[MUD-Dev] Real Life Consequences

[John Buehler]

rayzam writes:

> Aside from real life money, what about in-game consequences? 
> Penalize gold, experience, remove items from that NPC/skill/etc in
> specific, have it be a mark against someone's record that prevents
> them from running for office for a period of time, etc. We've done
> that in the past, when there was a bug that was being abused by a
> part of the population. Use logs to find out who abused it, and
> penalize them accordingly.

It all depends on how much importance a player places on their in-game
abilities, possessions and so forth.  Combined with your ability to
accurately appraise what they place importance on.  If they have
worked diligently to obtain a particular item, they could be penalized
by removing or disabling that item.  But you have to know the worth of
that item to the player.  Just as you must know the value of a penalty
to a child.  If you take away a child's right to watch television and
they aren't a big TV fan, there's no real penalty there.

In the end, I always fall back on the 'time out' approach.  When a
player does something wrong, you give them a time out.  I usually go
in increments of a day.  By suspending a player from being able to
play the game, you are almost assuredly preventing them from deriving
entertainment from the game in the way they wanted to.  (I put
'almost' in there in deference to the list members, who seem to be
excessively pedantic :)

>   A) How are players to know it's a bug? an abuse?

Well, that's a bit different than deciding what to do, but it's
certainly a good point.  I'd say that until the game publisher has
established that a certain behavior is a bug it remains a feature.
Once warned, players must not exploit the behavior.  Hopefully the
game administrators will be fixing the problem quickly to avoid
temptation.  This approach follows the rule of 'ignorance of the law
is no excuse'.  To do otherwise, despite how heinous the exploit is,
would seem to place undue pressure on the players.

Reporting an actual bug should carry a reward to the player, and it
should be kept out of game.  Perhaps a month of free gameplay.

>   B) Do you scale or threshold the punishment?

Once published that a certain behavior is a bug, wanton exploits of
that behavior should result in stiffer penalties than single use.  If
the game administrators can determine the degree of impact from use,
then that should be taken into account as well.  If one player nickles
and dimes his way using an exploit, while another player uses an
exploit exactly once for huge effect, the latter should be hammered.
Impact of the exploits should be the final determinant.

>   C) Reporting.

As before, until it is officially stated in a list of known defects
that should not be taken advantage of, the problem is in the
administrator's hands, not the players.  The purpose of a simple list
is that there is one final arbiter.  Everyone understands that the
list is it, and it doesn't matter what anyone says contrary to it.

> Overall, it becomes very difficult to assign punishment, or at least
> assign it fairly with a simple algorithm that doesn't require a
> series of judgement calls. Granted there will be cut-and-dried cases
> and other cases that are too hazy to do anything about. But any
> policy adopted should be stated in advance and available to the
> players. This policy would tend to be a guideline.

I agree that assigning penalties is difficult.  Unfortunately, it will
always require judgement calls, and that means involving people.
Given that games are going to have bugs, despite even the best
methodologies, I wonder how sensitive we should be designing our
systems to changes in behavior.  A PvP-centric world would tend to be
far more tolerant of a bug than a non-PvP-centric world: a bug is just
a change in behavior, and both sides of any bug *tend* to be able to
exploit the bug equally.  So if it works out to be a nuclear weapon
bug, both sides may refrain from its use for fear of mutually-assured
destruction.  Just a thought.

JB

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