[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[John Buehler]

Matthew Mihaly
Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2000 4:50 PM

> Um, no, player anonymity is not the source of the problem. It is the
> enabler of the problem. Murderous dictators such as Stalin were not
> anonymous at all (in fact 50 years later he is still an extremely
> recognizeable name and even face!) yet that didn't stop him from killing
> 20 or 30 million of his own citizens.

Your point is well taken.  Lack of consequences is certainly the root of the
problem.  (I assume that's your point)

> You could post the rl-identities of all your players on your website
> (that's assuming you could actually get accurate information about them,
> which you could not.) and it would only reduce the amount of harrassment
> marginally. By way of example: the Achaea 2000 meet wound up about a month
> ago, and it hasn't stopped a couple of the players who attended (who were
> violent and aggressive before) from continuing to be violent and
> aggressive.
>
> By way of further example, I have _publically_ announced in Achaea the
> real names, and real-life town where a gaggle of irritating and
> universally-reviled players live, and it hasn't stopped them from being
> just as asinine and just as irritating as before. They simply don't care,
> and I can't blame them. Why should they? No one is going to go to the town
> they live in and beat them up.

I'm not referring to social ostracization.  That strikes me as throwing gas on
the fire.  Grief players like attention, and posting more information about
them makes them all the more famous.

I was referring to effective banning.  Eventually, a player will run out of
real life identities that they can borrow.  Kids can use each of their
parents, maybe other relatives and friends' parents, but it's a limited set.
Far more limited than the number of credit cards that anyone can obtain.
Sending a message of cancellation to the owner of the account, along with
explanation of the events, might be something worth doing today.  Does anyone
do that sort of thing?

> > More grief playing.  An individual who chooses to cause problems will do
> > regardless of any game system that anyone can develop.  In a multiplayer
> > world, it is implicit that players will interact.  Therefore, players can
> > negatively interact.  My pursuits of justice system are to keep players
> > uninterested in criminal acts - not to dissuade grief players.
>
> I really don't understand this. If you want to keep players uninterested
> in 'criminal' acts, why code in the ability for them to commit criminal
> acts? It seems like a massive waste of time to design and implement
> features that you want to actively discourage the players from using.

I agree that coding to allow actions that are then completely undesireable is
a ludicrous idea.  We've already stated that crimes are a difficult animal to
nail down.  Taking something from someone MIGHT be a crime.  Punching someone
in the mouth MIGHT be a crime.  Killing someone MIGHT be a crime.  The
approach that I've currently glommed onto is predicated in the idea that the
game can detect things that MIGHT be a crime and then leave it to the victim
of the apparent crime to decide whether it really was.

To answer your question, I want to permit players to do whatever they care to,
but with the realization that if they cross the line, the victim of their
action has the ability to drop a 16-ton weight on their head.  I want to
permit someone to take a sword from my incapacitated body in order to defend
themself against some opponent because their own sword was knocked from their
hand or shattered.  If the sword is returned to me, I have no particular
reason to report a 'crime'.  If the 'borrower' of the sword is someone who
knows me, he'll know that it's safe to do the 'crime'.  This all seems to
permit fairly normal patterns of behavior and interaction.

I haven't gone very far with this approach yet.  I've only theorized perhaps
half of the thieving scenarios and perhaps 10% of the assault and murder
scenarios.  I don't know how far it will go, but it shows promise.  To me,
anyway.

It's my understanding that in Achaea you permit PvP killing, but not
subsequent looting.  That strikes me as a good approach: no real profit in
killing other players.  I wonder if the 'possible' crime scenario doesn't in
fact permit players to work out what they're willing to have by way of
looting.  It might become the norm to be able to take some number of coins
from an opponent.  Or their weapon.  Or a ring.  Whatever.  If the players
agree that certain rules apply, the players live by them and we're at some
balance point.  But for players who don't want to be looted at all after a
given PvP encounter, they have the ability to say "don't loot me", as it would
constitute theft.

There's the whole problem of whether PvP combat should follow the same
pattern.  I haven't worked out the rules of PvP assault and murder yet, so I'm
not sure how that would work out.  As with all rules, some societies may
choose to state the rules one way and another society states them another way.
These different 'ways' may declare that PvP murder is not even a reportable
crime in some parts of the world.  Or that it is not an enforceable crime (the
NPC members of the justice system just don't go into those areas).  Like I
said, I think it shows promise because of its base characteristics.  I don't
know if it would survive contact with the enemy.

JB





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