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

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 10 Nov 1999 12:09:49 -0800 (PST) 
Matthew Mihaly <diablo at best.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> On Tue, 9 Nov 1999 16:26:11 -0800 (PST) Matthew Mihaly
>> <diablo at best.com> wrote:

>> Unless the players are individually responsible for such
>> militancy?

> I'm not willing to give any players the ability to delete. 

I made and make no statement about the ability of players to delete
other players or characters.  I'm perfectly willing for players to
be able to make other player's characters unplayable by various
in-game means however.

Your shrubs are a case in point.

>> Yup.  This is why you institute human report and instigation
>> methods as well. All of this also gives me yet another
>> opportunity to roll out my favourite justice system:
>> 
>> "Crimes" would be deliberately vaguely defined.
>> 
>> The system would erraticly and unpredictably cycle between
>> ultra-strict enforcement and ultra-relaxed enforcement of crime
>> detection.
>> 
>> An increased percentage of guilty verdicts would tend to sway the
>> system towards stricter enforcement.
>> 
>> Users can report crimes to the system.
>> 
>> Depending on the above, not all reports would be acted upon.
>> 
>> The system would internally detect crimes.  This would take place
>> via mobiles or other similar coded systems viewing a crime in
>> progress or the results of a crime.

> < continuing description of trial method whereby jurors are
> randomly selected from those members of the society whose rules
> have been broken, who are online at the time>


> I guess I don't see this as possible unless you have a lot of
> fairly artificial rules like "no-pk zones" and stuff like that. If
> you kill me somewhere with no eyewitnesses, and I kill you back
> with eyewitnesses, and it gets reported as a crime, I am going to
> be merely annoyed at the whole trial process. 

You are missing the bit where most crimes are not taken up by the
justice system.  The intent is for somewhere around 1% of crimes at
any time to receive any sort of action.

> In fact, considering the number of potential "crime" committed on
> a daily basis, I think your system simply is too time-consuming...

This is one of the major reasons for making it overlook almost all
crimes, and also the reason for bring all past crimes under scrutiny
when a case is brought to trial.  On the one hand it allows gambling
with the odds, and on the other it constantly raises the stakes.

Further, the deliberate support of juror exchange, assassination,
manipulation, staging, etc (nothing says that the accused's player
can't popluate the juror with ohters of his characters, or even just
kill/bribe/do away with the entire jury) encourages the justice
process to be utterly inelegant.

  You commit some crime and a trial is staged?  Simple.  Go get the
jury list, find the elected players, kill them, bribe them, steal
their jury tokens, or play simple and put your mega-unkillable
character onto the jury and then kill them all once they're nicely
trapped in the justice cell.

How many players are really going to want to be on a jury, ever?  I
would exect well defined and honed practices to evolve for rapidly
transmitting all jury tokens to an accused.  I would also exect that
jurors would actively pursue opportunities to be on the jury panel
of known rich characters (the opportunity to pillage their EQ
guarantees a guilty verdict).

Remember: The purpose of the justice system is not to enact any form
of real justice or even to have anything to do with justice, but to
present an interesting and manipulable game system that the players
can incorprate in their game play in interesting and amusing
manners.

  Who really cares about bringing that dratted PK'er to any sort of
rational justice if you can have a heck of a lot of fun dressing him
down to size?

While players and their subjective value systems are real, game
worlds and their mechanics are ephemeral.

> Basically, there would be trials all day long, and potential
> jurors would be irritated beyond belief to be pulled away from
> whatever they are doing to have a trial. It might be fun a few
> times, but it would soon get tedious I think.

Yup.  Especially given that trials arriving at guilty verdicts are
likely to be the single most profitable game activity there is.

  The bigger you are, the more you have to lose, the more you need
to defend your acquisitions from the possible (and uncontrollable)
predations of the jury system and your peers.

Remember the bit about false accusations?  If Bubba is getting too
big for his britches, or just has a bunch of EQ you want, just
accuse him of crimes until you get a trial, ensure a guilty verdict,
and then grab everything you can and run.

Of course one of the "crimes" available for report will have to be
"False Accusation" -- which of course can also be a false accusation
in itself.

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


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev