|
We all have problem players at one time or another, and I guess we all have our different methods of handling them. I usually try to reason with them myself, rather than banning. It is amazing how effective that simple method can be.
But then again, we may have been lucky not to get struck by the worst kind of problem players.
The worst cases we've got were a couple of 'script-kiddies' from one of the new east-European countries, who decided to ddos the Mud, when they got mad at some of the other players. Y'all know what ddos does, right? They bombard the server with thousands of messages, from a number of computers that they hacked into, until it breaks down.
It happened about a year ago, on four different occasions; the worst time the mud was down for three days, and we had to get ourselves a new server. Obviously nobody was very happy about it. In fact we darned near decided to close down for good.
We didn' ban them - with the 'hacker' type of player who has access to a more or less unlimited number of computers, that obviously doesn't make much sense. Two of the three players that did it are still with us. I tried my best to explain to them why ddosing a Mud that you actually want to play isn't a very good idea, and hopefully some of it sank in. In any case they are among our most hardcore players by now, and have eventually adjusted enough to be among the top ones.
I doubt they'll do it again, but of course you can never be quite sure. Since most of the players know what they did, they obviously made themselves a number of enemies, so there have been some minor conflicts since the actual incidents.
It would be interesting to hear if something similar happened to other Muds too, and if so, how you handled it.
|