Recently, certain members of the TF2 community have used this page to fuel a campaign against friendlies. Specifically, they were quoting the "being intentionally useless to your team" example, which has been classified under "Acts that almost always constitute griefing" for some unknown reason.
Looking through this page's update history, this example was added by the user Henke37 at 3:53 PM on April 22, 2013, alongside a long list of other examples of what may or may not constitute as griefing, with the update summary only stating "grouping the teleporter griefing and a bunch of other stuff." No explicit reason for why this particular example fell under "almost always," and Henke37 added another update within half an hour of the initial addition, with this one adding the example of "Telling other people how to play the game," which seemingly contradicts the previous example of "being intentionally useless.
I should note that user "Nutshiny" had at one point attempted to explicitly add going friendly under "Almost always griefing." Team Fortess Wiki editor Anyar undid this change, with the stated reason that it "Doesn't fit definition of griefing, as most people don't be friendly solely to anger/frustrate players." Staff member Mikado282 brought back the example, but moved it under "May constitute griefing," with the stated reason that it depends on the situation. While shortly afterwards the example was re-deleted due to the "intentionally being useless" example already covering "going friendly," staff member Mikado282 did not question whether that example truly belonged under "almost always griefing," despite friendlies being a divisive topic in the TF2 community.
As I mentioned at the beginning, the categorization of "being useless" as "almost always griefing" has recently been used to fuel anti-friendly advocates; a vocal minority of TF2's playerbase. Two members in particular have even claimed that it's catagorization as "almost always griefing" made friendlies worse than cheaters and bots.
In an attempt to prevent further devision of TF2's community, I decided to move the act of "intentionally being useless" to "may constitute griefing." However, the ease at which I was able to make this change raises concerns about the possibility of an "editing war" in the near future. In order to prevent this, I strongly advise the TF2 wiki staff to lock this page for editing by non-staff members. If non-staff members wish to make additions or remove existing examples, they would need to go through a staff member, perhaps utilizing this talk page. Yes, I am fully aware of the irony of me requesting this, but I truly believe that this would be in the best interests of the community.
