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Molly · 02-19-2004, 06:21 PM

This thread is interesting to me, because it brings up two thing is Muds that I personally loathe, namely
1. Muds that pretend to be 'totally free to play' while in effect players can get advantages by doling out RL money, which will take a player who doesn't pay a very long time to achieve,
and 2. muds with excessive and silly rules.

I am not going to get into point 1, since too much has been said on that subject in the past, and most people on these boards know my opinions about it already.

About point 2, I have some comments however, both from the player's point of view and the Admin's.

The first Mud I ever played was of the kind with tons of rules. When you logged on to the Mud you where 'required' to first read a long list of helpfiles, titled HELP POLICY, HELP RULE, HELP RULES and so on. Most of these rules were unnecessary in my opinion, and many of them were downright silly. Since the Mud was described as a 'family environment', players were muted for weeks for saying things like the four word letter for 'urine' on open channels, and even rather mild jokes with the slightest implication of sex were banned. On top of that, the imms snooped and spied on players and reported every comment that could be interpreted as negative, even if it were over tell.

The head imp was a control freak, and all in all the situation instigated a sort of desire in me and my equally unruly friends to break as many rules as possible as openly as possible. In fact, baiting the head Imp soon became our favourite pastime. Childish? Yes. In retrospective I can see that we were totally immature, and it is actually surprising that we didn't get banned quicker than we were.

Much later, after becoming an Admin and Imp myself, I can at least see things a bit from her perspective. Most of the Staff in my present Mud came from that other Mud, and that is probably why we started out with the ambition to have as few rules as possible. From the beginning our only rule was the old biblical proverb; 'Do onto others what you want them to do onto you', which in our somewhat profane transaltion became; 'Act like a jerk and you'll be treated like a jerk'.

It all went well for a very long time, and even though the language on the open channels could be a bit rough at times, our players were mostly mature enough to handle the freedom of speech with some responsibility. Until the day when some new players arrived, who were so bad-mouthed that a number of the older players started to complain about it, and in the end it got too much even for my own pretty wide-stretched tolerance. And suddenly I found myself implementing a rule called 'Common courtesy', which had more or less the same wording as the one I so detested in my first Mud. We don't need to enforce it much, but a fact remains, the rule that I swore I'd never have is now there.

Next item: idlers and 'botters'.
I have no problem with players that just go AFK, those can easily be handled by letting the code transfer them to some sort of limbo room, after 5 minutes of idling. The problem is
players who set up scripts to advance their char while being AFK, whether it be by endlessly practising spells, doing the same simple quest over and over again, or by what is commonly referred to as 'camping' (which means that you place your char at a spot where some reasonably easy aggressive mobs spawn, and then just leave it there while you go do the laundry, walk the dog or watch television, The mobs will respawn and attack, and your char will get exp). Most Admin dislike this type of playing style and I am no exception.

Since many things in a Mud that is at least partly based on hack'n'slash gets repetitive by nature, sooner or later you get some players that use botting to an extent that makes it downright irritating. In my mud we try to fight it mainly by throwing in the occasional nasty surprise, and by making the Quests non-repetitive, but it's still hard to stop completely.

I can actually understand Admin that have a rule against this. But you should never set up a rule unless you are prepared to enforce it, and in order to enforce a rule against botting, you either need to snoop the players, or to adress them in the manner that Dubthack described. And since I hate playing Mud Police myself, I'd rather not have the rule, and let a few the botters get away with it instead. Still, if my Mud were to be invaded by a gang of totally shameless botters... Who knows, maybe I'd change my mind in the same way that I had to do about the free language.

Finally; Bug abusers.
All new code has bugs, and most new zones have building bugs. However much you try to test everything to make it cheat proof, sooner or later there will always be a player who tries an approach that you didn't even know existed. Usually I am pretty tolerant against bug abusers, partly because the players that find and exploit the bugs usually are quite a bit more intelligent that the average, and partly because basically it's our fault, for allowing the bugs to exist.

We also have a sort of rule against bug-abuse, going something like; 'If you find a bug and report it, expect to be rewarded, if you abuse it, expect to be punished'. But naturally that isn't enough to stop players from abusing bugs. There even are some that take it as an excuse to keep abusing it after they reported it. So our main policy is of course to fix the bug as soon as possible.

But there are times when the fixing isn't all that easy. Here's an examle that occurred recently on my own mud:
Our coder went away for three weeks vacation over christmas, after having installed some code that wasn't thoroughly tested. Pretty soon after he left, a player discovered a bug in the combination of two spells, that made the effect ridiculously powerful. It took some time before I was aware whart was going on, and even after that I wasn't sure what the exact bug was.

I am no coder myself, and there was no way to fix it, or even to disable the spells, until the coder came back. So I did the only thing that was left for me, I talked to the player and asked him to stop what he was doing. This would have worked with most of our players. Unfortunately this one turned out to be a 'Mud Advocate' of the worst kind. After arguing with me for about 2 hours about the nature of the bug, and the difference between a 'bug' and a 'feature', he kept right on abusing it, as soon as my back was turned, for the next weeks, right until the coder returned and fixed it.

He was 'punished' in a way retroactively, by losing some of the levels and gold he had gained on it, but not nearly enough. And in retrospective I realise that I should have been a lot more hardhanded. So if something similar happens again, I'll most likely freeze the culprit until the problem can be fixed, regardless of how long it takes.

Now the above examples illustrate how our values and rules can get affected by a certain type of twink players. And of course, the bigger playerbase a mud has, the bigger the chance that it picks up players of that type. So if a Mud has a lot of rules that seem stupid and unnecessary, there just might be some similar explanations behind them.

Or then again, there might not. After all, control freak imps and powertripping imms do exist. And even the best of imms can have a bad day at times. We are none of us perfect.

02-19-2004, 06:21 PM	#18
Molly Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Sweden Home MUD: 4 Dimensions Posts: 574	This thread is interesting to me, because it brings up two thing is Muds that I personally loathe, namely 1. Muds that pretend to be 'totally free to play' while in effect players can get advantages by doling out RL money, which will take a player who doesn't pay a very long time to achieve, and 2. muds with excessive and silly rules. I am not going to get into point 1, since too much has been said on that subject in the past, and most people on these boards know my opinions about it already. About point 2, I have some comments however, both from the player's point of view and the Admin's. The first Mud I ever played was of the kind with tons of rules. When you logged on to the Mud you where 'required' to first read a long list of helpfiles, titled HELP POLICY, HELP RULE, HELP RULES and so on. Most of these rules were unnecessary in my opinion, and many of them were downright silly. Since the Mud was described as a 'family environment', players were muted for weeks for saying things like the four word letter for 'urine' on open channels, and even rather mild jokes with the slightest implication of sex were banned. On top of that, the imms snooped and spied on players and reported every comment that could be interpreted as negative, even if it were over tell. The head imp was a control freak, and all in all the situation instigated a sort of desire in me and my equally unruly friends to break as many rules as possible as openly as possible. In fact, baiting the head Imp soon became our favourite pastime. Childish? Yes. In retrospective I can see that we were totally immature, and it is actually surprising that we didn't get banned quicker than we were. Much later, after becoming an Admin and Imp myself, I can at least see things a bit from her perspective. Most of the Staff in my present Mud came from that other Mud, and that is probably why we started out with the ambition to have as few rules as possible. From the beginning our only rule was the old biblical proverb; 'Do onto others what you want them to do onto you', which in our somewhat profane transaltion became; 'Act like a jerk and you'll be treated like a jerk'. It all went well for a very long time, and even though the language on the open channels could be a bit rough at times, our players were mostly mature enough to handle the freedom of speech with some responsibility. Until the day when some new players arrived, who were so bad-mouthed that a number of the older players started to complain about it, and in the end it got too much even for my own pretty wide-stretched tolerance. And suddenly I found myself implementing a rule called 'Common courtesy', which had more or less the same wording as the one I so detested in my first Mud. We don't need to enforce it much, but a fact remains, the rule that I swore I'd never have is now there. Next item: idlers and 'botters'. I have no problem with players that just go AFK, those can easily be handled by letting the code transfer them to some sort of limbo room, after 5 minutes of idling. The problem is players who set up scripts to advance their char while being AFK, whether it be by endlessly practising spells, doing the same simple quest over and over again, or by what is commonly referred to as 'camping' (which means that you place your char at a spot where some reasonably easy aggressive mobs spawn, and then just leave it there while you go do the laundry, walk the dog or watch television, The mobs will respawn and attack, and your char will get exp). Most Admin dislike this type of playing style and I am no exception. Since many things in a Mud that is at least partly based on hack'n'slash gets repetitive by nature, sooner or later you get some players that use botting to an extent that makes it downright irritating. In my mud we try to fight it mainly by throwing in the occasional nasty surprise, and by making the Quests non-repetitive, but it's still hard to stop completely. I can actually understand Admin that have a rule against this. But you should never set up a rule unless you are prepared to enforce it, and in order to enforce a rule against botting, you either need to snoop the players, or to adress them in the manner that Dubthack described. And since I hate playing Mud Police myself, I'd rather not have the rule, and let a few the botters get away with it instead. Still, if my Mud were to be invaded by a gang of totally shameless botters... Who knows, maybe I'd change my mind in the same way that I had to do about the free language. Finally; Bug abusers. All new code has bugs, and most new zones have building bugs. However much you try to test everything to make it cheat proof, sooner or later there will always be a player who tries an approach that you didn't even know existed. Usually I am pretty tolerant against bug abusers, partly because the players that find and exploit the bugs usually are quite a bit more intelligent that the average, and partly because basically it's our fault, for allowing the bugs to exist. We also have a sort of rule against bug-abuse, going something like; 'If you find a bug and report it, expect to be rewarded, if you abuse it, expect to be punished'. But naturally that isn't enough to stop players from abusing bugs. There even are some that take it as an excuse to keep abusing it after they reported it. So our main policy is of course to fix the bug as soon as possible. But there are times when the fixing isn't all that easy. Here's an examle that occurred recently on my own mud: Our coder went away for three weeks vacation over christmas, after having installed some code that wasn't thoroughly tested. Pretty soon after he left, a player discovered a bug in the combination of two spells, that made the effect ridiculously powerful. It took some time before I was aware whart was going on, and even after that I wasn't sure what the exact bug was. I am no coder myself, and there was no way to fix it, or even to disable the spells, until the coder came back. So I did the only thing that was left for me, I talked to the player and asked him to stop what he was doing. This would have worked with most of our players. Unfortunately this one turned out to be a 'Mud Advocate' of the worst kind. After arguing with me for about 2 hours about the nature of the bug, and the difference between a 'bug' and a 'feature', he kept right on abusing it, as soon as my back was turned, for the next weeks, right until the coder returned and fixed it. He was 'punished' in a way retroactively, by losing some of the levels and gold he had gained on it, but not nearly enough. And in retrospective I realise that I should have been a lot more hardhanded. So if something similar happens again, I'll most likely freeze the culprit until the problem can be fixed, regardless of how long it takes. Now the above examples illustrate how our values and rules can get affected by a certain type of twink players. And of course, the bigger playerbase a mud has, the bigger the chance that it picks up players of that type. So if a Mud has a lot of rules that seem stupid and unnecessary, there just might be some similar explanations behind them. Or then again, there might not. After all, control freak imps and powertripping imms do exist. And even the best of imms can have a bad day at times. We are none of us perfect.