bugs (was RE: [MUD-Dev] players who "take away from the game" )

[Sellers]

Charles Hughes wrote:
> On Thursday, November 11, 1999 6:13 PM, Holly Sommer 
> [SMTP:hsommer at micro.ti.com] wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Sellers, Michael wrote:
> >
> > > And, to return to the previous discussion, if a bug is known and
> > > someone repeatedly uses it to their own advantage, well, they
> > > deserve whatever they get in the end.
> >
> > What I've done in the past is plant an outrageous item 
> somewhere near the
> > person's logout room, as a test. If they exploit it, it'll have some
> > undocumented features about it, which might result in a freeze or
> > something.
> 
> Um, why?   I'm a much bigger player than admin and I've seen this
> attitude before but I don't understand it.  Why penalize a player
> for the inadequacies of a programmer?  The player is doing EXACTLY
> what he's supposed to - it's the game that is behaving improperly.
> Why not just take off your belt and whip the server?  (Or, more
> appropriately, the programmer. :)

Because it's a work in progress, and because bug fixes don't happen
instantly.  I guess I take the attitude that the player is not doing EXACTLY
what he or she is supposed to if he or she takes advantage of every possible
bug/feature they find in the game -- especially if they've been told or
could reasonably assume that some action or result was a bug.  At that
point, the game isn't about playing in the game-world any more, it's about
exploiting the cracks in the game programming.  If you as a player want to
have a game to play in, you need to play in the context of the game, and not
in the meta-context of "hey look what kinds of unreasonable results I can
get because of the insufficiency of the game programmers."  If that's really
the context players want to use, then I as an admin would have no qualms at
all about doing a server-wipe every time we fixed a bug.  Ah, but suddenly
the players don't like that option so much...

Mike Sellers



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