[DGD] Pet peeves for users in a MUD

[Shentino]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Dread Quixadhal <quixadhal at chartermi.net>wrote:

> 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.


I agree, however, I still believe that quits should effectively "pause" the
character until the player gets back, at least to the degree that it doesn't
hurt other players or permit players from using quits as a free way to avoid
danger, combat-induced or otherwise.

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.


I think this is a valid issue, and though I highly resent my character being
kept in-game without a good reason, I do think that players, and people in
general, need to give up the entitlement mentality that cherry picks by
taking the good stuff for granted but then crying foul when the bad stuff
comes along.

Spill gold from the heavens, and people will nab it and consider it just as
much theirs as if they earned it by the sweat of their brow.  And be just as
upset if it's taken from them, be it by a robber or the wand of a GM.

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.


Been there, done that, just as guilty.


> 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.


I would rather stop the clock on an account when the player is offline.  No
log in, then no accrual of online time.

Charging the player subscription fees to keep his account alive may still be
reasonable from the perspective of the game's owner incurring maintenance
costs to keep the account active, including the opportunity costs of what is
lost by not having that space usable for other things.

But I have absolutely no experience in pay for play anyway, so take this
section with a grain of salt.

As McCoy would say, I'm a hobbyist, not a businessman.

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.


I don't see well how this follows from a paused character chilling in limbo
until its player returns.

Though I suspect that game-time accrued is a good way to separate the loyals
from the new recruits.


> 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.


Here, I would let autoloot settings dictate what happens at kill point,
assuming that it doesn't go sour enough to either cause death or trigger
wimpy.  This lets things happen as they would have if the player just went
afk.  You're pretty much afk anyway if you're not online, and I consider
"what would happen if he were idle" to be quite reasonable as a default.

As far as I'm concerned, if a player's character is still involved in the
game, don't treat idley afkness differently from non onlineness...especially
since those two cases aren't really reliably distinguishable anyway.

Idleness in particular is IMHO grounds for automatic quit anyway.  Not only
is it misleading wrt your availability, but it chews up resources on the
machine hosting the game, and as such, excessive idleness is also "a bad
habit" that falls in the realm of "should be discouraged".  Not to mention
that leaving one's terminal unsupervised is a security hazard.

The only good reason to idle I can think of is for a koan.  Sadly, I have
received orders as a wizard to make admins immune from idleness checks just
so they could koan around doing nothing but meditating on the virtues of
being logged in doing nothing.  A definite manifestation of "know thy place
on the totem pole" that did nothing for the game itself except cater to the
administration's weirdness.

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.


Another reason why I want to treat idle and offline the same.

Attention is a finite resource that should be allocated wisely, especially
if you're a caretaker that has more important things to worry about than
playing a game :P.


> > 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.


Figured as much.


> 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.
>

Sage advice.