[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[Damion Schubert]

-----Original Message-----
From: Marian Griffith <gryphon at iaehv.nl>
>[Example snipped of a rather nasty way of indirectly killing a newbie]
>
>I really have only one question to this. Why did your friend do that?
>And most likely to a player who had done nothing to him, did not know
>what was happening and was justifiably very upset about what was done
>to him?


Because mischief is fun.  A lot of fun.  I don't even feel bad
for laughing out loud at watching these events transpire.  As
JC alluded to in another post, when you try to break the game, 
you challenge the GODS, which are not only much more exciting
than killing yet another NPC dragon on another NPC mud, but
is much more challenging to boot.

>It is incidentally also the kind of behaviour that I would immediately
>ban a player for were I ever to become an imm on a mud again.


I doubt you would have been very successful.  My friend and I both
always did our player killing from a second account, registered at
a second email address and (if we were truly paranoid, and attached
to the game) logged on through a second IP address.  Usually, we
weren't even attached to a game that we were tweaking other players 
on.  However, it turns out that in this specific case, the gods
never even found about the incident, in this case, since the newbies 
logged off immediately in indignation, and gods rarely have the time
to check out every single call that comes in.  And had they tracked 
down my friend, he would have simply logged onto his primary
account, feigned disgust with the GMs, and gotten his entire guild
to strike, write letters of protest on message boards, and threaten
to quit, all the while he was snickering behind his hand.

A lot of our mutual acquaintences called him a jerk.  I prefer 
to think of him as a 'learning experience', one which actually
contributed directly to my career.  Sure enough, mischievous 
players do this on UO, M59, and almost every other major 
online game, almost every day.

--damion