[MUD-Dev] Character Restraint & Capture.

[Damion Schubert]

From: Jester

> Justice implies laws to cover all types of crimes, so I agree the
> system wont do that, it will only cover the crime of murder, but
> as this IMHO the most psychologically impacting crime (bar rape)
> common to the genre, it deserves to be addressed. It suits
> computer judgment very well as it is a simple quantifiable action,
> either you initiated an attack on the victim (causing or
> contributing to their death) or you didn't so it should be able to
> deliver a better form of 'justice' than the player currently has
> the choice of :)

I couldn't disagree more with 'murder' being the most
psychologically impacting crime.  Video games have trained people
that death is cheap, and as such, players logging in reasonably
expect that they'll bit it occasionally.  True 'crimes' are social
disruptions, such as mudrape, slander, betrayal, infiltrating a
guild with an alternate character, etc, etc.  Murder only really
joins the list when people kill other people multiple times in a
row.  In UO in the early days, player killing was common and
somewhat expected - it was the jerks emoting crude things to your
corpse while your ghost helplessly had to stand there and watch that
really got people's blood boiling.

In Shadowbane, we get more petitions about jerks being antisocial
(kill-stealing, ninja-looting) in safe zones (read: where you can't
kill them) than we do about random PKs - by about a 10 to one
margin.  Of course, this is a "ganker's game" where life is
considerably cheaper, but all the same

Game designers try to include killing other people as a game
mechanic, either for (a) game interest sake ('other humans are the
most interesting quarry!') or (b) as a possible RESPONSE to
antisocial behavior.  If you think that murder is the worst of all
possible, by all means turn it off or make player killing
consensual.  But I promise you, EQ and other PK-less worlds have
situations that demand player justice, without any ability for
murder.

--d
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