[MUD-Dev] players who "take away from the game"

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 6 Nov 1999 23:11:25 -0500 
Charles Hughes <charles.hughes at bigfoot.com> wrote:

> On Friday, November 05, 1999 6:38 PM, msew [SMTP:msew at trilogy.com]
> wrote:
>> Question to everyone:
>> 
>> 0) what are disruptive players?  1) what do you do with
>> disruptive players?  2) why do disruptive players appear/blossom?

> 0) Any player who's intent is to disturb the normal (and proper)
> functioning of the game.

Who defines "normal" and "proper"?  On what metrics are they
defined?

  I used to play the arcade game "Tron".  It was a fairly simple
game where your character stood on one of a number of floating disks
in a room, jumped among them, and threw frisbees at a similar
character at the other end of the room, who was also doing the same
stuff.  The idea was to hit the other chap with your frisbees such
that he fell off his platform and thus "died".  Similarly he was
thowing frisbees at you, attempting to knock you off your platform.

 I quickly decided that the game was both boring and trivial.  So I
redefined the game.  Instead of working to knock the opponent off
his platform I made the game the challenge of consistently hitting
his frisbees with my frisbees which made them both self-destruct
with a great CLACK! and also earned good points.  As such I'd stay
on level 1 for as long as I possibly could, destroying everything he
threw at me, attmpting to avoid killing him for as long as possible.
"Losing" was defined in this new game as getting killed, or knocking
him off his platform sooner than absolutely necessary.

  A nice side effect was that for a single quarter (US) or 20p (UK) I
could play for over 2 hours while being quite thoroughly entertained. 
I never did make it to a very high level in the game, or even get some
atrociously high score.  I'd changed the goal.

Where does this fit?  What about Dr Cat's Stamp Collecting Dillemma?
The player want's to collect stamps and be generally uninvolved in
combat.  Other players want to PK.  Without pre-defining the game as
being either a stamp collecting game or a PK game, which is
"proper"?

> I have been subjected to two different disruptive player attacks:
> a) one character who was a newbie went around trying to screw with
> people's triggers (he managed to screw with mine which really
> pissed me off when the gods decided that was okay to do).  b) one
> or more characters who PK in a quite obviously non-PK area and
> again the gods refused to intervene.

Interestingly enough I would considr both the above actions quite
acceptable.  If you decide to isntall automations ofn your
character, Caveat Emptor, and I'm generically opposed to artificial
activity distinctions (such as voice-of-God enforced PK/non-PK
areas) in game worlds

Were the game to have support for funny bones, and the same newbie
ran about striking people on their funny bones causing them to drop
all they were carrying while chatting in the pub...  Would that be
an abuse?

> (In both cases above, the incidents which made me mad enough to
> cheat were caused by the gods not immediately enforcing the
> rules.)  

Who defined and pulicised the rules?  You or the admins?  How were
they promulgated?

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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