[MUD-Dev] UO Virtues

[John Buehler]

> Schubert, Damion
> Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 11:52 AM

> First off, it's easy to track murderers and thieves.  Trivially.  
> And we'll certainly have a system that does that.  However, the 
> players need more information than that - they need to know about
> the twinks who will say they're going to fix your armor and then
> log, or the jerks who will say they're taking you to a newbie
> killing ground and instead take you to the dragon's lair to die.
> The game can't track this behavior, because by definition it 
> squeezes in between the code.  If we did track it, players would
> find new cracks to squeeze into.
> 
> Second, it is nearly impossible to track acts of good automatically.
> How does the game know if you're being Honest?  What in-game piece 
> of code is triggered which will up that Honesty value?  No matter 
> what it is, players will find it and jack their stat.

Yikes.  Human intent cannot be determined by people, let alone a
computer.  Court cases are rife with juries and judges that attempt
to determine the defendant's intentions.

I believe the only thing that can be tackled is the actual actions
that are involved, and probably only some of the most primitive
actions can be monitored this way.  Thefts, assaults, murders and
such.  'Confidence' games and such are simply far too advanced for
a software engineer to come up with code that will automatically
detect such things.  And that's what we face when we try to deal
with lying players.

The only system for this area that even shows promise to my mind
is that of player-controlled judgements.  It's a touchy approach
and may not work, but because it relies on player judgement, it
has promise. The judgement system has also undoubtedly been tried
in a variety of forms and has doubtlessly been rejected due to
problems of abuse:

When somebody does something that you don't like, you shoot them
with a psychic 'negative' judgement.  When somebody does something
that you like, you shoot them with a psychic 'positive' judgement.
The problems with such an approach are immediately apparent: abuse
is as easy as shooting everyone you see with 'negative' judgements
over and over again.  And so the cat and mouse game of trying to
find ways of foiling judgement mules and such begins.

It boils down to a question of whether the game can trust a player
to be honest in his or her judgement calls.  This doesn't mean
that the player is RIGHT in judgement calls, only that they are
trying to be honest.

Some of the effects that should be used to control the judgement
system:

1. Frequent judging limits the impact of that player's judgement
calls on other players' ratings.  (Player ratings are displayable
through their characters - on the request of other players).  So
if I judge 30 players a day for major complaints, I'm pretty much
just a whiner (statistically speaking) and should mostly be
ignored.  Or I'm trying to jack up somebody's rating.

2. Players with high peer ratings produce a greater impact
on other player's ratings.  So if I am well-trusted according to
other players' judgement, my judgement calls tend to be relied
upon - regardless of whether I declare someone a slime or a
hero.  It may be that those who are considered slimes are simply
unable to affect other character ratings.  They have to rely on
eventually gaining the favor of those with high judgement ratings
in order to dig out of their hole.

The jury is out as to whether these ratings should be associated
with players/accounts or with individual characters.  An argument
for the latter is to permit one player character to be a slimeball
and another player character (same player) to be a hero.

It would seem that a single number is insufficient to carry a
sense of the true trustworthyness of a given player.  Some
histogram or some such thing should be displayed to show what
a number of fellow-rated players think.  This would let players
know what highly-trusted players think, what poorly-trusted
players think, and so on.

I'm after a way of capturing player sentiment so that players are
originating opinions and those opinions are being carried to
other players.  The computer is only moderating the voting
process.

Note that I can see 'judgement mules' coming into existence
(lots of newbie characters voting each other up until they have
one or more with good judgement ratings).  I think that if
someone has a high rating in this system, and somebody else
with a high rating declares them to be a slimeball, a report
that goes to a gamemaster should be generated.  That gamemaster
can then review the ratings history of the involved characters
to see if something odd is going on.

JB




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