[MUD-Dev] Balancing Addicts -> soft vs. hard enforcement

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 17 Mar 98 at 7:14, Ling wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Mar 1998, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> 
> > Outside of in-game mechanics, there are wide areas of communication 
> > activities that are open to abuse that I don't believe can be coded
> > against, such as 'gossip', 'tell', 'emote', etc.  
> 
> I think the best method to stop OOC behaviour is code in channels
> especially for OOC communications, no IC allowed (exact opposite of
> current thinking).  There are times when running around on my own in
> a mud with a hundred other players, drives me mad.  It would be
> handy to communicate, even just to talk about the weather.

A caveat to communications:  I believe you can (and should) code 
around "mechanical" abuses of a communications system.  Things like 
spamming a player into the oblivion of mud link-death should be 
grokked.  A method of ignoring or suspending all or partial 
communications should be available for a user.

My game will have strong separation of user and character.  You 
would log in as "Ling" and be taken to an OOC area and then upon 
entering the game you enter the IC area as your character, be it 
"Ming the merciless", "Conan", "Barbarella", etc. or all three 
characters at the same time or various in-game NPCs if you desire.  
While in the game there are no OOC channels.  There's no telling 
who is playing any given character.  You may even share a character
with friends or even make the character publicly available.  
 
> Believe it or not, DartMUD II/Accursed lands actually has an ooc
> daemon which will spot words like 'unix' and use some strange IC
> method called black blood to punish players.  It also has a
> translator which muddles everything you say into some awful
> Shakespeare dialect in the name of maintaining an RP environment. 
> (yet some rp by altering their speech)
>
> Accursed lands - <URL:telnet://accursed.org:8000>

Lovely.  I really like this.  :)

One of my ideas is to parse speech and extract portions that made any
reference to deities based on some odd chance.  Note that this is 
NOT an administration issue.  It's a thematic one that involves 
deities played as NPCs who are in some cases all-knowing or aware 
of remote events, yet not infallible and frequently deceivable.   

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