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

[Ian Hess]

--- Jeffrey Kesselman <jeffpk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
 
While I agree with everything you list, a griefer account isn't enough
to make trouble in games where it takes 500-1k hours to hit max level
and hit some kind of extended game.  In that case, griefer
accountability could be attained by having the player identity,
position, organization, and territorial holdings be information that a
vengeful player could act on.  

Two examples.  

I get pk'd relentlessly for a few evenings by an enemy warrior, but I
can initiate some mechanism to find his guildmates.  His abuse rolls
downhill, and social pressure can be brought to bear to restrain him, or
have the situation blossom into a full scale war -story-.

After being pk'd a dozen times, I can go looking for a set of in game
lands, with fortifications and bot defenders.  These lands give
equipment and offline time advantages to the person who pk'd me, and he
has invested in the lands with ingame funds to improve those advantages.
 Because this character killed mine, mine is flagged to be able to
attack his, perhaps with a few allies in my group, for a certain time
period.

Ian Hess