[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[diablo at best.com]

On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Kristen Koster wrote:

> 
> I personally love the people who log on for the first time saying, "I love
> this place! Can I build here?" Our standard answer is "Feel free to propose
> and area once you reach level 45."

I started this thread out of annoyance with some player from some mud
(Dragon Realms or something?) that I've not heard of who came on yesterday
(he wasn't even a newbie, he had played for 40 hours or so) and asked me
to be an immortal. This right away got my back up, as we do not have
"immortals" (I don't like the term immortal, wiz, imp, etc. I like God.
None of those previous words are mentioned anywhere in our mythology, so I
wouldn't expect players to use them.) When players ask me this question,
I'm not even sure how to respond, as it is so rudely presumptuous. I
wouldn't walk into another person's business and say, "Hi there, mind if I
help you run this?" Generally, I just say, "No", which is what I did this
time. 

The player kept on at it, asking me <slip into whiny mode>, "But why?", so
I made up a reason. I told him he was too young irl (he was 17 or so I
think). He kept pestering me, and finally I turned him into a smoking pile
of ash. He then started telling the other players what an a**hole I am,
etc etc and as I knew this person would never be a customer, I deleted him
(I have no tolerance for people who are not and never will be customers
who cause trouble of any sort.) He brought on a second and continued, so I
deleted both of his seconds. He then started logging on newbies to try and
shout rude things, so I told him that he was now banned from Achaea and
that if he logged on again, I'd alert his ISP that he was harrassing us.

So then some guy claiming to be the creator of some mud that this fellow
is an "imm" on logged on and immediately sent a tell to me saying, "So I
hear you are having trouble with one of my immortals?" I replied in-role
and told him that it was preposterous that an 18-year old human male would
"have" immortal beings to serve him. He carried on out-of-role, I carried
on in-role. He eventually gave up, but if he wanted to talk to me, he
doomed himself right away with his first statement.

As Caliban pointed out, and as I said before, I don't see why I should
care if someone logs on and claims (or is) an admin on another mud. I know
it's snooty of me, but if I were, say, Paul Theroux, and some hack no-name
writer phoned me up wanting to talk shop, I'd have just as little interest
in talking to him as I do in talking to a faceless supposed mud admin
whose talents I know nothing of (and who I automatically presume to have
no talent, given the horrid quality of most muds). I'm not claiming to be
the mud-world equivalent of Paul Theroux incidentally. I was just using
that as an example.

The basic issue to me is that when you go into someone elses world, you
are a nobody, just like everyone else. This especially holds in the case
of a world with any sort of emphasis on roleplaying. If another admin
really wants to talk to me, he or she could happily e-mail me an
introduction and ask if it would be ok to talk to me in the game. I would
extend that courtesy to any admin that I wanted to talk to and I don't
think it is too much to ask of other people. It should have been
especially obvious to this guy that I wasn't interested in his OOC
babbling when I replied to his first statement (which he had to have known
I realized was not an in-role statement) with an in-role statement.

--matt