[DGD] Pet peeves for users in a MUD

[Dread Quixadhal]

> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Shentino <shentino at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 4:03 AM, <bart at wotf.org> wrote:
>
> > Because quite often, people can't help that happening at all, and it is
> > generally known that the game can know about this happening?
> >
> > That said, it is never reliable, so people shouldn't be counting on it.
> >

I look at it from the point of view that quitting (for whatever
reason) in the middle of combat is a bad thing, and bad things should
be discouraged.

>From my years of playing muds, back when getting disconnected was a
fairly common event, I recall scrambling to get back in so that I
could retrieve my corpse and stuff before another player found and
looted it, or it dissolved into dust from my being away too long.
Typically, fights didn't last long enough to even consider the idea of
jumping back into the fight, and unless you were fighting lower level
stuff, it was also unthinkable that you'd win without using any of
your abilities.

This wasn't a problem back then, in the days of modems.  I really
can't imagine it being a problem with today's nearly 24/7
connectivity.

Sure, dying sucks.  Dying to something that's not your fault (cat
yanked the network cable out of the wall, flatmate needed immediate
help with a plumbing adventure, whatever) is even worse.... but unless
your game has perma-death, it's recoverable.

The only issue I really see with this at all, is the fact that people
have coddled players and they've gotten used to the idea that /quit
means they are magically saved and whisked off to happy-fun-void-land
until they log back in.

> Would different "tiers" of consequences for newbies and veterans be
> appropriate?

The reason I don't like coddling newbies is that it encourages bad
habits.  If they go through mud school getting all their gear replaced
and being able to choose what they fight, they yell louder when they
eventually lose those perks.  Likewise, in this case, it encourages
them to develop the habit of dropping connection because they'll get
saved (or worse still, win the fight).  Later, when you take that
away, expect much weeping and wailing.

> Thus, being held to a higher standard with regards to connection stability
> might be appropriate when you are dealing with someone who's more
> experienced and can be presumed to know better than to flake out.

In this case, it says you reward your most transient players, and
punish the most loyal.  SOE has a bad habit of doing that with their
MMO series, Everquest.  Namely, the people who have been playing for
years get veteran rewards, but so do the people who created an account
4 years ago, stopped playing, and then renewed for one month today.
It's tempting to do this, as it gets people to come back who might not
otherwise.

They also give you every expansion with each new one, so the long-term
player who shelled out $40 a pop for all 7 expansion is penalized by
virtue of the brand new player paying $40 and getting all 7.  Again,
attracting new players is tempting, but I don't like doing it at the
expense of your most loyal, core players.

> On one hand, it's not fair to be more than a sliver more likely to die
> offline than online, but OTOH depriving a player or an NPC of the spoils of
> victory just because the victim's player had an untimely (or timely,
> depending on what the flake-out motive was) is also not fair.  It's unfair
> to the would-be victor even if the quitter was completely innocent.

Sure.  Which is why doing nothing works the best, IMHO.  If they
somehow manage to win the fight on auto-attack, and they can log back
in before the corpse is cleaned up and goes away, let them loot and
enjoy.  Again, if they can kill the thing on auto-attack, it's not
going to be giving very good rewards anyways.

If they die, well, that's too bad.  They might have died anyways.  If
they failed to flee, if their attempt to flee failed, if they got
stunned or otherwise prevented from acting for too long, or if they
were just watching TV and didn't notice the "Wizard need food, badly!"
messages soon enough.

> Define "on purpose".

You can't distinguish the event on a case-by-case basis.  However, if
players know they stay in the fight doing the auto-punch attack, the
cheaters will quickly realize their strategy doesn't work.  The
innocents may be unhappy about the deaths, but they'll learn to
minimize their times of vulernability (I certainly did!).  If their
connection is really so bad that they can't stay on for more than a
few minutes at a time, they'll probably have to quit until they can
resolve that issue.  That's beyond your control.

You can try to keep statistics on how often people disconnect while in
fights vs. at other times.  You can try to be nice to some and not
others, but in the end, just spelling out what will happen is the
simplest way to handle things.  A MUD is a network game, and thus a
stable network connection is a pre-requisite, just as a 3D accelerated
card is for most first-person-shooters these days.