[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2000, John Buehler wrote:

> > Dan Merillat
> > Sent: Friday, August 25, 2000 10:10 PM
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Whoa.  Where did I say anything about managing this stuff through manual
> labor.  The only means of dealing with OOC issues is by eliminating the source
> of the problem: player anonymity.  Until that's solved, I won't go near
> management of one of these games.  I have no intention of playing cat and
> mouse with children that cannot be disciplined.  The cat and mouse only
> contributes to their juvenile delinquency.

Um, no, player anonymity is not the source of the problem. It is the
enabler of the problem. Murderous dictators such as Stalin were not
anonymous at all (in fact 50 years later he is still an extremely
recognizeable name and even face!) yet that didn't stop him from killing
20 or 30 million of his own citizens. 

You could post the rl-identities of all your players on your website
(that's assuming you could actually get accurate information about them,
which you could not.) and it would only reduce the amount of harrassment
marginally. By way of example: the Achaea 2000 meet wound up about a month
ago, and it hasn't stopped a couple of the players who attended (who were
violent and aggressive before) from continuing to be violent and
aggressive.

By way of further example, I have _publically_ announced in Achaea the
real names, and real-life town where a gaggle of irritating and
universally-reviled players live, and it hasn't stopped them from being
just as asinine and just as irritating as before. They simply don't care,
and I can't blame them. Why should they? No one is going to go to the town
they live in and beat them up.


> More grief playing.  An individual who chooses to cause problems will do
> regardless of any game system that anyone can develop.  In a multiplayer
> world, it is implicit that players will interact.  Therefore, players can
> negatively interact.  My pursuits of justice system are to keep players
> uninterested in criminal acts - not to dissuade grief players.

I really don't understand this. If you want to keep players uninterested
in 'criminal' acts, why code in the ability for them to commit criminal
acts? It seems like a massive waste of time to design and implement
features that you want to actively discourage the players from using.

 
--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




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev