Here's a question that came to mind recently due to some incidents, including a player from another MUD deciding to pose as one of our players and post "suggestions" that the board readers try his/her MUD instead.

What do you do about people who are enthusiastic about your game, but act in a way that detracts from its image, such as spamming other sites?   I can remember one incident in our past where a player set up multiple lab machines to "vote" for the MUD (not on TopMUDSites, but an earlier version) without telling us, which resulted in our game getting removed entirely from voting.

Part of our staff contract is an agreement that:

Do we have the right to ask the same of players?  Has anyone put such a policy in place, and if so, what were the results?  Or is having to cope with this sort of thing simply the price of popularity, and there's nothing that can be done about it?

There's nothing you can do aside from explaining to the player in question why his/her mis-placed enthusiasm is having the opposite effect from what is intended.

At the end of the day, you are most definitely not responsible for what your users do outside of your game. We're not their parents.

--matt

We had a player do that a few years ago.  Spammed a crapload of forums with adverts.  I just said "Hey don't do that".  And she said "'kay".  The reaction from some of the people on the forums was far more exuberant than what she did.  

Well you could do anything you wanted to your players on your game.  But don't a lot of mud admins attempt to exercise enough control already over their players behavior already?   Well that's rhetorical.  I wouldn't bother.

Heh heh. Our most embarassing example like that was from last spring when Achaea had a massive system meltdown. We spent 6 days running 'Anarchaea' (just a copy of Achaea using the db from a few weeks before) while we got things back in order. One of our users decided to get us on /. to get us "some publicity." Unfortunately, telling the world that we had a massive meltdown is NOT the kind of publicity we wanted! The poor guy was horrified after I explained why what he had done was, perhaps, not the best way to help us.

--matt

I think it depends on the situation, but generally if the player is posting in such a way as to promote your mud (such as placing adverts in their sig, or whatever) then - regardless of whether they are staff member or player - they are effectively representing your mud to the outside world, and people will associate them and their actions with you and your mud.

This could be compared with a situation I read on another board recently, where numerous players from one mud would spam other muds for players - and when approached by admin from the victimised muds, the mud owner would say "I don't care - I can't tell the players what to do".

The same applies for the voting situation you described, or for situations in which an obnoxious poster insists on advertising your mud in their sig - by doing negative things on behalf of your mud, they will draw negative publicity towards your mud.

In such a case I would simply ask the players to stop publically associating themselves with my mud. I've done so before, and I've not had any problems (most of them promote the mud out of devotion, so they're typically pretty well disposed towards doing what they're told).