[DGD] Pet peeves for users in a MUD

[bart at wotf.org]

The problem is of course that you will get angry people either way. You don't
do enough about cheating (in their eyes), they'll accuse you of being unfair
for letting people get away with it. You do a lot about cheating? well, there
we start running the risk you imo correctly pointed out. 

I'm not trying to be overly pessimistic here, and I agree with Shentino that
esp. the potential of griefing needs to be addressed. I'm just convinced that
it is a problem that has both social and technical aspects to it, and that
there is no simple solution, neither social or technical.

For me so far, the best approach has been the 'shame' thing, specifically
applied to a very dangerous combat situation. Getting fewer 'quits' then
others became a competition in itself, and as a result, it did its job. That
situation however was rather specific (finishing it without 'escaping' by
means of quitting was extremely difficult)

Bart.

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:18:27 -0700 (PDT), Noah Gibbs wrote
> 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.
> > ___________________________________________
> > https://mail.dworkin.nl/mailman/listinfo/dgd
> 
> ___________________________________________
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