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A sub-topic of this particular thread has been of interest to me for a while now; the concept of "winning" in a MUD.
I mainly with to PK-oriented MUDs, in which the eventual point is (normally) to stockpile equipment, make either yourself or your clan invincible, kill everyone a few hundred million times, and then junk your stockpile, remake a low-level pointless immortal character and get put in the hall of fame for a while. I've been seeing a lot of animosity towards that particular style of game-play on this site over the past few months, and I'm wondering why.
Is it against some rulebook of roleplay that I have yet to hear about that players should play fair, that they shouldn't cheat to their advantage, that they should be honorable, chivalrous, or whatever it is people think is "fair play"? Why the hell would any halfway-intelligent player NOT use everything he can to his advantage? Why wouldn't he exploit everything he/she had access to, get as powerful as possible, and then sit back and watch the MUD die from admin incompetence, or see the mud advance and become better through his/her efforts?
The concept of "fair play" and "winning" on MUDs has always interested me; I've always adopted the policy "it's legal unless you get caught" into the MUDs I've put up for periods of time over the last couple of years. Most of the players, knowing this, exploit a code bug horribly for about an hour, get bored, tell me about it, and move on to the next one. Because of my attitude and theirs, I'm able to quickly debug code with full cooperation of the pbase.
Anyway, I've written too much already, but these things have always puzzled me and thwarted my understanding. Does anyone have any insight on the matter?
-Visko
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