[MUD-Dev] Problem Players [was: Guilds & Politics ]

[Stephen Zepp]

[snip my own quoted stuff]
>The above sounds wonderful, given that you have email registration, 
>characters who never log out, etc. These provide important "identity 
>tracking" which permit the enforcers of justice to track the villain 
>down. Without them, though, it's next to impossible... Also, as scale 
>grows, anonymity will become increasingly easy as well. Eventually, it 
>may break down on you.It will be interesting to see if this is the 
>case. It relies a lot on players' willingness to gossip, which may not 
>work out that well (is it possible for a group of 100 players to get 
>together and purposely report the same person for something nasty, to 
>get their character destroyed?)
>
>-Raph
>
>
>

Well, simple bounty hunters ( my last code base created them, but all the
player had to do was to logout, log back in with a new CHAR_DATA, and the
mobs forgot about them ) can be "fixed" by giving them a char * hunting;,
which stores the names of who they are hunting.  If they lose track, they
go back into "search" mode, periodically attempting to re-aquire the
hunt...if you make them persistent enough, and they survive, the player
comes back a week later and is _still_ being hunted.  Move that a layer up
in control ( an area administrator mob, for example ) that assigns the
area's mobs/hunters/whatever to appropriate targets might even be more
powerful...or, add a list of:
struct threat_data
{
  next, prev, various needed system code;
  char * name; /* player considered a "threat" */
  sh_int threat_level; /* how badly do we fear them? */
  char * hunters_assigned; /* what npcs are currently active against this
threat? */
  sh_int threat_status; /* annoyance, problem, threat, enemy, nemesis */
};
  Have your area_update parse this list for both currently logged in
"threats", and check for resource ( hunters ) allocation against these
threats...with some simple code, you're already adding some serious depth
to playing...players can't just go wipe out an area continuously..they will
become a "threat" to the area, and may just get punished for their extreme
behaviour.

BTW, sorry about the code, sometimes it's just quicker to summarize that
way :) Also, sorry, my code is merc derived, and I'm getting the impression
most of the posters here are lp or well beyond...

Zoran, still trying to not make bad waves, but very interested in the list
so far :)