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

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 12 Nov 1999 21:33:59 +0100 
olag  <Ola> wrote:

> J C Lawrence wrote:

>> The first principle of course is that you don't need or want
>> honsety on the part of your players.  You merely need the
>> semblance of honesty and some level of motivation that players
>> may regularly wish to be honest in this way.

...

> A design goal might be to create a system that encourage the
> propagation of bug-knowledge to those hunter types.  Their
> affiliation and "toe-licking" behaviour may of course not make
> them very popular by some players.

True.  I suspect the best approach is to concetrate on creating
opoortunities for social interaction and dependencies, and then let
the players figure out how to exploit them for themselves. 

You just provide the fertiliser and the water.  They do the seeding
and the growing.

>> What they do know is that periodically there are rather public
>> spectacles where players who took advantage of bugs are thrown to
>> the lions.

> This is basically the thing I object to, the negative focus which
> can be seen in the non-humorous rules you are force-fed with on
> MUDs when you log on for the first time. 

That's not my intent.  My intent is for a public spectacle without
the angst.  Further, the intent is to provide an avenue for
politiking (who gets thrown to the lions) by suggesting that certain
objects/people may be able to indirectly affect who gets thrown
when, and then giving them no such capability (one could make it
purely heuristic).

The idea is to provide an opportunity for people to parlay.

> Not to say, that it is entirely without effect, but it creates a
> negative attitude in me. And it might lead to the opposite of what
> you want. If what is suggested from other fields such as driving
> make sense for MUDs then making things dangerous encourage the
> daring to go even further, and puts off those that never would
> have done it anyway.

<nod>

> Not to say that toasting somebody that keep crossing the line by a
> mile is a bad idea.  If you toast somebody that is close to the
> line, then many of inventive players I would have wanted to play
> with would feel uncomfy. There is a major difference between
> feeling uncomfortable about the threats of the world and feeling
> uncomfortable about the actions of the admins, but that's obvious,
> or?

Yes.  This is part of the base line of the system being slow to act
and not predictable when it does act.  Consider the following base
model:

  Offenders are ordered by the extent to which they have profited by
their offense, and (seperately) the frequency with which they have
offended.

  Now pick one of those two lists at random.

  Now pick a random number from 1 - N where N is the max number of
  offenses on the list..

  Select all the members of the list who have offended that many
  times or more.  

  Randomly pick one from that set.

  If you increase the weighting to the hard core set, just do a
  second random range pick from Q - R where those bracket the
  offender set.

>> What if the Egg or customised heads in Habitat had been awarded
>> for juicy bugs found?

> You would get a race of eggheads...

Wonderful!  The Eggs devalue and you create a replacement fad.

>> Consider Habitat's handling of the money machine arbitrage that
>> saturated the world with money.

> I think the money was redistributed to all players, but he also
> wrote that he didn't think this would have worked out with
> individualistic american players.

Touche.

> Farmer's general philosophy was to handle such things as a
> non-admin character though.

As is mine.

> [...using public bug DBs]
>> I prefer this to such secrets being passed about on hobbiest web
>> sites and mailing lists.

> Such sites may be good for (sub) community building. It may be bad
> for the same reason of course.

There's two sides to that.  1) You want sub-communities.  2) You
also want to know what they are doing/talking about.  

The questions:

  -- What value is derived from the community venue being abstracted 
     from the service venue?

  -- What value is lost if you make the supports for such grouping
     too rich in the service, and thus actively discourage grouping
     off site?

I want to know what my players are doing, I'd like them to stay at
home, but I can't afford to be their parents.

>> My ideas are rarely workable within the first few hundred
>> generations.

> That's only a problem if you insist that it doesn't suck. *grin*

<kof>

--
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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