[MUD-Dev2] [MUD-Dev] [REPOST] Griefing

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

On 6/25/07, Nicholas Koranda <nkk at eml.cc> wrote:
>. (i.e. A player says a griefer has camped him. The game could
> check to see if there was ever a PVP encounter with them at all and who
> won to decide if that is valid.) Naturally, such a system would not be
> perfect but it could weed out some of the wrongful griefing claims.

Okay,  a few problems from soneone who's been there on the admin side
of this sort of thing.

(1) Character repercussions are of limited value.  Griefers just
create new characters.
(2) Account repercussions are of limited value. Griefers just create
new accounts.
(3) Credit card blocking is of no value.  Griefers get (or steal) new numbers.
(4) IP blocking is of no value.  Most ISPs use DHCP and its easy to switch ISPs.

The fundamental problem is that there is no *player* accountability.
And  until someone comes up with a (cost effective) way to positively
identify players such that you can actually block a player, that will
continue to be the case.

There is a reason this oldest problem continues to be a problem and
thats because  none of the easy or obvious solutions work... they've
all been tried, trust me.

And unless you solve the above and have a "no-tolerance" rule, hidden
checks don't work either.  Griefers figure them out through
experimentation amazingly quickly.

.