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

[Charles Hughes]

On Friday, November 12, 1999 11:09 AM, Sellers, Michael 
[SMTP:MSellers at maxis.com] wrote:
> Charles Hughes wrote:
> > On Thursday, November 11, 1999 6:13 PM, Holly Sommer 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.

How long should they take?  I think this is a fair question.
I've reported bugs, just to be told they were "features".  I've
also reported bugs and found them unfixed after 6 rl months.
Six rl months is way too long to take to fix a major exploitable
bug. (The bug in question was later deemed to be a feature
and would not be fixed. :)

> 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.

I've never really figured out some things on certain muds, so to assume
that I could reasonably determine what is a bug and what is proper
functioning is unreasonable.  It is different if I know, for a fact, 
without
a doubt, that something is a bug and I'm caught taking advantage of it.

> 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."

>From a player's perspective I know two attitudes that result in a
player exploiting the cracks.  The first attitude is quite simple - the
player wants to 'win' at any cost, so cheating isn't a problem.  The
second attitude isn't so simple - the player actually likes the game,
but is bored and/or annoyed that the bug hasn't been fixed.

>From an admin's perspective - they're all a bunch of cheaters. :)

> 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...

I'm not a 'normal' player and I advocate changes that help the mud
even if such changes would hurt my characters.  PWipes aren't a
problem with me. :)




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