Zebedee has been running for around 15 years now, so we have a lot of experience of dealing with trouble makers and generally actions such as suspensions/deletions/site bans have kept people in line.

Recently though a few members have, after many and repeated warnings and lesser penalties, been permenantly banned from the Mud.

Since then they have been passing their time by posting scathing 'reviews' (using the word review to mean slagging off the Mud as much as possible) and creating websites detailing walkthroughs to quests and to alchemist recipies which are supposed to be only known to people who have solved them themselves.

Beyond the obvious 'ignore them and eventually they will stop being childish and go away' does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with this?

I can think of one way: Change the quests, change everything that's on their websites, and let them post their so called "reviews".

Why let them post the reviews? Cause any half-brained troll who reads the sentence "Oh! Lets not forget good old Savoy. Genius that he is" (Just picked a random sentence that I think makes a good example) can understand that he's dealing with nothing but a disgruntled player, and would most likely try the Mud for himself knowing that idiots like that get banned.

And well, I already offered my advice about their little websites... If you change the quests, their websites become worthless.

(original comment removed - it appears I was confusing the owner of Zebedee with the owner of mono.org, my apologies).

Disgruntled players are always coming here and ranting - it's got to the point where most readers take the reviews here with a pinch of salt anyway. I shouldn't worry about it.

You really can't do much about disgruntled players, other than turning off reviews for a while. Generally I've found that they want reactions, because it convinces them that whatever they're doing is seriously inconveniencing you. Ignore them and go about your business. Changing information that's published - well, it depends on the amount of work as well as the impact on your game. Are the people with the information getting an unfair advantage? If so, I'd probably change it. If it's just "whoo, you want this to be secret so we're publishing it", again I'd ignore it or maybe change enough to make the info questionable. If they've got a place for people to post info, it's kinda fun to post info that sounds good but is totally false, if you want to put that much effort into it.

I hope that helps. I've dealt with a lot of griefers in a multitude of forms over the years, and it's usually discouraging and painful if you let it get to you. Remember that you must be doing something right if you're creating a game that's good enough that people get that worked up about it.

Just ignore them. And as the saying goes, "Information wants to be free." If they're publishing info and you take the time to make changes, they win. They've forced you to waste your time, thus inconveniencing you, which is what they're after.

--matt

Could be, but why let some random jerk dictate your timeline for such things?

Because if he doesn't, you'd probably never do it.

But I mean, if the guy is giving out solutions to quests, you change the quest... Or delete the quest... If you sit there and do nothing then the guy just took out the fun in quests for your players, and then who won? He sure as #### didn't have to work hard to do it, so what's next? Clues to all the rare items?

Leave the quests as they are...
spend the time you might have spent changing them making new quests!

It can't suck the fun out of quests for the players who don't care to do the quests anyway and just want to get whatever reward if any the quest provides. Those people seeking solutions to quests are going to be seeking and getting that information privately. It doesn't harm players who enjoy finding and solving things on their own because they won't bother with the website.

What Tyche said. =)

There are tons of quest walkthroughs for Worlds of Warcraft, but that hasn't stopped it from selling 300,000+ copies on its opening weekend in Europe this last weekend.

Just generally, trying to keep game mechanics secret from players is futile unless you have virtually no players to begin with. As your playerbase rises, so does the "value" people find in supplying information about your game mechanics.


--matt

The most amusing way is to change minor details in the quests he's posted, usually the details that are the easiest for the players to work out on their own. This raises the possibility that people will be saying, "You don't want to trust that site. They have the silliest mistakes on there!"

I'm assuming you mean 'criminal' in an off-handed way, since there's nothing even remotely illegal about putting up a website with solutions to quests.

You guys might want to check out thottbot.com. It's a pretty amazing reference site for Worlds of Warcraft (that's also a bit controversial right now since it appears to be owned by Ogaming, which is owned by IGE, the major player in the secondary market for virtual world items and currencies). The info is fed to it largely, I believe, by a custom frontend for WoW called Cosmos. You can search by quest, item, whatever. It's a huge treasure trove of data.

--matt

The first thing you should do (and something you should have done the first day you signed up at TMS) is disable reviews.

Anonymous, player submitted reviews are absolute trash.

The overwhelming majority are either trolls from disgruntled jerks with a bone to pick, or inflated, hyped, puff pieces written by fanboys.

The rare worthwhile review gets utterly buried amidst the previous two types.

Anonymous, player submitted reviews are absolute trash.  The overwhelming majority are either trolls from disgruntled jerks with a bone to pick, or inflated, hyped, puff pieces written by fanboys.

I spot-checked our last ten, and counted two disgruntled jerks and zero fluff pieces.  I'd also say that four of them do a very good job of outlining our niche from a player's perspective.  I say they aren't fluff pieces because they all mention pros and cons, and avoid hyperbole about either.   One more was basically explaining why DJ#1 was spreading incorrect information (*).  One was quite possibly written under the influence of potent hallucinogens, but at least it's entertaining.   The last two were probably too short and vague to convey much.

We've always had decent luck like this- I think the collective impact of those ten reviews is certainly a net positive.  If I had to speculate on why:

1) We don't offer bribes or rewards for reviews.  You might get a brief thank-you letter from a staff member or two, but that's about it.  Cuts way down on the lowest-common-denominator reviews.
2) We don't pester people who are playing to write them.  (Or for anything.  We have a strict policy about keeping OOC stuff like PR and RL money outside of the game environment.)
3) Professional, fair rules enforcement.  Every game gets a certain quota of jerks, especially if they're like us and don't use cumbersome screening methods or financial contracts before a player can sign on.  (You can essentially log onto CF 'off the street'.)  If someone breaks our rules, we try to stay out of the insult-slinging and just explain the rules, punish if needed, and remove the offender silently if it's really called for.

In summary, I'd urge MUD admins to open their game to public review.  It's a useful tool for a prospective player to use before making a decision about trying your game out or not.

(*): DJ #1 claimed we randomly delete characters, and the review quoted our helpfile about how our character-bot cleans out inactive accounts after X days, and explained the policy a little more.  There's no human involvement in the decision to keep or remove an unplayed character.

Yeah but it's another of those things you don't really have control over and not worth the headaches. It's sort of like banning players from smoking while playing your mud. ;-) Not only are players coordinating their actions in ICQ chat, they are sharing "secrets" via that medium and tells in your game. If you're punishing them inside the game they'll do it outside the game.

Are you sure about that? I mean we were having that amusing discussion along similar lines over on TMC. I know your Sonya definately wouldn't agree with me. :-)

I personally like to solve puzzles myself. OTOH, my son is scouring the cheat sites after no more than 48 hours after purchasing a new video game. One amusing thing is I started playng the Sims and had to tell him, No I really don't want to know the cheat code to start with a million dollars. His friends are like that with cheat codes, my friends aren't. I'm venturing part of it is a youthful predisposition of impatience with puzzle-solving and desire to get to the good part of the game. But it's not confined to youth, you see it commonly among those who love to PK. They could care less about the stupid quests and would rather skip that part, get "buffed out" with the rewards to enjoy the part of the game they like.

If they stick to playing their game it's fine, but then again they might be really annoying to others by issuing spoilers over global chat. *shrug*

I believe it was over copyright infringement not quest cheats, right Threshold? A cheat site might but not necessarily infringe on copyright.

The intended audience of the bad review is usually the staff and players on that game. The player has usually been cut off from communicating their displeasure inside the game. As has been said many times, players have the right to logoff. Well they do enjoy another right too. The right to whine, bitch and moan on mud forums (well as long as mud forums and listing sites remain liberal in regard to who uses them). Being that forums are primarily read and written by mud staff, it almost guarantees a predominately negative group response regardless of the complaint. And some admins will respond by loosing their flying monkeys to do damage control on the reviews or forums. Of course if players weren't terrified of really speaking their minds on the muds they play that'd probably cut down on "AnonymousCoward" reviews.

I think it's all very amusing.

I agree with this actually. Each of the forums for our games has a section specifically for players to rant, complain, bitch, and whine. As long as they don't get too personally insulting with any of our staff (saying they do a bad job is fine. Saying they're white supremacists who eat puppies and lynch minorities is not.) they can bitch about whatever they want. Some productive stuff has actually come out of those forum sections too.

the_logos Feb. 16 2005,14:11
I meant it in a figurative way, and also note that I said 'on the verge of criminal.' If you are going to quote me, plese do it correctly.

I am well aware that providing free cheat info on a website - or even selling the same info - doesn't fall under criminal law. That doesn't mean I have to like it, any more than I like some other sleazy things on the fringes of muds, like selling equipment or even chars for RL money.

I like a fair play and a fair game, and I think Admin should try to sell the idea of that to the players as much as possible.

And one way of doing that is to make it clear to them that cheating is not acceptable behaviour, and that if you ARE caught with your hand in the jam jar, you are going to get punished in some way or other.

That said, I'd like to clear my standpoint on cheating to Tyche:

1. I don't think you should have any rules in a Mud that you don't have a reasonable chance of also enforcing. I do think that you should enforce the ones that you have however.

2. I am a Builder, (and so is Sonya, who you mentioned), so naturally we don't like to see our work misused. I try as much as possible to make my quests reasonably 'cheat proof', by adding random elements, and lower the rewards when the quest is repeated. But it is very hard to protect against blabbing, unless you make the scripts so elaborate that it really isn't worth the time and effort. There is a limit to the time you can put down on each single quest. And however hard you try, bugs WILL appear every now and then, especially in new zones.

3. I don't think anyone should be judged without cut and clear evidence, neither in a mud or in RL. I'd never judge a player based solely on accusations from other players myself. But some players are such obvious bad eggs that you soon run out of any sympathy for them.

4. I also think that player privacy should be respected, and that habitually snooping and spying on players is generally a bad thing. If this means that a number of cheaters who would otherwise get caught are going free , I'll have to live with that. (Note; I am not saying that the snoop command is never used on my Mud. It is however restricted to imp level, to avoid imms being nosy out of sheer boredom, and we never use it without good reason). Also, as Tyche already pointed out, if you monitor your players on line, they just take their blabbing to ICQ or AIM.

5. However, a blatant cheat site on the net is way over the borderline for me. Some people may find it amusing,  some might even consider it a possible source of income. I guess next we might have Mudowners offering to sell quest info from their own game for $. As for myself, I consider it an insult both to the game and the players, and everything possible should be done to shut it down. (And I doubt that the info on a cheat page would NOT fall under copyright infringement).

6. Finally, imms that abuse their chars to get game advantages for their mortal chars, or those of their personal friends, should lose their imm privileges immediately. There is no excuse for cheating imms and it should never be tolerated on any mud.

Chuckle. *pat pat*

Yes, clearly, MUDs like Achaea, Puzzle Pirates, Habbo Hotel, Second Life, Ultima Online, Project Entropia, and so on are "on the fringes" when compared to mainstream titans like 4 Dimensions or other random DIKUs with few players.

There seems to be a lack of understanding on copyright on your end. Information is not copyrightable. Ideas are not copyrightable. Specific expressions of those ideas are. A site that verbatim takes a bunch of paragraphs from your game may be infringing. A site just giving solutions to quests is not.

You also might want to clean up the infringing IP from your own game before you go attacking others for allegedly infringing.

--matt

the_logos:
Heh, touchy, touchy...

FYI, I wasn't  referring to the Achaea custom of selling perks for money, (which seems to be pretty mainstream nowadays), but to the phenomenon of players trading virtual swords and equipment and even characters for large sums on the internet. One of the backsides of commercial games.

But of course, you need no excuse to insult my game. That's the second time in a week now. Last time the List admin removed your posts.  It will be interesting to see if they will do the same this time.

Fair enough, and if that's the way you really meant it, then I apologize for taking offence. We're actually in agreement there too. I have a huge problem with that, but not because of anything to do with its effect on the game (the game has no rights). My problem is that people -explicitly- agree to Terms of Service EULAs that prohibit them from buying or selling in-game stuff for money and they do it anyway, using a justification that boils down to, "Well, I want it."

Incidentally though, I don't see how it being mainstream or not really affects the morality of it. For me, and I'd assume for basically everyone, morality isn't a popularity contest.



They removed your post too, Molly. And I didn't insult your game. I just pointed out that there's nothing original about centaurs, fauns, and caucasian humans. That's self-evident. Had any other game claimed to have all original races aside from dwarves and elves, I'd have claimed 'BS' just the same if they had centaurs, fauns, or caucasian humans.



--matt

the_logos wrote (Feb. 16 2005,14:11)


Isn’t it a bit strange that the owner of a large commercial Mud, who is claiming himself to be widely respected professionally, is publicly promoting a cheat site against another commercial game? Even to the extent of publishing the URL for it? Hardly what I’d call professional courtesy, but then again, professional courtesy doesn’t seem to be any of his more outstanding properties.

On the other hand it comes as no surprise that the_logos would approve of cheat sites. I remember a thread some time ago, when he informed the world about how he once bought a heavily cheated sword from a crooked mudowner for (I believe) 1000 $. It surprised me at the time that someone would openly brag about such a dishonourable exploit, but it does tell you something about the moral standards of this guy.

What I found particularly offensive about that post of his however was the fact that he insulted just about every mudowner on the board by claiming that they would have done the same if given the chance (i.e. sell a cheated weapon to a player for a similar sum). Talk about judging the world from your own standards…

Sarapis is an incorrigible bastard. He stole my candy, then he sold it on eBay.

He is NOT TO BE TRUSTED. Keep fighting the good fight, Sinuhe. You, the Chinese government and Molly O'Hanrahahanrahan make an UNSTOPPABLE FIGHTING FORCE.

Daedalus

Heh, your mindset is amusing. Imagine considering a great player resource like Thottbot an attack rather than an asset to your game community. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. I'd kill to have people as competent as the Cosmos/Thottbot guys doing that for one of my worlds.

In the real world, where most developer's vision isn't as obscured as yours is, sites like Thottbot are encouraged as legitimate player resources. It's generally only ego-driven admins who want to 'beat the players' or show the players how much smarter they are than them who get ****y when someone doesn't find things out JUST as the developer intended.

And hey, guess what? Blizzard is run by great, professional developers. That's probably why, if you had actually bothered to do any research (*gasp*, imagine doing that! ), you'd discover that Blizzard has an entire forum section on their official forums devoted to custom UIs like Cosmos, which feeds Thottbot its information. They've even made a thread about which UIs are available sticky so that the thread stays at the top. Note that the first post following the Blizzard rep's thread-starting post is about Cosmos.

So are you even more outraged now? How dare I post a link about Cosmos/Thottbot from WoW's official forums! My god, I'm like the devil!

Oh, by the way, you might also want to check out Allakhazam's site, which also has lots of quest walk-throughs:

(yep, look at me, I did it again! I posted another web link to a well-known WoW resource! By the way, you can also use this cool little site you've probably never heard of called 'Google' () to find all sorts of information. )


--matt

the_logos; Feb. 17 2005,04:48
Oh, I see – referring to someone’s mud as ‘mainstream titans like 4 Dimensions or other random DIKUs with few players’ is not insulting these days? My mistake, you could have fooled me.

And, just for the record:

1. 4D is anything but ‘mainstream Diku’, it’s one of the most developed free muds on the net, as anyone who has played it can verify. You obviously have no clue about what the game is like, so why the cheap stab?

2. Anyone judging the quality of a Mud by the number of players must be either extremely biased or rather stupid.

3. And if I cannot take part in an open debate on a discussion Forum, without some jerk taking a stab at my game instead of sticking to valid arguments, then these boards are going sadly down the drain.

Shrug, it is what it is. You have few players. People can read into that whatever they want.


Haha...hahahah....hahahah. That's too funny. My god, that's like a textbook example of pot calling the kettle black.

--matt

You're so wrong. It's Achaea. Imperian is the suck.

Achaea sucks ass. It doesn't even have GRAPHICS, for God's sake.

Come back when you have normal mapping figured out, Sara****.

That's good because I just hate when people agree with me, because that means I have to do the heavy lifting on finding something interesting that we don't agree on. :-)

Ditto on 1. and 2. But there is a lot to 2. that is just simply out of your hands and into the realm of unenforceable like you say. Along the lines of questy stuff, we had players who would exchange maps areas in e-mail. Builders didn't like it much, but the alternative of monitoring player communications to look for secret deals like "hey give me your email and I'll send you my map" was well dumb... also unconscionable.

Well yeah and it's just as obvious to their fellow players who the bad seeds are. Of course in most games like I've suggested here and elsewhere, the players are powerless to do anything about it. So you must judge. Well get out of the judging business. The last thing I personally want to do is to login to my mud and take a look at at the docket of player complaints, play dad, and decide which child is the problem. And as you might be also be aware even a clear cut case with the well-known problem child on the victim side, is usually the result of retaliation by the frustrated but normally good player. You don't have to judge if players have the power to each individually make a decision to exile those they don't like from their space. Peer pressure is a much more powerful force for change than that coming from authority figures.

Well I disagree with you on 5. In the US at least information is not protected under copyright. And whether currency is exchanged for information, or equipment in the mud between players isn't none of my business either. Whether it's real or virtual currency. Why draw the line at exchanging real currency, and not exchange of real services or for something more ephemeral like friendship? Same thing. Hey I can always get great deals when I mud with my wife. I can exchange an uber-sword-of-major-orc-killing for a kiss, and if I really haggle I can even get a better deal outside of the game. Of course she usually wants hard cash for anything she finds. *sigh*

Regarding 4. Get rid of snoop, logging and wizinvis. Really respect their privacy. Why should players have to move their chat outside the game when there's perfectly good chat system in the game? Well it would be after one scrubs the flaws out of it (staff peeking).

My solution to 6 is simply to reverse the progression and provide an advancement track for staff. The advancement track gives higher level staff members less and less powers over the players. Advancement is based solely on contribution, and non-exercise of power. They advance from level 1 (or whatever it is in game terms for a newbie player) to level 0 to level -1 and on to ever decreasing levels of power. Until they are completely invisible and without power over the virtual world. One might ask, well if they can't manipulate anything in the virtual world the players are living in then how do they do anything at all? They do what the do in the meta world of the mud. Creating and coding meta things which are unrealized in the player world and until such time as they (or subset of them), via consensus, collective push a button to make them realized. Yeah it's a zen thing. Sadly many would have to redesign their games to do this.

Hey look at the players on this mud forum game. They have to appeal to a moderator to crush each others communications. Now I can't see the post. What about my right to read it, judge for myself and more than likely be highly entertained by it? I protest!! I complain loudly and vociferously in colorful turgid prose that this doth suck! Repression! Tyranny!

P.S. Moderator: Could you remove all the exchanges on this thread between Molly and TheLogos. They are frightening my inner child.

the_logos Feb. 17 2005,17:56
I am glad it amuses you.
There is one small difference however.
I attack your arguments.
You attack my mud.
You do a similar thing with KaVir, whenever you run out of arguments.
It's bad debate technique, to say the least.

Again, you have to be kidding me. You are the one who -constantly- attacks me rather than my ideas. What's your response to pointing out that coders are valued more highly than builders, for instance, based on what they get paid? Insults and accusations. And let's not forget the time you implied we harbor paedophiles.

Further, what are you talking about, exactly? On the thread in which our posts were deleted, I was attacking what you said, not you. You claimed that your races were original aside from dwarves and elves. This isn't so, and I pointed it out.

Stop playing the victim. It's laughable.

--matt

Tyche; Feb. 18 2005,00:26
That’s fine by me, I enjoy a good discussion too. Many of your suggestions are really interesting too.
However, some things that look very easy theoretically are a lot harder to apply in praxis. I believe you are not actively running a mud ATM - (no offence intended, just an observation) – so maybe you forgot a bit about the every day problems that running a Mud entails. (Just like old time players tend to forget how it felt to be a newbie).

Take for instance your idea of removing snoop and wizinvis completely. It’s true that both commands can be abused extensively for intruding on player privacy. But both are also very useful as tools for the staff.

Most imms for instance go wizinvis while they are working on a project, because they don’t want to be disturbed by player questions, while on the other hand they don’t want to appear rude by ignoring them. As for snoop, I use it myself pretty regularly, for instance in the following situations;
1. When a player claims that his char, or some command or quest, is bugged, to find out what is causing the problem, by asking them to repeat the action while I watch. (Usually it turns out to be caused by a bad alias or bad settings in the mud client, but that’s another story).
2. Guiding a new Builder through the first steps of OLC, since that makes it possible to give them immediate input at each stage, which they otherwise cannot receive while they are in the editor.
3. Following a new player through some part of mudschool, to check if the instructions there work as intended.
4. Monitoring when a new zone is testplayed, because some weaknesses only are revealed when the zone is played by someone else than the creator. (You tend to get ‘home blind’ to your own errors, that’s only human).

Actually the easiest way to really address the privacy problem, would be to send a message to the victim each time a snoop command is toggled. We’ve chosen to restrict is to imp level instead. After all, if you cannot trust the imps to be mature about the game they run, who can you trust?

I assume that by this you mean an extended ‘ignore command’ or ‘filter’, which allows one player to block out not only private tells, but all communication channels and actions like emote, socials, title etc. from another player?

It would be quite possible to code, the command ‘coventry’ that we have works pretty much that way, although it is an imm command, and isn’t restricted to single player communications, it blocks out all output from the player affected by it. I can see how an extended ignore command or ‘filter’ might be of use for very sensitive players, who for instance would like to block out bad language or twinkish rants. But it also has its definite drawbacks, since problem players would take advantage of it.
Picture the following scenario:

Player A dislikes player B and takes every chance of back-talking him, accusing him of several vile actions, which incidentally all are blatant lies. Since Player B thinks Player A is a jerk, he has long ago ‘filtered’ him out, so he is totally unaware of the rumours that are spreading right under his very nose - and rumours spread incredibly fast in a mud. Since he doesn’t contest anything that player A says, even when he is present in the same room, the other players naturally assume that the allegations are all true. Player B might only become aware of the situation when other players start treating him with growing resentment, unless one of his true friends informs him of what is going on. By then it may already be too late. A lie, repeated often enough and not contested, becomes the truth to many people. And Player B, a decent guy, is now the pariah of the mud, while the real jerk, Player A thrives.

As much as I dislike playing nanny and listening to the daily grieves, complaints, tattling and plain whining – (and I admit that I DO dislike tattling and whining intensely) - someone has to do it, or things would soon get out of hand. I still believe that active imms or ‘Game-masters’ are necessary in any game.

I know your pet peeve is that all bugs are the fault of the Admin, because ‘they suck’, but regardless of how hard we try, bugs will still appear, especially in a developing Mud. We may call ourselves ‘immortals’ but we’re still human. New features may have flaws that aren’t fully worked out and need to be tested in active gameplay. People will get stuck in no-exit rooms that they weren’t supposed to have teleported into in the first place, and need help to get out. Scripts sometimes screw up due to some unforeseen change in the main code. Blatant harassment or just globally annoying twinkishness has to be dealt with. All this usually on a daily basis.

And even the players who whine the most about ‘interfering imms’ usually are the first to come screaming for help, when they run into some problem themselves. A fact is that most players like to see at least one active imm on line. It makes them feel safe. And they also like being able to actually talk to the imms and to get a personal response to their ideas or needs. Why else would ‘Active imms that care’ be such a common point when people list what they expect from a 'good Mud'?

Isn't that the truth. The biggest debates in Achaea over imm involvement tend to be over the manual enforcement in our (fairly complicated) PK rules. Funnily though, the same ones who always bitch that they'll get punished for killing someone for <this> or <that> were recently VERY loud in complaining that the admins needed to do something about a certain practice called "rezz-killing" (where someone is rezzed and immediately killed again) that was only affecting two groups of players who are considered open PK at all times (but with whom others can contract for assassination work). They were begging the admin to step in to save them.

What drives me a little batty is that the same players will say both that they want less admin interference and want the admins to recognize more "RP" reasons for PKing, something which would require more admin interference and more subjective judgements (of what is and isn't "good RP") on the parts of the admins....which, of course, is something they also bitch about.

A lot of them don't really know what they want, I believe, or rather, they know they want fun, but they don't really know (or haven't thought very hard about) how the opportunity for fun can be given to them.

--matt

God you're an idiot, Daedalus. I'm going to throw you down a well.

--matt
P.S. If you think we don't have graphics, you've obviously never seen the big square we have on our login screen. A SQUARE, man. Doesn't get any more impressive than that.

What about summoned mobs, pet mobs, charmed mobs, etc? Couldn't players just use those to kill each other?

No, in the all encompassing greater PK check funtion
we have, it makes sure that any NPC that is a follower
of a PC cannot attack another PC with that flag on. That
one check along with the myrid of other ways to initiate
combat should all be nulified when that rezzed player has
that 90 second AFF flag. Making that kind of solution unabuseable
s your own muds responsibility, it's not that hard to do and
it sure stops the complaints of rezz-killing and keeps the
killed player happy that hes/she isnt whisked away to a graveyard
or whatever other inconvienient results your mud has upon death.

Tank

My memory is certainly not foggy enough to want to repeat the mistake of being involved in muds that are run on that system again. I have no desire to be involved in "running" a mud in that sense, nor am I currently.

I don't have to resort to theory on that, I could list all the mud codebases (non Diku) that don't have snoop or wizinvis. For example none of the available mudlibs that I know for ColdC implement snoop or wizinvis. The point being it isn't at all necessary or needed for problem solving.

It's quite easy enough to indicate availability or unavailability, and retrieve away messages in the same way that players can. And yet what Diku player hasn't had strange experiences with disembodied voices? I contend it's used for quite a different purpose on most muds. Did you ever think of implementing playerviz so players could hide from imms and communicate anonymously as well?

IRT 1. Note boards, forums and tells are certainly more than sufficient to report problems. IMO, if a player is unable to communicate a problem through a note or an exchange, then muds probably aren't going to suit them anyway.
IRT 2-4. I would have thought building and testing in most Dikus was done on test ports or offline. That's how we always did it. If we didn't have enough testers, we'd invite players to participate as well. On other types of muds apparently one is able to build, code and debug online without snoop.

Addressing the privacy problem would involve removing the security holes not inventing excuses to justify them. Implementing key encryption inside a mud would be quite useful as well to secure privacy of communications.

There are actually more things I mean by it, but as far as communications are concerned the above is correct. Your scenario assumes that players remain unaware of what ignore does, whether it's even operative, cannot form character judgments themselves, and for some reason Player A is still actually quite interested in continuing to deal with Player B via third parties.

I don't really know what "out of hand" means to you. I expect players would decide that for themselves. It would mean players would no longer whine, bitch, moan and rely on you to solve their social problems. Why do you assume they wouldn't make creative use of social tools available to them? They clearly demonstrate that they are quite capable of making full use of the rest of their avatar's toolbox, your other game commands (especially the bugged ones ;-), and most of all they use these existing tools in concert with other players.

My pet peeve isn't just bugs, but punishing people because your design or code is broken. If you have to deal with "bugs" like the above on a daily basis then yes, that's certainly level 1 on my "you suck" table. The social stuff is because players don't have any the powerz to prevent it. It's a circular argument, they don't have the power so they need us. See how much they need us.

The phrase is certainly very popular among those who start muds, and advertise them. And you wrote an article on just the sort of players who would use that phrase in one sense. For a great many it translates into "they listen to me and implement the things I want". I don't put much stock in it from the viewpoint of "I want to mud in a safe monitored environment with no privacy" though I acknowledge some players do.

If you want to know whether you really can administrate a mud effectively, delete your immortal character and recreate as a regular player character under the same name. Set your title to Head Wizard, Big Cheese, Great Kahuna, or whatever just so players know you are the one running the mud and the one to report problems to.

TheTrollCop wrote on Feb. 20 2005,08:47
Aha, so that is what really happened.

Interesting.

I should also mention that we've got Osama hiding in the closet and that after Caesar was murdered we took in Brutus and protected him from Caesar's angry enemies.

Oh, and did I mention that all our profitable games are DIKU-based?

Keep on trollin', Trollcop.

--matt

Yeah, I remember that one too. That's the one where I pointed out that salary surveys show us that coders are more valued than builders and promptly got flamed for it. Some people on these boards have a serious problem with reality, but that's their problem.

--matt

You're right, it doesn't make it any less true. When something is false to begin with, nothing can make it less true.

It is, however, an appropriate response to stupid accusations. That or a lawsuit if we felt someone had crossed over into libel territory. Those are the two appropriate responses to that kind of thing I think. Another would be just ignoring them as the rantings of children, of course, but what fun would that be?

--matt