[MUD-Dev] Reputation & Trust Circles [was UO rants]

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, John Buehler wrote:

> There are some ugly results that have yet to be tackled:
> 
> 1. Loans of items must involve some kind of contract system that the game
> can enforce.
> 
> 2. I can hand you an item under contract, then bolt, preventing you from
> fulfilling the contract.  Next thing you know, we have arbitrage, with
> gamemasters having to fill the job of mediator.
> 
> 3. It is a crime to assault another person, but not to defend one's self.
> This says that my enemies can spend a long, long time preparing for their
> assault on me, and I cannot take proactive steps to prevent them from
> completing their plans - if my proactive steps involve assaulting them.
> 
> 4. It is a crime to assault another person, but not to defend one's self.
> Can I help defend others?  That involves some additional mechanism to
> ensure that at the time of the crime, others can come along and help to
> defend a victim from a criminal, but that open season isn't declared on
> criminals at arbitrary times after the original assault.  I want to
> avoid vigilantism.
> 
> 5. Player bounty hunters are dangerous.  If there is reward in being a
> player bounty hunter, we're right back to Ultima Online, with players
> looking to hunting criminals as the way to become rich.
> 
> All of these uglies have potential solutions.  The question is, is this
> approach to limiting PvP crimes fundamentally and seriously flawed such
> that no matter how much time is spent plugging holes, it will always
> have more holes?


John, if you (or anyone) could create a system like the above that I or
any other reasonably intelligent person couldn't easily 'game', I'll
worship you as a god. 

No one in real life has yet been able to create a legal code that defines
with any serious level of detail (which is needed for a computer to model
it) what a crime is. Take obscenity laws for instance. From my days
studying law, I recall a Supreme Court case back in the 60s on obscenity.
The court ruled that 'community standards' should have some influence, and
admitted that while they couldn't define obscenity, 'they know it when
they see it.' That is the case with a whole, massive range of 'crimes'. If
the combined wisdom of 2500 years of serious philosophy is not enough to
enable us to define in detail what a 'crime' is, what makes you think any
of us can?

--matt
"He that is wounded in the testicles, or have his penis cut off, shall not
enter into the congregation of the Lord." Deuteronomy 23:1




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