[MUD-Dev] DGN: Random questions about griefers

[Peter Harkins]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 05:18:11PM +0930, Mike Rozak wrote:

> 2) When you kick a griefer off, what percentage of them come back
> in a different guise? And do they keep coming back despite their
> being kicked off repeatedly?

The percentage that come back in the same or different guise is
basically 100%. They want to make the admins angry, so every time
they get kicked Pavlov's bell rings and they're a little bit
happier.

As a small mud, we've dealt with the problem by toading
griefers. Toaded players can use all commands as usual except no one
but them sees the output. To them it will appear that every say,
tell, shout, chat, and soul (social) they perform worked, but no
other player ever sees it.  Ignoring them is the best way to make
them go away, because they generally want an audience to perform
to. Despite griefers being commonly labelled "sociopaths", in my
experience it's been the opposite: they're desperate for any human
attention.

We toad griefers to shut them up until an admin can drop by and IP
ban them/their netblock and contact their ISP -- almost every ISP
has a clause in their TOS saying that it's a violation of their TOS
to use the service to violate someone else's TOS. So far we've
gotten good response from this, though we haven't yet had to deal
with any of the huge ISPs.

We've got factors working in our favor for griefing, though. We're a
small mud, so there's only a small audience to grief. There's a
substantial amount of time to reach high levels and our high-level
players are just good people, so they can and will take care of any
grief PVPers.

If we were larger, I'd want to detect and block proxied
connections. If we were for-pay, I'd require a credit card and block
on that. None of these techniques (or the ones you listed) is 100%
effective or reliable in and of itself, but each additional hurdle
will cut down the number of griefers, with the end goal being that
admins can manually squish the remaining few in their free time.

- --
Peter Harkins    -    ph at malaprop.org    -    http://malaprop.org
Malap on Walraven    -    http://simud.org
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