[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[Dan Merillat]

"John Buehler" writes:
> > Dan Merillat

> > So it's ok to enforce your style of PvP on someone, but not ok for them
> > to force theirs on you?  The type of interaction you're talking about
> > is having a group of morons follow you around heckling your every action.
> > That "added spice" is ok, but defending your honor against a group
> > of hoodlums is not?   That's more of a self-centric view then the
> > PK's themselves have.
> 
> Dan, I was playing contrarian there, attempting to use Matt's logic in
> opposition to his own argument.  As I've stated elsewhere, if you don't want
> people saying stuff to you that you find harrassing, you should be able to
> have sanctions applied to those people.  But the recognition of what is
> potentially harrassing has to be established up front, and the sactions
> against those people have to be controlled by the game.  Otherwise, someone
> will harrass me, I kill their character and they continue to harrass me.  As
> has been stated on the topic of harrassment, it is OOC, while killing a
> character is primarily IC.

Why is harassment OOC, though?  If your character gets drunk in a tavern and really
annoys the local bard who was trying to sing, is it OOC harassment for them to go 
around singing ballads of your ineptness?   

The OOC argument is moot, though.  Harassment is Harassment, and you'll never
have enough staff-hours to investigate every case of it.  POSSIBLY when you're
first starting out, but your own success will kill you if you depend on admin
sanctions.

The in-system abuse of other characters is another severe problem.  If Lord
Brave is out slaying dragons, and Annoying Newbie goes out taunting dragons and
having them chase him... ending up right where Lord Brave just finished slaying
the biggest dragon.  *SPLAT*.  That sounds like having someone elses style of
PvP imposed on me.   So what if Annoying Newbie dies?  He's got no investment
in his character.  And, even if LB KNOWS what player did it, and what character
they have a heavy investment in, he can't take action against him.  (The system
attempts to block PvP combat).   Boom.  Grief players abusing the system in ways
your normal playerbase cannot.   PvP using NPCs rather then swords as the weapons.

> I absolutely agree with this.  Two people standing in the same room are
> immediately in contention for where to stand.

The people who stand infront of zone borders in EQ, causing you to bounce back
and forth endlessly.  (With a 2-3 minute load each time, of course).  But don't
worry, you can't log, come in with another character and kill them, because they're
protected by the system.   Common theme here, I think.

> > Murder dosn't exist without death.  Perminant death.  Thus, without permadeath
> > killing someone for slandering your character is acceptable, even admirable.
> > They'll just respawn, like the goblin overseer.  And you get a trophy or
> > two out of it.   And perhaps you'll spark a war, and that'll also be fun.
> 
> Take your 'murder doesn't exist without death' statement to the logical
> extreme.  Your character doesn't exist without a body.  No body, no
> character.  Obviously, this is all about a question of degree of saction in
> the game world.  Death models vary, and I have proposed a temporarily-imposed
> death penalty that is just like permadeath.  That's more extreme than 'fall
> down and get up'.

Great, so now Annoying Newbie not only kills your most loyal player, he locks
him out of the game for X number of hours.  I'll be sure to put that game
at the top of my list to play...

> As to whether a war is fun or not, that's the very focus of this discussion.
> Who's to say that a war is what the players want?

A war is obviously what the players want.  The focus of this conversation is
if the players want the war against each other, or against only the game.

> > > The players are the monitors, but not the judge, jury and executioners.
> >
> > So who fills that role?
> 
> The first judge is the game.  It decides what could possibly be a crime.  The
> next judge is the victim.  If he's unhappy enough about what was done to him
> to loose the dogs of justice, he does the appropriate in-game things to make
> that happen.

Instantly abusable.  As has been pointed out, after 2500 years of society building
we can't even come up with well-defined laws.  How do you intend to code that
into the system?  If LB is killed by a red dragon, how will your system know to
punish your grief player for it?  And if it knows, when your grief players find
out what triggers that flag, what's to stop them from waiting for LB to retreat from
a dragon then rush in and get killed?

Assume you allow PK with fairly harsh game-defined concequences.  Grief player
attacks a friend of LB, who he is much stronger then.  LB, being a Hero, leaps
to the defence of his friend, and slays the grief player.  Oops, except the
grief player never directly attacked LB, and now he's a murderer.

And yes, the grief player WILL flag LB as a murderer in both cases.  Thats what
he's there to do.

So, you have no first and second judge.  Leaving you with a lawless environment.
Mmmm.  Sounds just like every other game, except more twinkable.

> Included in 'the dogs' are player bounty hunters, who are authorized to use
> varying levels of force  to enforce the sanctions that are defined by the
> game.  Non-lethal force to bring in thieves alive.  Lethal force to bring in
> murderers, dead or alive.  And so on.

Which now provides a heavy in-game incentive to grief play.  Take a low level
char, get him killed by a high level "good" player.  Take out your high level
character and go collect the reward on LB.  Hey, that sounds really familiar.

> My statement there has been massively misunderstood.  Obviously I massively misstated what I
> intended.
> 
> My assertion is that a virtual community is simply an extension of our
> reality.  Real people are playing the game at real computers.  The community
> doesn't exist within the game world.  It exists in our world.  That's why I
> say that virtual communities are no different tan real life communities.
> It's like saying that a phone call produces a different self-contained
> community than the real world.  It's an extension of it.

No, we all understood what you meant.  I've been trying to correct your
mistaken assumption.   There is no "Virtual Community" because in the
virtual world there is no community.  There's no RL concequences to virtual
actions, therefore everything is permitted.   Communities are imported in
by friends who know eachother RL, and thus if Boffo kills Bubba underhandedly,
next time Bubba sees him RL he can punch him in the nose.   RL concequences are
the only thing that make a community.


> > So what happens when EVERYONE is a lord, untouchable by anything but the
> > hand of God itself?  (And God is too busy keeping the universe running to
> > take an interest in peasant raping or sport hunting of outcasts...)
> >
> > Add to that a magical sheild that prevents the other lords from harming you
> > in any fashion.   In fact, the only thing that stops this is having actions
> > directly have conceqences.
> 
<snip unrelated paragraph>

> As to the assertion that everyone is a lord, that's a fundamental problem.
> Simutronics has been talking about a game called Hero's Journey, predicated
> in the idea that every player is a hero.  I simply don't believe that.
> Unless the world is populated by so many NPCs that I feel like a hero because
> I'm surrounded by non-heros all the time.  Then we're back to the single
> player experience of Diablo.  In multiplayer games, we play with the other
> players' characters.  The only thing that matters is what our relative
> ability levels are.  If we're all heros, then the effect of being a hero is
> drastically diminished.  We might as well all be peasants, trying to
> overthrow our dastardly baron.

Again, you really don't understand.  Read my definition of feudal lords:
Free to do whatever they wanted without any worldly concequences.

In online games, especially these stock dikus(with graphics) everyone is a
feudal lord.  They can do whatever they want, and nothing has any impact on
them.  So their character gets perma-killed?  Roll another one,  grab your stuff
off a mule and powergame back to where you were.  With no concequences to their
actions, they are free to harass other players and bring their style of PvP
to the world.   And I can't think of a single game where this hasn't been
tried.

If you can maintain a 1/10 staff/player ratio (online), you might be able to
administrativly keep this in check.  Possibly.  But you sure as hell can't do
it with a hardcoded system.  Some of the worst travesties of justice RL are when the
law is followed to the letter rather then the intent.  Computers can't do 
anything but follow to the letter.  Thus, computer-given justice will always
be a joke.

--Dan



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