[MUD-Dev] Cultural Differences in Gaming and Gamers

[the_logos at www.achaea.com]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2001 SavantKnowsAll at cs.com wrote:

> Our first game has a relatively large player base in korea (80,000 I
> believe - at $19.95 a month) - and so small a base here that I've
> decided we're going to phase it out prior to beta'ing our second
> game.  In the past two weeks, Korean players have found our american
> version (I suspect a Korean server outtage or the fact that we're
> $9.95 here to be the culprit) of the game and have begun absolutely
> /flooding/ the server.  They are, to put it simply, a completely
> different beast than american players.  They flood the chat with
> cursing, spamming, and they rampantly PK at every opportunity they
> get.  Oddly enough, when they are banned, they write to us (in a
> very calm manner, I might add) and genuinely curious as to why they
> were banned.  It strikes me as funny that not only is the playstyle
> so different, but the reaction to the ban as well.  From my
> experience - american players don't get quite that out of hand, but
> become savages when banned.

We've actually had the same experiences with some asian players,
though mainly from Singapore.  They cheat _outrageously_ by using
their second characters to help each other (something that is a
shrubbing offence) and then when caught protest in fairly polite
language that they don't understand why they were turned into
shrubs. I shrubbed a pair of characters yesterday, and told her that I
was really tired of her and all her Singaporean compatriots cheating
so much. She replied and the thing she was most upset about was my
slur on Singapore. She also didn't quite seem to be able to put
together the fact that we clearly post our policies on multiplaying
and second characters (and she was aware of them) with the result that
she was punished. It was quite odd.

> On another note, our second game is from a Korean company as well,
> and the game is quite good.  Minus the customization of armor on the
> actual avatar which would be my personal choice for any game I'm
> involved in the development of - it's comparable to, if not better
> than, a lot of the stuff being made here.  As an example, not only
> do we have what you'd normally expect from an MMOG, but we have a
> colony system where you can build, tax, etc. your land/territory as
> you grow in power.

Well, that's exactly the sort of thing I expect from a MUD, which is
why I don't play any of the current graphical ones.

--matt

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