[MUD-Dev] Striving for originality

[Matt Mihaly]

On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Kwon Ekstrom wrote:
> From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>

>> People play basketball quite regularly too, and yet there's only
>> one Jordan.
 
> Yes, but there's alot of good basketball players too, and I don't
> think Jordan would score many points standing on the court all by
> himself against several of his peers.

Yeah, I noticed how well those other teams did against him when he
had his team with him.
 
>> It is naive to assume the bullies don't have a large network of
>> supporters and friends too. Furthermore, if I'm a leader of
>> Ashtan
 
> I didn't say that the bullies don't have their supporters, but
> I've noticed something over years and years of playing experience.
> Bullies may get friends, but generally they have less than helpful
> players.  For example, on the last mud I played there was a player
> who tended to cheat newbies using their own ignorance, as those
> newbies started to learn the game they simply wouldn't do anything
> with him.  He eventually left the game because he was being
> constantly killed by large groups of the people he used to cheat
> and nobody would group with him to kill mobs for more equipment.
 
> Granted, few people go to this extreme, but everyone is a newbie
> at one point or another.  Players who pick on newbies greatly
> limit the number of potential future allies.  I've yet to see a
> system where people who pick on newbies get more allies than
> people who help newbies.

Actually, I'd agree that I have yet to see a system where people who
pick on all newbies get more allies than people who help
newbies. However, people who pick on newbies that are opposed to the
group the bully is in are relatively unaffected, and can, if left
unchecked, effectively kill off the opposing organization,
particularly as the bullies tend to be far and away the best PKers,
due to practicing it constantly.

>> still act just like organizations do in Achaea. Look at the
>> US. Claims to be interested in human rights. Talks a lot about
>> the
 
> This isn't a topic I care to go on right now, but before you point
> a finger at the US, take a look at China. Great Britain, France,
> the governments of those countries that people die in (quite a bit
> of which specifically forbid assistance from certain countries)
> and then take a look at the amount of resources those countries
> put into philantropy.  You'll notice that the US is at the top of
> those countries donating money.

Um, ok, though I'm not sure how that's relevant. I'd happily pick on
any of those countries for the same thing. I am most definitely an
equal opportunity disliker of the massive hypocrisy practiced by
governments.
 
>> serious problem of tens if not hundreds of millions of people
>> being destroyed by AIDs, or the genocides that our media can't
>> even be
 
> We know what causes AID, and so do they, that's a personal
> responsibility imho

I'm astounded by this statement. It's the sort of thing I'd expect
to hear at a Baptist Church meeting in Alabama. The 10 year old
girls being raped (very frequent in parts of Africa where sex with a
virgin girl is reputed to cure AIDs) would, I'm sure, be a bit
surprised to find out it was their fault. You sound like Ronald
Reagan denying that AIDs was the potentially (and now is) biggest
plague of the last century, and threatens entire sections of the
world with near complete depopulation. what happens abouts
 
>> You may find small MUDs where the players can keep the other
>> players completely in line, but I'd argue that's because those
>> MUDs are so small there really is only one community in the game
>> (the player-group as a whole).
 
> I don't think I'll be responding to any more of your posts on this
> thread, for the most part I've noticed that you've tended towards
> unrelated examples to prove a point.  It's sort of like using
> statistics to prove that eating potatoes in the US causes cancer
> (over 95% of people who have cancer eat potatoes).  You've gone
> from "basketball" to "how countries don't wipe other countries
> noses".

I don't think you have grasped the concept of analogy, though in the
case of the behavior or physical world organizations, I'm merely
pointing out that generally speaking, people don't care enough to do
anything to really help people outside whatever community they
consider to be theirs. People go out and buy a new DVD instead of
feeding a starving family. It's just how people behave, and the
behavior doesn't get better in a virtual environment, only worse
generally speaking.
 
> From my experience, I've seen this work time and time again.
> You've gotta work at building it up.  I spend quite a bit of time
> working with pkers (since as I've mentioned it is amung my primary
> interests) and have seen alot of things work and not work.  On a
> whole it really depends on a single word... respect.  Perhaps in a
> mud with a few thousand simultaneous players it wouldn't work, but
> I've seen it work on muds with medium/large playerbases.

I hate to pull the experience card, but as you've done it... I
haven't just spent quite a bit of time working with PKers. I've
built two of the most successful text MUDs around, in which PK is
considered by many to be the most important thing (not by me, though
PK drives probably 75% of our sales). I've been working with PKers,
including designing nearly every facet of our intricate PK system,
full-time, for 6 years. I have seen exactly the system you advocate
fail miserably, because that's the system we implemented in the
beginning. Someone kills you, fine, get your friends to come kill
that person.

Whether it "works" is a matter of opinion I suppose. I was an admin
on a MUD called Avalon years ago, whose administration enjoyed
watching players driven off the game by rabid PKers like myself. I
can't imagine how much business I cost them (they charged by the
hour, so a big player could pour a lot of money into the game during
the course of a year), but the head admin seemed to think the system
worked. Worked for what, I don't know. Worked to drive a lot of good
customers off the game, certainly (a lot of our best, early
customers all left Avalon to play Achaea). Worked to discourage the
heck out of newbies, certainly.

Again, I agree it can work if the game is composed of a
community-in-whole, because then everybody in the game is part of
your community, and so you're likely to care about them.

As soon as you get multiple sub-communities, particularly ones which
are violently opposed to each other, any sort of universal player
justice system I've ever seen breaks down quite handily.

 --matt




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