[MUD-Dev] Trouble Makers or Regular Citizens

[J C Lawrence]

Justin: Please ensure that your mailer (which appears to be Outlook)
word wraps your posts at 80 columns or less.

On Tue, 28 Mar 2000 11:59:56 -0800 
Justin Rogers <justin at mlstoday.com> wrote:

> This is terrible.  You mean to tell me you can't filter down
> to the user level?  

I suspect he's saying that in some cases its just not worth his time
chasing down individual accounts when instead he can ban a domain or
IP range and know that the problem is likely terminatedly resolved.
The fact that some other unoffensive players may get caught in the
cross-fire and be "unjustly" banned is usually viewed in such cases
as regretable, but an acceptable administrative cost.

> First of all the use of a ban at the IP level implies that you
> already have code to handle IP level.  

And isn't of that much use in these days of dynamic IP assignments
and proxying firewalls.  IPs are (now) a lousy form of
identification, especially across connections.

> So adding code at the IP level to marshall these people into jail
> rather than into the game or banning the.  Shouldn't be that much
> more code.  

True.  But I question why I should spend my time on supporting
players that I have little to no interest in versus supporting
players I am actively interested in?  Or to rephrase, supporting
activities and players that I want to discourage in my game, versus
supporting those I like..  Or possibly most simply of all:

  Why do I want to provide a service, in any fashion, for people I
don't want to deal with?

And the odd corollary:

  Are your (most?) valuable players also likely to also be your
(most?) provacative players and therefore the ones most capable of
the acts that prompt banning?

Consider your most expert players.  What would happen if they
instead decided to attack you game?  Who else could be a more
competent destructive force?  There's a thin line between preserving
your world, and sanitising it out of existance (or tossing the baby
out with the bathwater to really torture the metaphore).

> You also allow people to turn off channels, chat, etc...  

While this is generally true, typically there are a small set of
channels which can't be turned off.

> So why not allow one person to turn off another person?  

There's some good discussion on this idea back in the archives.  I'd
love to see large playerbase testing of an implementation.  The
potential effects on societal forms and small group dynamics are
insidious at best and pernicious at worst, and that's not accounting 
for the abuse factors.

Consider:

  What would happen IRL were people to have the ability to
selectively perceive/not_perceive certain things to the level of all
their perceptions being edited/removed in that regard??

Take it to an extreme:

  What if you were able IRL by waving your hands appropriately, to
never physically see a negro or hear anything a negro person said?

Now substitute "woman", "man", "dwarf", "cripple", "WASP", "child",
"homosexual", and any other demographics of your choice (as fine
grained as you can conceive of them) for "negro".  This is not just
"not listening", this is "those photons never hit your eyeballs",
and "those sounds never approach your eardums" carte blanche
across-the-board blanket filtering such that these things then just
_don't_exist_ for you any more.

Realise that this can be done today via most minorly scriptable MUD
clients ala TinTin++, TinyFugue, etc. 

Aside: This mechanic is one of the reasons I talk about one of the
base purposes of Murkle being to support players enforcing their
realities on each other.

> Think of the amount of referalls for banning you would get if a
> single person could shut another person up.  

  Bubba> whoami
  You are Bubba.
  Bubba> l
  Boffo is here
  Boffo whines at you.
  Boffo whines at you.
  Boffo whines at you.
  Bubba> muzzle boffo
  You will no longer hear anything Boffo says or does.

Later:

  Boffo> say Bubba has been cheating all the time by doing XYZ...

  Boffo> say Bubba has been telling people the answers to the quests.

  Boffo> say Bubba is actually a pedophile and has been trying to
         pick up children on this game.

Its worth noting that any game which supports free user programming
is potentially in this position.  There is a difference however
between something a user concocts for himself (and others maybe
use/copy), and a facility that the game officially offers and
supports.

--
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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