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Old 02-15-2006, 03:33 PM   #55
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
Posts: 2,305
the_logos will become famous soon enough
You're missing the point. A player doesn't have to bribe the owner. A player just has to buy something from another player for optional payments to have an impact on gameplay. There's nothing you, as the mud admin, can really do to stop that as long as anything of value is transferrable between characters.

So it never happens then, right? Or does it happen, and people are punished afterwards. I'm sure it's the latter, or you wouldn't have to speak of enforcement. If it's the latter, then it's too late: Already had an impact.

No, you couldn't not call the ACS a nonprofit, because nonprofit has a very specific meaning, as determined by the IRS, and it's got nothing to do with bribing.

You keep switching between two positions:
1. Money affects gameplay and that's what you want to categorize.
2. When it's pointed out that money can affect Carrion Fields gameplay, however trivially (and I'll agree, it's probably pretty minor), you change to basing it not on whether money can affect gameplay, but to whether the admin policy embraces that or not, which is -completely- separate from how money affects gameplay.

Blizzard, for instance, is -very- against real-money transactions between their players, and yet the single most traded virtual currency is Blizzard's gold coin. The admin policy is totally against those transactions, and yet money still has a huge effect on their gameplay.

In your case, the effect of money is potentially much smaller (nobody's going to set up a business to farm Carrion Fields items/currency. Too small a market.), but it is nevertheless not zero. Your policy is against it, but policy isn't reality. It's what you WISH reality would be. I wish we didn't have any grief players at all, but it'd be a lie to say we didn't. Admin policy may be against it, but that doesn't mean it can't and doesn't happen. Did you know, in fact, that prohibited transactions between players for real money started with text MUDs, in Gemstone? It was against admin policy, and it was happening without them even realizing it for awhile. A mud admin isn't able to know if it's happening either. He may discover it, but there's no way to know it's not happening.

So, what you appear to be saying is that muds should check off whether they WISH money couldn't have an impact on gameplay, but if we're going to be checking boxes based on wishes, I have a lot of potential boxes to add.

--matt
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