[MUD-Dev] Seamlessly Distributed Online Environments

[Brent P. Newhall]

"Adam M" <ceo at grexengine.com> wrote:
> Crosbie Fitch <crosbie at cyberspaceengineers.org> wrote:
>> From: J C Lawrence

>>> Remember: The client is in the hands of the enemy, and in a P2P
>>> system, all the nodes are clients and all the nodes are in the
>>> hands of the enemy.

>> If more than a few percent of file sharers were the enemies
>> they're made out to be then file sharing would have collapsed
>> immediately. RIAA simply cannot afford enough stooges (computers
>> or people) to pollute the MP3 file space faster than it's cleased
>> by the users.

> I think you've misunderstood the definition of "enemy". Who, in
> the Napster world, is an "enemy" (apart from RIAA) ? [rhetorical
> question]

> The point about games here is that EVERY user has a vested
> interest in cheating, and what is more they have full control of
> any code running on their PC.

That would be correct, in a game.  I submit that the original
poster's idea is for something that is not exactly a game.  It's a
shared environment.

> There are *very* few application domains where every user is
> rewarded for trying to break the system.

What rewards would the player have for breaking the proposed system,
beyond the obvious ones like "Because it gives them a thrill" which
have been shown to be surmountable in p2p filesharing services like
KaZaA?

> Obviously, many users choose not to, but that doesn't invalidate
> the incentive - it just means they resisted it :), whether that
> was a no-brainer easy decision to make (because of their
> playstyle) or not.

So, what is this incentive?  What, exactly, would these cheaters be
striving for?  There is no in-"game" goal that players are striving
for, other than finding new envirnoments, and surely breaking the
world would limit the cheater as much as those cheated.

> In Napster/Kazaa/etc I get no reward for poisoning other people's
> files.

And what reward is there in this p2p "shared world" scenario?

--
Brent P. Newhall
http://brent.other-space.com/
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