[camlorn]

Well, I already composed this, and then got kicked out of the system, so I'm going to post it anyway (timeout).

You don't. Let me explain.

If you remove the ooc channel, you remove the right to police what people say oocly; if I can't say something oocly ingame, at all, ever, and if no record shows up ingame, you can't do much that is "fair". I understand why some rp muds might want this. But, in my opinion, it's like saying I can't look at other windows while logged on to your game, or answer the phone while logged on to your game, or go check my mail while the window is open, etc. You won't know if I do these things. You can't. You can accuse me of them, but that's it.

If you can not prove with some sort of ingame log that someone did something wrong, you can't police it. You can ban, but this will just lead to the standard accusations of favoritism, and you'll go downhill fast.

Go look around--I've never, ever, ever heard of an professional mmorpg with a rule like this. Ever. It can't be enforced fairly. You can make rules against sharing contact information ingame, if you want--that's perfectly enforceable--but I don't think that is a good idea either: people want to make online friends through your game, or at least some do, and as soon as you open one avenue of communication, the others are easily obtained. Or someone just goes and makes an IRC channel to share it.

So, the solution. Give players an ingame ooc channel. That way, no one has to go outside the game to talk to others about lunch or that boring business meeting and you've got a log; if something bad happens ic, the chances of someone else being available via skype or <the im client goes here> are less because I don't give that information out to everyone regardless of who you are. As soon as someone starts asking for help on the ooc channel against your policies, you've got 100% proof of it.

That, and ooc channels are, or so I should think, needed for about 75% of all newbies.

My point here is this: the strength of the policy prohibiting this depends only on the players' willingness not to break it, and there's not much you can do without offending half the playerbase. If this were 10 years ago, I'd not make the following point, but I don't see why ooc can't enhance rp, too: we don't have enough players for a spy network, not really, and there are probably other equally valid ways of explaining the information away. Besides, it's only a matter of time until a poor roleplayer gets accused of this, or you get someone for whom english isn't their first language, and now you've started the typical cycle of "bash mud x" reviews.

I left new worlds in part because of this. I left miriani in part because of this. Again, I do see why mud admins would want this and why a certain type of player would want this, but I think the whole thing is pointless. You can only enforce it with an iron fist, and that doesn't work well (I have no personal problems with this policy on either of the aforementioned muds and left for other reasons). You'll lose some players if you cut down ooc too much.

We've moved on from the 1980s and 1990s. Most graphical games have walkthroughs and wikis, and it's time for muds to learn that they're not going to stop this. For rp muds, this isn't the best, but the general attitude of how games are played in general has changed: it's no better or worse than it was, at least in my opinion, but it has changed. They are no longer something you solve yourself for the sense of discovery, etc, and information will get shared whether you like it or not.

So, as I said, limit it by providing official, controlled channels, so that players don't feel forced to go to IRC or something: now only those who really, really want to go through a lot of trouble, both as the helper and helpee (is that a word?) have to try, as everyone won't already be on these channels. And yes, the right kind of player really won't hurt.

These are just my thoughts: feel free to disagree.

and two amendments, as people have posted while I compose:

1: if you don't want other players interfering with fights, code it, don't put it in the policy. All rooms are flagged private unless otherwise flagged, and you do clever things to prevent it. Having this in the policy to prevent people finding bugs in the system is probably not a bad idea.

2: if you are going to insist on this policy, and want to rely on e-mailed logs, don't. I can fake a chat log with a few hours of familiarity with your game; if the chat happened outside the game, all I need are some fictitious timestamps. I could probably even write a simulate-chat-client program to do it all for me in an afternoon: it'd be way, way easier than my homework to implement a linked list without the stl.