[MUD-Dev] New Topic: Butthead features

[Jeff Kesselman]

hey all,
I thougth i stir the pot with naother contentious issue.

No offense to Raph but my playing arounf with UOL broguth thsi to mind.

There is a philisophpical/practical issue in the inclusion in your MUD of
"butthead" features. What I mean b ythsi are features that allow a pure
butthead to annoy (or worse seriously harm) other players jsut for the
cheap pwoer tip of doign so.  We all knwo thes eperosnalities exist on tegh
ent SO...

How do you control them?

Do you just avoid features that could be so abused, or do you count on
oither mechanisms to keep thsi behavior in chack and if so what agurantees
do you have of success?

This coems to mind becaus ein my current projectw e are conciously avoiding
butthead features.  Thatwb as our design decision. I see a rgeat many
features existant in the current UOl so obviosuly the designers there took
a differnet track..

Some exampels of butthead features include..

(1) PC pickpocketing of other PCs... always upsets people.
(2) Fixed tport points so that oterh can lay in wait and way-leigh
unsuspecting traverls befoe they can see whats up.
(3) The ability to take control of OTHERS PCs and make them do things (The
Provocation skill in UOL looks at first blush particuarly nasty in this
regard.)


There are lost mroe but there are some starter catagories.

Thoguhts, all? Raph? Whats your UOl philosophy on managing these things?

Jeff Kesselman
Jeff Kesselman
Snr. Game Integration Engineer
TEN -- The Total Entertainment Network -- www.ten.net

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