[MUD-Dev] curses and grief players

[Scatter]

Patrick Dughi <dughi at imaxx.net> wrote:

>        Our system was pretty simple, and revolved around the idea that
>less powerful people would be able to affect the world less.  Admin staff
>would flag someone as trouble and the afflicted character would miss
>attacks more often, do less damage, be hit harder, fail spells/skills more
>often, require more exp to level, etc.

I intend to implement something like this as well - in the guess of a "bad luck"
curse that can be applied to players. Basically it would hook into the skill check
function and make the player less likely to succeed at anything and increasing
the likelyhood of fumbles or suprising successes by the opposition. 

Multiple applications of the curse would have a cumulative effect until the
character becomes more or less unplayable. At this point the player has to
decide whether its more desirable to sacrifice the character and start over
with a new one or to reform, apologise and get the curses removed.

Of course, this method would have very little effect on the 'annoying
newbie' syndrome who has just created a character for the specific purpose
of annoying people.

>        I was curious what other tools of encouragment there exist for the
>handling of these grief players, or potential troublemakers - how are they
>handled in other situations?  Is the player-moderated curse/other an
>effective system?  Someone had mentioned death being permanant based on
>the feelings of other players?

The other mechanism I'm considering, given that it is unlikely for an admin
to be on all the time, is to allow players to boot a player from the game.

The idea is that players have a command such as 'boot' which can be used on
annoying players. When the first player uses 'boot', the system begins logging
the actions of the targetted player - to provide supporting evidence of the
problem actions. When a certain proportion of other players online have
also used 'boot' on the player then he is chucked out of the game and his access
is suspended pending admin review of the log.

The proportion of players having to support the boot would probably have to
vary depending on the number online - if there are only 6 online, then 5 should
need to agree whereas if there are 30 online then 20 agreements might be
enough. The logging should prevent (or at least, expose) groups of players
using 'boot' maliciously.

Again, the problem this doesn't really address is 'annoying new characters'
where the player concerned doesn't really care if the character is lost or not
and just creates a new one when one gets booted.

--
Scatter ///\oo/\\\



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