it’s simple griefing is unfair it’s unbalanced let’s say you spend an hour building a nice

Small house you collect the resources plan it out and critically think about how you want the house to look alright nice now how long would it take for a player to grief said house if they used only iron tools for example maybe a few minutes tops if they had half a brain

And use flint and still then maybe 20 or 30 seconds and if they used a couple blocks of tnt it wouldn’t even take 10 seconds and that’s the main issue with griefing the time it takes to grief a base is so little compared to the time

It would take to build a base griefing at its core is unbalanced which therefore makes it unfair even if you removed all blocks or methods of griefing and gave players only basic tools to grief with it still wouldn’t be fair as not only is griefing far less

Time consuming but it requires far less thought if you’re building a base you’re likely not just building it rapidly and spamming blocks down you’re taking time to step back consider the box you’re using and the aspects of the build maybe even building something disliking it and rebuilding it differently again griefing

Doesn’t require any of this you can for the most part just turn your brain off and mash some buttons there is an argument that could be made that if a player’s base is griefed they are also at fault themselves minecraft is a vast open world spanning tens of

Millions of blocks as well as hundreds of blocks down underground maybe the player should have built their base further out or hit it better on the ground and theoretically that should be true but in practice it unfortunately doesn’t work while yes minecraft worlds are massive most smps have world borders

Around 10 000 blocks in each direction some even less drastically reducing the amount of spacers for players to build their base furthermore players intent on griefing aren’t playing fair they often use hack clients x-ray and chest esp meaning no underground base is ever truly hidden that’s why most players

Dislike griefing because the time and effort required to build a base is not even comparable to the time and effort required to grief one but worst of all the reason griefing is so unbalanced is because there are no repercussions for griefers if a player’s base gets grieved

The repercussions are that they lose a lot of items resources and time but if a server allows griefing and a player’s base is grieved then the griefer loses nothing in fact they often gain something unless a player stays online 24 7 to kill anybody who attempts to grief their base there’s eventually

Going to be somebody who comes along when they aren’t online and destroys it you’re not going to know who did it and probably won’t ever see the player again which means there’s nothing you can do to get back at them or serve them justice for their wrongdoings you just

Have to suck it up and either build a new base or become a griefer yourself there’s no winning for the player in this situation here’s the thing though it’s called survival minecraft for a reason you have to survive against not only mobs and other game challengers but also against

Other players if you join any odd s p these days you will likely start with a bunch of gear food blocks as well as a warp out to the wild allowing you to start building your base with no issues almost right away furthermore these servers often have land claims chess

Protection pvp disabled and mobs will hardly be a threat because they won’t spawn in as high frequency as they would if you were playing single player that’s not survival minecraft there’s no surviving here sure while griefing isn’t exactly balanced or fair it still presents a challenge to the player same

With pvp which both contribute to the survival feel of the game when you take away almost all of the challenges and threats to a player’s life you’re ruining the survival aspect of survival mode look there’s nothing wrong with these newer age survival servers existing but the issue is they seem to

Be the only type of survival server out there it’s incredibly difficult to find a somewhat active survival minecraft server where griefing and pvp are allowed that isn’t an anarchy server so rare in fact that apart from the smp i run on my server og-network.net which allows pvp and griefing i don’t know of

Any others off the top of my head at least not any that are relatively active this is also why anarchy servers have become so popular as of later years since there is a lack of proper survival servers players turn to anarchy servers where anything goes including griefing

And combat but i also don’t think anarchy serves a true survival either as the use of hack clients automatically makes some of the natural challenges of minecraft null and void if there was a scale and on one end our anarchy servers and on the other end are these new style

Survival servers what we are missing is what’s right in the middle a true survival server these servers used to be the norm back in 2012 and earlier when quite simply there weren’t really any other options and as such everybody had to play on them that’s no longer the

Case and as minecraft plugins continued to develop allowing players to create their idea of a perfect minecraft server the communities began to drift further and further apart but i understand the other perspective as well some players just want to build a base with others or want to replicate their feeling of an s

P with friends and don’t want to see their hours of work be destroyed it’s just unfortunate that these days smps only tend to be one of the extremes either being anarchy or far too protective so we know the issue now griefing isn’t balanced and that has led to a massive

Divide in the minecraft community between players who want to grief and choose to play anarchy servers and players who would rather not choosing to play new style survival servers instead these two groups of players rarely intermingle because they have their own goals when playing the game that are

Opposite of one another sure not all anarchy players play solely to grief and not all new style s p players think pvp or light griefing is bad but in general if you play on an anarchy server you build knowing you can be griefed and if

You play on a new style smp you build knowing you can’t in order to see the return of older s p servers where all kinds of players griefer or not would play together we need to balance griefing and there’s two ways this can be done first of all the

Time required to grief a base needs to be somehow increased so that is similar to the time required to build a base this is very tough however let’s say that tnt and other mass forms of griefing were disabled and therefore the only way to grief bases was through simple destruction this would help

Balance griefing making it more time consuming but it will never be even it can also harm the server in other ways for example disabling tnt to prevent griefing also may ruin other players farms or methods of terraforming and digging out large areas it’s very hard to balance griefing when it comes to

Disabling core minecraft features without there being significant drawbacks that’s why i think the better and second method of balancing griefing could work better and that is to give griefers repercussions for their actions if griefing had repercussions that made it so griefer was actually at risk of losing something or facing consequences

Griefing would be a lot more balanced let’s say a player becomes known for spawn camping or killing newer players on a server there could be repercussions for that player for example every 5 kills that player gets he loses one heart permanently this would not only give griefing a downside but also make

It so the griefer has to actively consider if a player is worth killing or not they have to weigh up the pros and cons similar can be done for base griefing let’s say a player blows up a base if the original base creator could somehow check and see who blew it up

They could be given the option to seek revenge on the player maybe through exposing the player’s current coordinates this would make it so the griefer would have to be careful where they would go after they grieve a base as they could in turn have their base location exposed and if they continue to

Grief over and over the grievous coordinates could be exposed 24 7 meaning all players on the server would know where they are at all times if griefing had clear downsides it would make it so much more balanced because now the griefer is at risk themselves it may deter players from playing solely to

Grieve so then why don’t servers do this you may be asking because unfortunately in practice it rarely works out you see on my server we created a reputation system where players could add or remove player reputation if a player’s reputation entered the negatives they would progressively begin receiving

Punishments for example they lose the ability to teleport to spawn or their home and eventually their coordinates are permanently displayed on the tab menu the idea behind this system would be that players would down wrap briefers and eventually the griefers would either have to stop griefing as to prevent

Themselves from losing reputation or start doing good deeds to gain back their reputation reputation in a sense was meant to be a sign of trustworthiness in theory it sounds solid right well i thought so too but as the more active players on the server would let you know in practice that

Isn’t exactly the case players would frequently false rep one another buy and sell rep as well which while we tried to moderate is almost impossible to prevent at the end of the day as all players do they found ways to abuse the reputation system and over time as less and less

People found it reliable less and less people went through the effort of downrapping wrongdoers rep became more of a popularity measurement rather than anything to do with trustworthiness and this is one of the problems with trying to balance griefing players no matter what will find loopholes or figure out

Ways to abuse the system there very well may be a good solution to griefing out there i just don’t think it’s been found yet and due to the difficulty in balancing griefing most servers just choose to outlaw altogether so they don’t have to deal with the issues surrounding it at all i mentioned

Earlier that i made a video discussing griefing a while ago when i had a more chaotic outlook on the game my golden years of minecraft were in 2012 and 2013 when servers weren’t nearly as polished and s p’s and faction servers were everywhere i grew up playing minecraft

Servers where you would walk out of the spawn to find ruin and players fighting almost instantly where x-ray was used by half of the service players and where base and chess protection was very hit or miss i would spend my days eagerly x-raying chess around the map pillaging

People’s bases and leaving them behind in ruins then running away to my secret underground stash and building up my wealth so what changed then what happened to all these older style minecraft smps where did they go it wasn’t until i began my own smp with pvp and griefing earlier last year that

I began to understand why minecraft multiplayer had become this way in minecraft’s earlier days when survival servers were at their peak players didn’t know the game as well they weren’t as developed cheats or methods of griefing and destruction servers were smaller with much less player capacity and more tight-knit communities griefers

Were known on the servers they griefed on their name would spread through word of mouth servers could maintain and control most griefers with minimal issue but these days where griefers are far more crafty than ever cheats are more powerful and prominent than ever and servers are far bigger and much harder

To moderate it’s simply just easier to disable griefing altogether no longer would you have to deal with players complaining their base got griefed or players quitting because they kept getting killed it just made more sense to disable it altogether as it would lead to far less issues

I get it now after dealing with and hearing about countless complaints and issues related to griefing on my own server i get why other servers want nothing to do with it to answer the question we set out to today no i don’t think griefing is bad i just think the

Way it’s carried out can be and yes i still believe that griefing is a core part of survival minecraft and without it minecraft just isn’t the same my server will forever have griefing and pvp enabled i won’t let the true style of minecraft survival die i hope you enjoyed today’s video be sure

To let me know what your thoughts on griefing are in the comments thank you all so much for watching