[MUD-Dev] Total Annilation of Downtime

[Steven J. Owens]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 11:07:28AM +0800, Eric Hu wrote:

> People don't mind they are "looked" in text MUD. Some people don't
> mind they are "inpected" in graphical MUD, but some pepole do. In
> EQ, when the most players think "inpection others before granted"
> is bold, not polite, Verant add a new function that players could
> filter out the message they were inspecting...
 
> Frankly, it remind me a scene : Camel bird buries its head in the
> sand, and yell "Lion is not here! Lion is not here!!"

It reminds me of an episode about 10 years ago, on LambdaMOO.  A
fairly young and determined-to-be-fringe player, we'll call him
Abbot, got a programmer bit and developed a "schmoo" player class
with all sorts of odd features - mostly tinysex-related features,
like removable clothing :-) - that became quite popular with newer
players.  This also, not coincidentally, made the class quite
unpopular with the more experienced players.

Unfortunately, one feature the schmoo had was that its look_self
method would inform the player when somebody was looking at them.
Since most of the players were newbies, this immediately resulted in
a lot of "why'd you look at me?  STOP LOOKING AT ME!" etc.  This
ended up really, really annoying the more experienced players.

The older players and the wizards weren't really happy about this
stuff, but LambdaMOO in those days had a pretty strict hands-off,
laissez-faire policy.  However, one of the wizards also happened to
be the player - we'll call him Costello - who owned the parent class
that schmoo was descended from.  So, using only his authority as the
mortal player who owned this player class - developed before he was
promoted to wizard - Costello tweaked the code to break the schmoo
look_self method.

 So Abbot tweaked the schmoo class to get around that hack.

 So Costello tweaked the parent class *again* to break the schmoo.

 So Abbot tweaked the schmoo class *again* to get around *that*
 hack.

By this point Costelloas on a mission, so he coded up a method to
loop through all of the schmoo players and remotely invoke their
look_self methods every few seconds.  Thus, every schmoo player
every few seconds, saw:

 > Costello looks at you.

The archwizard stepped in at this point and suggested that this
bordered on harassment, and told Costello to knock it off.  When
questioned, he said that it wasn't the remote invocation, it was the
constant looping that made it harassment.

Costello took the loop out and put the method on a box with a button
on it, and put the box in a high traffic area where the older
players hung out.  The older players would push the button quite
frequently, for some odd reason :-).

Steven J. Owens
puff at darksleep.com

"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
Take it all with a grain of salt." - Me at http://darksleep.com

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