[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001 13:24:18 -0800 
John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:

> Justin Hooper writes: 

> I may be slanting the systems towards exploration, but I'm
> assuredly getting my teeth kicked in here by those who both
> dislike my approach and wouldn't want to play my game anyway.

Not really.  There are a few hard won lessons in MUDs surrounding
the grief player phenomena which many of us have battered our heads
against for long enough ,and in enough forms and forums (Usenet,
mailing lists, MUDs, bars, work, etc), that we've come to a pretty
basic set of assumptions:

  1) Where there are people, there are grief players.  No
  exceptions.

  2)rief players don't need support from your service or
  environment to be attracted by your service.  They just need
  targets.  They don't need to be entertained or even interested in
  your service or its products.  They simply need other people there
  who:

    a) Can be upset

  or,

    b) Will react to them being upset

  or both.

  3) You can't get rid of grief players.  No exceptions.  It is
  arguably impossible at a systemic level and in practice the best
  you can do is to attempt to manage the problem.

  4) The preferred target of grief players are the admins.

  5) The favoured game of grief players is gaming the admins.

These things are pretty close to being considered incontrovertable
and absolute laws.  There certainly is a lot of history, encluding
this list, to support them.  

While this may be in error, the impression I get is that you
question the above observation (which is fair), and present that
disbelief solely on the basis of, "I think I can manage them by
XXX," which runs directly counter to our observations, and thus
gets, umm, aggressively questioned.

Little Billy popping up and stating that he thinks the "laws of
gravity" don't really apply, and that if he just did enough jumping,
or arm flapping, or something, he'd be able to fly without effort
and do loop-the-loops in the sky by properly puckering his lips
might get a somewhat similar reaction, especially from those who
rather liked Billy and cared about his success and possible
failures.

Yeah, we're a hard bitten aggreesive lot that tend to have strong
beliefs and stick to them.  Its a common trait of war survivors.

> Yup.  That was an early realization for me.  Sex and violence are
> the way American society produces its popular entertainment
> because it's easy.  The human mind reacts strongly to both, so it
> draws people to it.

Human Emotion & Reaction -- there are few things more predictably
attractive to people's attention.  Go look at your average Hollywood
movie lineup, or your bookshelf of fiction, of your TV schedule, and
discard everything that is founded on people being upset with each
other, and see how much you have left.  Now watch a news program, or
read a newspaper and do the same thing.

Not a lot left.

> And I think that suspense is a popular entertainment style, but is
> it something for a casual player?  

Attracting and maintaining the casual gamer en mass in a social
environment is a most glorious goal.

> I believe that one reason that casual players don't play these
> games is because they're so incredibly hardcore.  Hmmm.  That's a
> silly statement.  

There are conflicting requirements here:

  I want to create strong and significant emotional reactions with
  my players.

  I don't want my players to have to make any significant investment
  in my game, at any level.

Strong emotional reactions largely stem from the player considering
that something is important (for whatever reason).  If it is not
needed for the player to make any investments (and thus create value
which is thus important), then you have to leverage generic shared
values which you can (safely?) assume the players already have
before they ever approach your service.

Seeing as every other media company on the planet has the same goals
and targets, and that repeated tittilation of such buttons rapidly
desensitises and devalues them, this is a challenge without
resorting to pornography.

> Next, I have to come up with an argument that will convince people
> that grief players are not a necessary outcome of running an
> online community.

<bated breath>

I would love to see such an argument successfully made.

> A note to JC: the reason that the list appeared to be drifting
> into homogenaeity is that those who disagree with the
> commonly-held views in this list are generally 'argued into the
> ground'.  

<nod>

This is a side effect of peerages, assumed orthodoxies, etc.  Its a
tough thing to kick without abstracting the list into, "Well,
everything comes down to 'It depends on your circumstances,' and
thus no decisions ever being made," or balkanising the list into
armed encampments who violently defend their religions without ever
daring to open their eyes.

I don't know that there are any real long term solutions outside of
periodic gross revolutions.

> With MUD-Dev, you really have to be ready for some serious PvP,
> because agreement is generally not bothered with.

I would note taht this is true of most refereed critical
environments.  Of course consrtuctive sugestions for improvement are
welcomed (and are one of the purposes of the Meta list).

>> How does this desire interact with the "uber" model, wherein a
>> quick rise to power of a small clique of players would then go
>> out, collecting all possible maps (or a substantial fraction
>> thereof) in order to try and collect all the treasures?  This
>> WILL happen, unless the treasure is so undervalued as to be
>> relatively worthless.

> How do they collect all the maps?

Given a couple bot scripts and a little time, it really doesn't take
much effort.  Its been done so often that its now pretty well an
assumable.  This extends all the way down to gamers deriving, by
observation, the formulae and curves used for all your in-game
computations, publishing their deductions, and thus deriving the
optimal min-max path, and thus the fastest route to the cheese.

This is not something to be surprised about.  The only question
is. "How soon?" not whether.

--
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--
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