Whether you're inflicting damage on anything friendly for the thrill of it, or you accidentally hit friendlies in a crowded fire fight. There is a grief system in place that tracks the amount of damage inflicted to prevent rogue TK'ers from controlling the pace of the game and ruining everyone's fun.
Every time you damage a friendly object, player, or vehicle, you will gain grief points relevant to the amount of damage you cause. It doesn't matter whether it's armour or health ... it's still a griefing.
Whenever you gain a grief point, an indicator flashes on screen to let you know it happened. Grief point totals are easily seen on your character page if for any reason you need to know.
As you accumulate more grief points, you will attain higher penalty levels:
| Level 1 (0-600): |
You are gently reminded, via a help window, of why it's a bad idea to kill friendlies and how the grief system works. |
| Level 2 (600-1000): |
You're warned, via a pop-up warning in the center of your screen, that killing friendlies is a bad idea and will eventually cause you problems. This warning appears 3-4 times before you hit Level 3. |
| Level 3 (1000+): |
Weapons lock. All your weapons are locked and your max throttle speed is reduced to 10% (so that you can't ram anyone). Weapons lock lasts longer the more grief points you have. |
| Level 4 (1600?): |
Account Ban. Congratulations, to get to this level of grief is pretty amazing and will result in at least a 72hour ban, with a longer ban the more people complained about you along the way. |
Grief points dissipate at a steady, but slow rate, based on real-time. To go from Level 3 to 0 grief points will take about 2 days of not getting anymore. If you mess up, and kill some friendly troops just be careful for a while, and the grief points will go away naturally.
If you damage a friendly who is a member of your Squad, Plantoon or Outfit then you do NOT gain grief points. This is to allow Squads to sacrifice members occasionally to achieve an objective. It's also because Squads are self-policing in that if someone is griefing other squad members, the squad leader can always kick them out of your squad and the normal griefing rules then apply.
Grief points are set on a per account per server basis. This eliminates the possibility of switching characters within a server to avoid or gain more grief points.
PlanetSide offers players several methods to help protect against grief players. All players in an Empire fight for the same cause, regardless of squad or outfit affiliation. Outfits that regularly engage in grief activity are subject to being disbanded. There is an in-game grief tracking system, but Planetside also offers live Customer Service Representatives (CSR) to help to address the situations that technology can't. To contact your CSR in-game, type "/appeal" and click the "New Ticket" button. Next, select a category and describe the issue you are experiencing, including the name of any other players involved, their Outfit if known and the location of the incident.
