[MUD-Dev] Re: Unruly Players (fwd)

[J C Lawrence]

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From: Dennis Towne <soda.usenet at xirr.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.misc
Subject: Re: Unruly Players
Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 12:06:34 -0500

Lawrence Runacres wrote:
 
> Hi All.
> 
> Do any MUD staff out there have any logs of unruly players,
> troublemakers, spammers, etc etc, doing what they do best, or any logs
> of them being dealt with? As a new MUD admin I would like to get a
> feel for what may be expected from such people, and the various ways
> of dealing with them.

Annoyance characters are always a problem.  A lot of admins are quick to
wield the sledge hammer of siteban, but I try not to - often I get
annoyance characters from a site that has real players as well.  I
haven't really kept logs for a while, so I'll just describe some of what
I've seen:

- ------------------
Situation:  annoyed player writes a script to log in an infinite number
of players from his sun account at his isp.  Goal is to use up all
sockets and lock out valid players.

Solution:  default login port was unavailable, so log in on secondary
port and siteban.  Call ISP.  Get account deleted for abuse.  It's
probably a good idea to limit the number of connections to a particular
ip address to about 20.  I wouldn't go below 20 for any size mud, and
probably would go higher than 20 for a large one.

- ------------------
Situation:  idiot newbies with names like 'dentinsucks' and 'asshole'
log in for one hour a day in the morning, every weekday.  They appear to
be from a middle school.  There are a number of players from the site,
but only about a third of them are stupid.

Solution:  set up newbie siteban to allow existing characters to play,
but disallow creation of new characters from the site.  Make sure the
existing players know it's nothing personal, and that we'll remove the
ban temporarily to let them create new characters for friends, etc.

- ------------------
Situation:  idiot newbies log on and spam channels repeatedly.

Solution:  a channel thwacker.  The more you spam, the more movement it
costs, and the more lag you get for each send regardless of whether or
not you have enough movement to do it.  I've seen spammers log in, get
off 7-10 channel sends before reaching negative movement, then get stuck
with so much lag that they get annoyed and break link before ever
getting another send off.  The channel thwacking wears off over time,
and does not impact regular channel usage.  Example:

- -----------------------------------------------------
<33hp 33m 135mv>#100 doom spam

[doom] Testboy: spam
[doom] Testboy: spam

<33hp 33m 132mv>
[doom] Testboy: spam
[doom] Testboy: spam

<33hp 33m 120mv>
[doom] Testboy: spam
[doom] Testboy: spam

<33hp 33m 94mv>
[doom] Testboy: spam

<33hp 33m 73mv>
[doom] Testboy: spam

<33hp 33m 46mv>
[doom] Testboy: spam

<33hp 33m 11mv>
You are too exhausted, please wait a few seconds and try again.

<33hp 33m -32mv>
You are too exhausted, please wait a few seconds and try again.

<33hp 33m -32mv>
You are too exhausted, please wait a few seconds and try again.
- -------------------------------------------------------

By the time you get to the bottom, it's taking on the order of 3 seconds
between sends.  The longer you try to spam, the bigger that delay gets. 
There is also a default lag of about 4 slices on any channel send.

- ------------------
Situation:  annoyance characters log on from the same site as a valid
player and begin harassing others, or existing players harass others but
are otherwise valid.

Solution:  the ignore and silence commands.  Ignore is something a
player can do to another player, and it's about as strong as #gag on the
client side.  It also works both ways, so if you ignore someone, it's
equivalent to them ignoring you as well.  This works very well, but
there are necessarily exceptions for permanent pk chars.

The silence command silently turns off sends on the target.  Target can
use channels, socials, talk, say, etc - but noone else can hear them. 
Primary use is on annoyance chars that learn not to spam channels.  I've
seen annoyance chars try to get a rise out of players for half an hour
before getting bored and logging off, without ever realizing they were
silenced.

- ------------------
Situation:  huge flamewars on any public channel left ignored for more
than 30 seconds.

Solution:  all channels are dynamic and user moderated.  If you get
banned from a channel, feel free to create your own and moderate it how
you wish.  The best channels survive.  Private channels are very popular
as well.

- ------------------
Ok, so the last one isn't really an annoyance char problem, but it's
close.  Giving the players most of the control over their channels has
really helped though - less (if any) god intervention is required, and I
can say 'take this to another channel' without getting complaints about
how I'm oppressing free speech.

Grin, hope you find some of this stuff interesting.  Good luck :)

- -dennis T
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--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.


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