Team Killing - Discouraging Team Killing

Discouraging Team Killing

Most games that support friendly fire use some method to discourage intentional friendly fire, aka "team-killing". Simply, many games allow an option to disable friendly fire, preventing most TKs from being possible. However this is not always a preferred option as the reduced realism can be undesirable. Other systems involve deducting points from players for TKs or forcibly logging them off of the server.

Removing team-killers from a game, whether accidental or otherwise, is desirable to keep all players focused on the game, and avoid having a match thrown because of undue retaliations or a mismatch in skill.

In the anti-TK system from PlanetSide:

• Damaging friendly players results in the accumulation of "Grief Points".
• Grief points dissipate slowly over time, but accumulate faster if many separate instances of friendly fire occur back-to-back — someone who does 500 points of friendly fire damage in 1 minute suffers more than someone who does 500 points of friendly fire damage over 2 hours.
• Once grief points exceed a certain threshold, the player will no longer be able to shoot or drive lethal speeds in a vehicle.

This type of system is intended to create a chilling effect on intentional or clumsy episodes of friendly fire damage without overly punishing the occasional accident.

In addition to this system, usually, the one who is found to be intentionally killing his teammates will usually be kicked or banned from the game. This is a common practice of FPS games.

A more straightforward method of handling team-killing can be found in the Halo series. A player who kills a member of their own team has committed a 'Betrayal'. The player who was killed is then given the option of whether or not to immediately kick the traitor out of the game. Team-killing is parodied in the machinima comedy series, Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, when the character Caboose accidentally kills Church with the blue team's AI-implanted tank (also known as Sheila), and Tucker yells to Caboose, "You shot Church, you team-killing fucktard!"

A solution from Counter-Strike was killing TKers prior to the next round starting, however this option can be turned off.

The Battlefield series allows teamkill victims to forgive accidental occurrences and punish intentional acts with a stiffer penalty. A host can set different rules, such as automatically punishing all team-kill events, disabling team-kill penalties and/or friendly fire, and setting a threshold for teamkills.

In Call Of Duty: World At War and Black Ops, when a user teamkills the same person over 3 times on the same round, the team killer is automatically booted, however this is bypassed if the teamkiller is also the host of the game.

The Xbox Live player review system also allows players to negatively review and submit complaints on the grounds of disruptive game behaviour. Players can also set specific players to be avoided when matchmaking in online games.