Thanks to Drakkos Wyrmstalker of Discworld MUD for his article, "Unlisting the Listable." Here's an exceprt:

You can read the article .

Information wants to be free, as the saying goes.

It's the endless information struggle.  Information just can't make up its' own mind.  

And then some games go to extreme lengths to make sure that questinfo isn't shared. For example, The Eternal Fantasy is set up as a mandatory-quest game; unless you can solve puzzles and defeat certain foes, you're stuck in the newbie areas.

Their rules state that any sharing of information will result in both the character who "dared" to ask, and the character who answered, being immediately nuked. Which is why I gave up on that game. I'm not stupid, but I was stuck on a quest. And since I knew there was no hope of any help, there was no way I could continue.

While I agree with your point to stop cheaters, going to extremes can make the players feel persecuted by the staff. And that will drive them away from your game.

Bing!

I don't think it's ever going to be possible to stop 'cheaters'... if the information is valuable in any way, then there is an incentive to try and capitalise on that value, whether it be for tangible or intangible rewards.

The trick, I think, is to make the information valueless - the only way I can really think of to do that is to make the process into the part that rewards.

As I mentioned in the article, the act of decrypting a monoalphabetic substitution cipher is pretty standard - but knowing how to do it is the easy part. Actually doing it is the hard part, and the process of deciphering should be the factor that rewards the player.

My stance would be that our job as developers isn't to get rid of the cheaters, because that's all but impossible... instead, we should try and remove the incentives for cheating. In quests, removing the value of 'secret information' is a fairly effective weapon.

Re: Molly.

Thanks - I'm glad you found it interesting. :-)

As far as actually finding these web-sites goes, it's a little bit of both. A quick google search will turn up a number of sites, which the Discworld Admin try to get rid of by virtue of negotiation with the relevant ISP.

But we do have some players who appreciate the spirit of the rules, and quite rightly resent people being able to get an easy reward by abusing quest lists and quest list sites - sites of any kind of real popularity are often reported by Civic Minded players.

Nice article.

I can imagine such a player only sharing the solution with their guild, for example. If the reward is significant enough, it could give a guild armed with such knowledge a pretty significant headstart.

Additionally, what's more important to a player - the ability to do a quest no-one else can, or to be the first to publish the solution and thus be credited as the first to solve it? I'd wager that to many players, the latter seems like the greater reward.