GTA Online has had two long-standing "social" issues since it released way back in 2013: hacking and griefing. While the former has since been fixed and no longer threatens the in-game cash of players, the latter is still very much an issue going into the new year.
As we said, hacking was dealt with — quite severely — earlier this year. Griefing, however? Well, griefing is still very much around. While 2016 was the year that the hacker issue was solved, it was also the year that the griefer issue became much more prominent.
With the release of the Further Adventures in Finance and Felony update, Rockstar gave players the chance to fill up warehouses with valuable contraband, which they could then sell off to black market contacts for high profit. These crates of cargo had to be bought, meaning getting into this business required quite a bit of investment, and hence, it was a large risk.
The source of the risk? Crates could be destroyed in transit. Here you have a situation, where a given player will put effort, time and money into filling their warehouse, maybe even with special cargo, meaning a pretty darn high investment, of possibly even several hundred thousands of in-game cash. Then, when they go off to sell this cargo, some dick in a Hydra shows up to blow everything.
What does the Hydra pilot get? No more than $6000, tops. That's it. But the thing is, they do get that 6K.
Human history has been filled with violence. Not a single day has passed in the thousands of years since civilizations have been producing records that there wasn't some conflict or other being waged somewhere in the world. Violence in an inherent human trait and people are generally assholes to one another by default. People kill actual people in real life for pettier reasons.
And dickish behavior is being rewarded? Even without this small incentive, griefers would continue to grief simply because it is human nature. The only way to subvert this psychological urge is to reward the opposite — being a decent human being.
The relative failure of the bad sport system and mental state systems to curb this issue prove that simple and lenient punishments won't do anything to prevent them from occurring. Which leaves two avenues open in the pursuit of a solution for griefing.
