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

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, Sellers, Michael wrote:

> 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:
> > 
> > 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...

Exactly. Players are not stupid. Some bugs are clearly bugs, and in any
case, the example of the troll and the million gold is a very easy one to
solve. If you think the player in question didn't know it was a bug, just
take the gold away. If you think he did know it was a bug, delete him.
Anyone other than a rank newbie is going to know that is a bug. 
--matt




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