Griefing

"Griefing" especially with it's usage in Personal Servers and other building games is the act of deliberately and maliciously editing and/or tampering with another players work. It can include the spamming of models and parts, lag machines, malicious high scalability terrain placement, mass deletion of parts and explosive usage. This can often be acquired by the gaining of trust, exploiting, using glitches, etc... Griefing as often performed by people trying to "troll" but sometimes may also include specific targeting of games and players. It may also be accidental in some cases although typically someone not intending to actually cause damage but simply accidentally or indirectly causing it is not considered griefing.

Griefing itself is usually a type of trolling. It is not however, to be confused with other behavioural tactics like camping, "saltiness" "tryharding" and general toxicity, all of which are generally player-based and do not manipulate or affect any surroundings.

Types of Griefing
The list below seeks to organize and note down any forms of griefing:


 * Terrain Scalability Spam: This is an act specific to personal servers and old build mode places in Roblox. These are no longer a part of the game but this method of griefing does still somewhat exist in the form of old build mode and personal server simulators. It involves the use of the high scability terrain feature. This feature allows the easy placement of strips and shapes of voxel terrain. Due to this it can be used to cause large scale terrain placement which becomes an obstruction and causes lots of lag during the process of it being placed down.
 * Part Spamming: Part spamming is the act of deliberatly and repeatedly placing down large amounts of parts and models with malicious intent in mind. It causes a huge nuisance as it is an obstruction to buildings and players and when done in huge numbers can significantly lag out a server.
 * Explosive Use: The usage of explosives in different games is a widespread and common way that players can grief another person's hard work and effort. Explosives in video games are typically devices that can cause damage to players, buildings, items, and mobs of a game in widespread amounts. They typically have a blast radius. This function is used by griefers to cause mayhem upon whatever gets in their path. It is typically not used as much now adays, as games with buildings aspects to them don't tend to have much explosives anymore, or explodable parts.
 * Robbery: Although perhaps not as common on a platform like Roblox, a griefing technic used by many is the tendancy to steel loot or whatever else they can find from other people and their bases in games which have such features. A griefing tactic like this really isn't something which can happen on acident, but due to not many games on Roblox having features such as external storage accessible by others, it is not seen very often. That being said, there are still a couple of games which have aspects like that, and so robbery runs rampant on them.
 * Asset & Message Spamming: This is seperate from part spamming. Most predominantly it includes the spamming of chat messages, as this is probably the easiest griefing tactic to achieve as it is possible in most games, even games where you can not manipulate your surroundings as it is a feature of Roblox. Luckily, there is in fact a cooldown applied to users typing in chat if they've been typing far to fast (usually this happens when someone is message spamming). Other forms of griefing that are similar to message spamming include the intentful playing of (spammy) audio, usually considered "earrape" or bypassed audio, and the spamming of decals on surfaces. Some games may also have command features that can allow people to do things like changing the appearance of other users or applying effects to the map (for example the "disco" effect).
 * Painting: A very minor form of griefing, some games may have colour tools or functions in them that have the potential to be used for griefing if a person were to get a hold of the tool and use it for widespread colouring of parts and players. This is also achievable through official gears.
 * Exploiting: Exploiting is a combination of other griefing techniques, which instead of using in-game functions, are achieved through third-party means (programs, scripts) which allow the player to perform and do actions they otherwise would not be able to do within the game. An exploiter intending to grief may use a collection of the above tactics, such as using build tools (F3x), explosives, gears, and asset spamming, and many others.



Remedies
Simply banning the person(s) behind any griefing should prevent it from happening again. Try to efficiently repair and reverse what ever damage has been caused.

One of the reasons many players complained about personal servers when they were a thing, was due to the fact that it was so easy to grief them. The server could extremely easily be reverted to an earlier version, though.

Impact
Griefing has always been an issue in many games that allow for collaborative building, and some games that allow collaboration with others will generally have barricades in place to prevent these issues, physical or via scripts. Many games, though, have little to no anti-griefing or grief reversion tactics, and so losing progress is easy and may be very difficult to prevent, stop, or reverse any damage caused.