[MUD-Dev] Interpersonal Relationships

[Michael Tresca]

Ronan Farrell posted Wednesday, June 20, 2001 8:42 AM

> I am wondering if anyone here has had experience in dealing with a
> self-sustaining group of obnoxious people on the mud.  Their
> behaviour has infected the general behaviour with a degree of
> anti-social behaviour that's anathema to a primarily social mud.

Ah, yes.  It's been my experience that this is something
administrators often overlook on their games: player groups can
exist independent of the game.

When RetroMUD came about, its basic framework was similar to a
handful of other MUDs.  Thus, RetroMUD attracted the bitter, the
angry, the violent leftovers from those games.  These were not
players you wanted on your MUD.

Worse, they all knew each other, and when word got out that one MUD
was a place you could "get away with stuff" they all came together
to play.  They were not necessarily socially familiar outside of the
MUD -- they were just comfortable playing (and PKing) together.

This goes precisely to my belief that the coding staff has a large
part to do with the theme of their game.  We had a lot of removals.
We had a lot of conflicts.  We had a lot of problems.  Slowly but
surely, we made it a very tough place for people who wanted to be
complete jerks to play on our game.

And you know what?  They left.

This took years.  It took tough decisions.  It made being an
administrator very nasty some days.  But it was a battle to
determine the tone of the game, and as long as we had a resident
group of griefers who enjoyed harassing, PKing, and brutally beating
up their comrades, our game would continue to drive off new players.
This is, of course, why they were thrown off the other games and
came to RetroMUD.

There's no easy answer.  The short answer is: stick to your guns.
If you have rules, then enforce them.  The result of a "no PK turns
my MUD into grief-land" is due to coding staff not taking on that
responsibility.  If you want grief players to be controlled but then
take away the players' ability to self-govern, then somebody (that'd
be you) better step in and take control of it.

Grief players will, if you survive their attacks, ultimately make
your game a better place.  Every time they find a bug in your
system, you'd better fix it.  Every time they take advantage of some
balance-flaw, you'd better react to it.  Do this enough times, and
1) your game will have less bugs, 2) the game won't be as fun to
abuse, and ultimately 3) it won't be nearly as much fun for grief
players.

But it takes work, and a lot of baby-sitting, more than a lot of
administrators want to do.  Running a multi-player game system, I'm
convinced, is as much salesmanship and people skills as it is a
solid codebase.  Too many MUDs treat their games like ant farms and
just let things fall apart.

Mike "Talien" Tresca
RetroMUD Administrator
http://www.retromud.org

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