[DGD] Pet peeves for users in a MUD

[Noah Gibbs]

  Pretend they're 99% reliable for this, which is awfully optimistic.  You still have a social problem.

  You're going to be penalizing your players because, although you can't prove it, you think they cheated at least some of those times.  Penalizing non-cheaters for cheating makes them fiercely angry at you.  Penalizing only-sometimes-cheaters for times when they didn't actually cheat actually makes them angrier.

  So expect this system to be a customer service nightmare -- and you won't know when you're penalizing innocent people, but some of them pretty likely are.

  Also, here's at least one case where your metric would semi-fail.  Imagine a mother or older sibling playing, while attempting to watch a baby or small younger sibling.  Now imagine the network connection uses a wired cable.  The player will be most distracted when in combat or other dangerous situations, and the baby or young sibling will quickly discover that yanking the cable gets a large, entertaining reaction from their caretaker.  Especially since the caretaker will also soon be fuming because you're calling them a cheater.

--- On Tue, 4/14/09, Shentino <shentino at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Shentino <shentino at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [DGD] Pet peeves for users in a MUD
> To: "All about Dworkin's Game Driver" <dgd at dworkin.nl>
> Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 4:50 AM
> You know, come to think of it, I should probably check the
> very linchpin of
> my plan.
> 
> Are statistics a reliable way to distinguish quit-cheaters
> from flakers?
> 
> Does proneness to disconnect only in dangerous cases as
> opposed to proneness
> to quit at random times in general indicate a quit cheater?
> 
> I would think so, but can anyone think of a counterexample?
> 
> Right away I can think of the increased activity levels of
> combat generating
> more text than the client can handle, but that seems
> unlikely.  There might
> be something else I'm overlooking.
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