[MUD-Dev] Striving for originality

[Damion Schubert]

>From Fred Clift

>> The options which I've always favoured in the past have been
>> disallowing attacks on a player within a few days of their
>> creation (or a certain quantity of online time, or where
>> appropriate, a certain level), or having safe newbie areas where
>> they cannot be reached, much less attacked.
 
> By 'disallow' do you mean the world prevents people from doing
> harmful things to newbies?

Yes.

> or do you mean you have a rule against it with admnistrative
> punishment for violation?

That's the second line of defense.

> The problem with preventing harmful actions (e.g. "You can't bring
> yourself to harm such a pathetic weakling!") is that then griefers
> make new characters to harass others in a variety of ways using
> untouchable characters.

Ban them.

> Is there a better automated way to handle this?  probably.  I
> can't think of any off hand or I would have already implemented it
> -- My basic philosophy is that we have as few 'policy' rules as
> possible - if players shouldn't do somethign, the world should be
> modified to prevent it.  There are somethings that can't be solved
> technically, and we have policy rules covering those -- with good
> logging.

Meridian had a system of 'guilty until proven innocent'.  Quite
simply, the game flagged anything that was even remotely
questionable as an outlaw act, which made you an outlaw.  This meant
that people were free to PK you one time (at which time your debt to
society was paid off).

However, there was an elected official (the Justicar) who could
pardon up to five people per term (six days).  Different justicars
would wrap more pomp and circumstance around the trials, where
people would plead their case ("I didn't know someone was next to me
when I cast firewall", "I was just testing out a new spell", etc.

Occasionally, voter turnout did fail, and a corrupt justicar was
elected.  This actually usually worked out okay, because:

  1) If the friends he pardoned were jerks, they were usually
  outlaws again in a week.

  2) Players blamed themselves, and not us, when an outlaw walked
  freely on the streets.

  3) It certainly spiked voter turnout upward on the next time
  around, which was a neat social cycle.

Still, this wouldn't have caught someone just saying nasty things
about someone else.  Things that can't be detected still require
admins in order to boot people out.

At any rate, your game will need either safety switches or safe
areas, one of the two, even if its only one room in the MUD where
players log in and chat freely.  Once you have even one situation
like that, you have to deal with people potentially abusing that
safety in order to mock or harass other people.  Expecting that
high-level players will simply take care of troublesome new players
is short-sighted, because frequently, the problem is troublesome
high-level players wiping out new players the moment they walk into
the world.

--d
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