Interacting With Other People

Now that you’re ready to go online and have fun, take one more minute to stop and read. Following are a number of tips that help to avoid trouble with other people. Let’s talk about etiquette, so you can be one of the cool folks that everyone likes to have around!

Griefing Is Bad!

There is a time and place for trouble. If you want to wreck people’s houses, attack their characters, slaughter their animals, and ruin everything you see, go to a Hardcore PvP or an Anarchy server—a place where this behavior is tolerated. This is perfectly fine. Just make sure you end up playing with other people who want the same thing! Combat rocks. It’s nice to compete and hunt people down, if they’re cool with that.

Don’t go into regular Survival servers or other cooperative modes and try to ruin things for everyone else. This is incredibly lame. It’ll get you kicked off of the server sooner rather than later, and there’s just no point. Treat people the way you want to be treated, and everything will go just fine most of the time.

What Counts as Griefing?

• Attacking other players unless the server is PvP focused, or the other player says they’re interested in fighting
• Stealing from other players’ chests or taking things from their homes
• Damaging other players’ property with Lava or TNT, removal of light sources, destruction of walls, leading monsters to them, and so forth
• Inappropriate speech or text

Get Away from Griefers

If it seems like a server has a ton of people griefing and causing trouble, find a new server. Keep searching until you discover a place that has cool people. Why bother playing online if you don’t like the players that you bump into, right?

Have a Thick Skin, But Not Too Thick

Try not to overreact if people are a little bit rude from time to time. It’s the internet. It happens. Ignore the person who is being a pain, and focus on the players that you like spending time with.

That said, report people to the server’s administrator or moderators if you start seeing really nasty stuff. Anything really hurtful, cruel, or upsetting should not be tolerated. It’s totally fine to stick up for yourself and others!

What You Can Say and Type

If you’re worried about saying anything wrong around other people, go by a simple rule: pretend that your parents and your younger siblings are in the same room. Don’t do anything online that you wouldn’t do when they are listening. Following this guideline avoids quite a few “Oops, I didn’t mean to upset you” moments.