[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wi

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 7 Aug 1998 21:55:37 -0500 (CDT) 
Dan Shiovitz<dbs at cs.wisc.edu> wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Aug 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:

>> On Tue, 14 Jul 1998 03:46:36 -5 Jon A
>> Lambert<jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>>> Nod.  The availability of @gag did not prevent the Mr. Bungle
>>> incident.  Nor would @gag or "squelch" affect third party
>>> observation of such activity.
>> 
>> A thought:
...
>> As the number of gags increased on a player, the distance
>> propagation of his speech, or of his proxies speech would be
>> decreased proportionally.  Ultimately perhaps he would have to
>> shout to be heard by someone standing immediately beside him.

> If you're going to do something like this, why not just let people
> vote to prevent players from speaking at all? Say, if 10% of the
> people on the mud (minimum 10) vote to @gag someone, that person
> gets gagged for the next thirty minutes or until a wizard ungags
> them. 

Because that prevents the possibility of "Horton hears a Who", where
if either the speaker or the listener tries hard enough one will
hear the other, and it allows for mob rule in who gets heard at
all.  Turning it around, it allows for a smll cadre of players, if
they act in concert, to effectively banish another player from the
game without prior-knowledge on his part, or resort.

> (If you want, it might be better to do a chit system instead of a
> voting period. You have X chits you can give out. If a person
> accumulates N chits, they get whatever penalty is
> appropriate. This is basically a slightly-more-decentralized
> version of the voting system.)

I chit wars down the pipe with gangs of players combining their chit
collections to damn others they dislike.  While not necessarily a
problem, it would need to be accounted for.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...