[MUD-Dev] Real Life Consequences

[Jon Morrow]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
>Jeff Freeman
>Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 5:30 AM
>To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
>Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Real Life Consequences
>
>> Don't give players a chance to abuse a bug. Someone touched on
>> developers taking responsibility for the integrity of their work.
>
> Battle-cry of the ethically challenged.

Ethically challenged players or ethically challenged developers?  :)

You cannot depend on the world, including your player base, to be
ethical.  It is better to concentrate on things you have a little
control over: the developers and their processes.  For example, there
are no cities in the world completely devoid of crime to my knowledge.
You can obviously not trust everyone to obey the laws.  That is why we
have law enforcement officers.  As they are on government payroll,
they can be held responsible for maintaining order.  If they are not
able to maintain order, they can either be replaced or trained to be
more effective.

> Ultimately, the developers do not suffer from bug-exploitation, but
> rather, the other players do.

Oh?  I think both suffer.  If one of my developers constantly produces
buggy code, fails to fix it, and allows bugs to be exploited
rampantly, I will not hesitate in firing him/her.  And being without a
job is generally considered suffering.  Of course, the game might not
have decent management.  In this case, bug exploits would probably
destroy game balance, it would become less attractive to players, and
their revenues would drop.  Suffering, once again.

>> Forgive me for not citing the paragraph, but I agree wholeheartedly.
>> I don't believe developers lack pride in their work.  But many MUD
>> hobbyists also enter the commercial gaming world without any formal
>> education on quality-control.

> Not to be flippant, but so what?  Fewer bugs don't mean that there
> won't be ANY bugs.  The question is what to do about the bugs (and
> exploits) that do arise.  Not how to prevent ANY bugs from occurring
> in the first place.

Certainly not.  Some bugs are unavoidable.  A good bug-tracking and
correction process is needed to deal with them.  But why not attack
the tree most strongly at its root?  I hate to cite figures that I am
uncertain of from Steve McConnell again, but I remember something
about a good development process reducing bugs by 80% and dividing the
time spent on correcting them by 20 or more.

>> It may delay the speed of implementation into the main environment,
>> but players will appreciate the resulting stability.

> No they won't.

> What player's want is for Star Wars and UO2 and Shadowbane and Dark
> Age of Camelot and EQ2 and D&D-Online and everything else they've
> ever so much as heard a rumor of, to be released *today*.

>Failing that, they just want these games to be released *someday*.

If this were true, text muds wouldn't still be a lucrative business.
When asking around on GS3, quite a few people responded with, "I have
friends here" or "I've already invested too much time and energy to
leave".  However, I'm also sure bugs resulting in complete gameplay
imbalance would cause many of them to look for another community.

> Considering that "delay the speed of implementation" equates to "no
> longer profitable to produce, so cancel it", the players don't
> appreciate that at all.

Not true.  Delaying the speed of implementation by 10-20% to
thoroughly test code can reduce the amount of time developers spend on
correcting bugs significantly.  When developers aren't working on
fixing bugs, they can work on more features or the next product.
Also, as time is spent much more efficiently, overhead decreases and
money is saved, increasing profitability.

>> In my experience, successful, smaller games also respond more
>> creatively to the desires of players, generating an atmosphere of
>> goodwill.

> Ah, another candidate for Laws of Online World Design: "Goodwill"
> doesn't scale.

Perhaps it hasn't yet.  And while we can probably not depend on
goodwill, I believe it is a very, very admirable goal.

>> Such an atmosphere makes the old saying, "don't bite the hand that
>> feeds you" much more appealing.  Instead of attempting to control
>> my players, I'd like to try eliminating the need to control them.
>> I've long been an advocate of self-correcting communities, where
>> troublemakers are quickly punished by empowered and trusted
>> citizens.  They might even reduce corporate legal constraints.

> Personally, I *love* that approach, but it mandates a massive number
> of low-user servers (relative to the current and upcoming crop),
> versus fewer servers with more people on them.

For a graphical game, you mean?  I wouldn't know.  But on a text-based
game, self-correcting communities don't require additional servers.
GemStone 3 is an excellent example.

>> I realize that this entire post is quite utopian.  Just thought I'd
>> through out a bit of controversial philosophy to keep the thread
>> going

> Apart from all the above cynicism, I like the idea of smaller,
> user-controlled servers vs. large nanny-state servers.  But I don't
> think "eliminate all the bugs prior to release" is a realistic
> solution to the problem of bug-exploiters.

> You *can't* eliminate all the bugs, and if you have thousands upon
> thousands of users then you'll have one cubic crapload of
> bug-exploiters regardless.

I'm glad we have some common ground.  Eliminating "all the bugs" is
close to impossible.  I believe, we do, however, have room to improve
our development processes.  I also think the impact would be
significant.

-Jon

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