Grief points

Grief points are a mechanism introduced in an attempt to control the amount of friendly fire that takes place in PlanetSide. If at any point a character damages soldiers or equipment owned by their own Empire (with a weapon or a vehicle), they will be awarded grief points corresponding to the amount of damage caused. As grief points accumulate the subsequent grief added is significantly higher. This is to prevent unduly penalizing actual accidents. The Grief levels can be seen below:

Grief Level	Grief Points	Warning/Penalty
0	0-10	None
1	11-500	Gentle Reminder/Warning
2	501-1000	Strong Warning
3	1001-5000	Grief Lock (see below)
4	5001+	3-day Ban from Planetside

If grief accumulates past 1000 points (level 3), characters will be penalized in several ways, such as being unable to fire weapons and reducing the top speed of all vehicles (so you cannot damage friendlies by running into them). The duration of the penalty is directly related to how much damage you did. The penalties will continue for each subsequent grief point earned past 1000, and will only stop when your grief points fall below 1000. You can be banned for grief points in excess of 5000. Grief points will gradually dissipate over time (1 point every 10 minutes). Note: while your grief points will dissipate even while not logged into PlanetSide, the grief lock timer does not. Thus if you have a 30 minute grief lock, you must stay logged in for it to expire, or else the lock time will carry over until your next session.

Squad and outfit members are exempt from grief for damaging fellow members, as it is assumed that the squad and outfit can manage itself.

You can check your Grief point total on the Character pane. Grief points are shared among characters on the same server, preventing griefers from logging in with one character, racking up grief points, and switching characters to have a clean slate.

Two common sources of grief are the Thumper and the Liberator. The Thumper because in inexperienced hands it can cause a large amount of area-effect damage to friendlies (especially in confined base corridors), and the Liberator because of the delay between the release of a bomb and the subsequent detonation at ground level.