10 Ways to Grief Your Videogame Teammates

This guest post comes from DarkSydeGeoff, also known as GeoffTheHero. You may know him from his YouTube exploits, his Tumblr blog, or his original Freezecracker site. Today you’ll learn the secrets to griefing teammates with the best of them.

This is probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done (worst than everything on my YouTube channel), but WiNGSPANTT promised me a Golden Wrench in TF2 if I shared my best strategies for making teammates rage.*

Generally speaking, griefing friendly players online should come naturally to you. My goal with these tips are to reinforce a few points from my philosophy of having fun; perhaps you’ll gain a fresh perspective on the joys of multiplayer gaming. All in all, it is what it is: Top 10 Griefing Tips.

1. No two griefs are the same!

Your goal is to ultimately have fun. Your opponents don’t need to be shitting themselves in anger; they can be enjoying it and trying to do the same on you. Keep an open mind and be flexible with your approach.

2. Know the system mechanics in-and-out.

In most Call of Duty games, you can get away with teamkilling two people per match without any penalty after the first 15 seconds of the match. In Battlefield, you don’t use up your free teamkills if you jump out of a car, moments before you bowl a perfect 300 on your squadmates. Your efficiency (and fun!) goes up exponentially if you understand the system.

I could pretty much rerelease this guide every year they have a new Call of Duty, but I respect myself a little more than Activision does.

3. Be creative.

Griefing can be made anywhere. Back in the golden days of Xbox Live, there was a live show called 1 vs 100, based off the game show hosted by Bob Saget. The name of “The One” would be shown, and we would message ’em over and over again with horrible insults. The firmware of the 360 is, to say the least, terribly bad, and it actually got to the point where, if “The One” tried loading up a message while getting a ton more, it caused his Xbox to freeze up just long enough to get kicked out for not answering the question in time!

He sent an equal amount of messages back to us about how pissed he was, for some reason. There goes your 50 cents in Microsoft Points, sucker!

4. Input < Output

It’s my personal opinion that the amount of effort you invest into a disturbance should be minimal, while the output you get from it should be ridiculous. Don’t blow all your best tricks at once. When you choose an opponent, do minor annoyances to him while also playing the game normally. Body block him, graze a few bullets by him every time you see him, take a few precious blocks from him in Minecraft. As time goes on, amp up your aggression and boom, you tend to get a much more memorable overreaction.

5. Find a persona and stick to it.

Constantly getting labeled as a “troll” gets boring over time. It’s up to you to use a persona to convince your opponent that you are actually incompetent.

Back in 2011, I found an exploit in Battlefield 3 that let you grind for unlimited XP, and Kotaku posted it. A day after, I put on the persona that I was very sorry for ruining servers, and I made up for my sins by team killing everyone that I saw trying to use the glitch. For some reason, everyone bought into that persona, and Kotaku ended up posting that as well.

Thankfully and surprisingly, GameInformer was able to spot that it was all a joke and posted the story in their Top 10 Griefs.

6. Misery loves company!

Griefing alone is kinda fun, but the power of teamwork can really open up possibilities that were impossible solo. So grab a friend or two, or a dozen, and wreck havoc! Priceless memories for everyone!

Here, my friend GeneTheBean and I team up to act like mobsters in the middle of a zombie apocalypse:

7. Don’t ever get personally involved.

The people who take it too seriously are the ones that are incapable of understanding why games are fun to begin with, the ones who can’t take a joke. Grown adults like DarksydePhil need to be explained what joking around is, don’t be someone like him.

Speaking of DarksydePhil, I’ll be returning to T3 with another guest post on how people like him are truly ruining the gaming community. If that doesn’t carry some weight coming from a griefing master like myself I don’t know what does. Stay tuned!

* I can’t believe anyone reads his website.