[MUD-Dev] Wild west (was Guilds & Politics)

[Derrick Jones]

On Wed, 10 Dec 1997, Maddy wrote:
> Previously, s001gmu at nova.wright.edu wrote....
> > On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Alex Oren wrote:
> > > On Sun, 7 Dec 1997 13:04:00 PST8PDT, Mike Sellers wrote:
> > <snip being a Jerk vs. RPing a Jerk> 
> > > How about dividing the mud into zones with more or less strict law enforcement
> > > in each.
> > > 
> > > For example, you'll have cities in which even the slightest perceived act of
> > > stealing or violence will instantly set the town guard on your tail, post
> > > "wanted" ads all over the place and in general make life miserable for you.
> > > While at the same time, there will be areas in which free PK is the norm.
> > > 
[snip]
> > The problem with this is that the 'jerks' are not going to WANT to harass 
> > ppl out in the wilds.  They're going to want to do it inside the city, 
> > and they are going to find a way to do it.  What makes you think you can 
> > enforce a behavior pattern within a city if you can't do it for an entire 
> > mud?  About the only thing I can see this system doing is isolating the 
> > areas where the 'jerks' behave like jerks to the cities.  The reason they 
> > are being jerks is because it goes against the expected behavior 
> > patterns.

I disagree.  Most jerks act like jerks because they are unable to
empathize properly with another living creature.  They're jerks because
they can be jerks, therefore it is 'Right' to be a jerk, and those who
are not jerks (favorite victims) are weak and therefore deserve the fate
that befalls them.  Sort of a Social Darwinian approach to mudding.
People act like jerks on muds mainly because a.) they're jerks in RL, or
2.) They would be jerks in RL, but are too cowardly to act out their
desires, and the virtual environment provides them with a 'safe' way to
feel superior to others.
I've met probably 50 people face to face that I've also mudded with.  I
realize this is a small sample of the mud population, but I've found that
100% of the people that act like jerks on muds also act like jerks in
person, although their thoroughly selfish behaviour is mediated by
societal pressures in person much more than in a virtual environ.

This personality typically holds the following logic:
If its mine, its mine.
If its yours, and I can take it (without undue harm to me), its mine.
Thus you have you pk sprees.

Most jerks don't see OOC verbal attacks (constant OOC insults, threats,
etc) as harassment because there is no damage one _to_the_jerk_.
Unfortunately, our ability to punish jerks is severly limited in that any
punishment must remain within the gameworld(?), which most jerks haven't
taken the effort of appriciating in the first place.

> The reason why it's so hard to enforce a no-kill zone at the moment, is that
> in most muds you can be standing one room away from a fight and never know
> it's happening.  Hence a city can be full of guards, but unless they're in
> the same room they won't notice a fight.  Being able to (by default) see as
> far as you'd expect would mean guards would be able to see fights.
> 
> If you stick with current room philosphy you could do what was discussed
> with regards to protecting newbies from getting slaughtered, namely by
> making a guard leap into the fray, but that can easily be abused.

Its probably about 10 lines of code to put line-of-sight into a Circlemud
(the achetypical box-room Stockmud). I'd have to re-dl the orignial code
again to see exactly what I had to add as its been over a year since I
did that.  Its probably easy to have yours NPC guards aware of any
violence within their line of sight as well.
SIDENOTES: I used a simple definition of line-of-sight within towns...5
rooms in any given direction with no blockages.  Buildings generaly block 
your view of 'odd' angles.  Wilderness line-of-sight would be much more
complicated as you'd be able to see rooms off the base room at odd angles
(such as a room 2n;3w in a flat plain) but there's no straight line a
player can travel between them (this is a major flaw in non-coordinate
based muds, but that's another topic beaten to death). Anyways, some sort
of hash table of viewable rooms would solve the problem, but would eat up
loads of memory without giving all that much in return.

Derrick