[OnyxFlame]

I agree with you, except in one instance. It seems like you're basically saying "players will cheat anyway so why should we try to stop them?" I've spent my whole mud "career" putting up with cheaters, and when I try reporting them I seem to run into people who are so "fair" that they rarely if ever get anything done with the issue, and so it gets to where if you sitebanned all the cheaters you'd have like 3 players left. If a few people cheat and the admin need 6 pieces of evidence to convict them, and then never get that evidence because they don't trust any of the info they're given, then the cheaters will just multiply as people realize that's the only way to get ahead in the mud, and pretty soon you have a piece of total crap.

So what I'm proposing with this god thing is that gods can't actually code anything, but they have access to "cheater logs" which attempt to log actions that could indicate cheating (i.e. teaching your buddies for extended periods of time, someone being killed by a new char of the guy they killed last week, etc). Gods will also not technically be immortal, since they gain their power from being worshipped by the mortals, and if they screw too many mortals around they'll stop worshipping them and they'll fade away. And gods also give the IC excuses for mechanics such as changing geography and having floods and such. So gods in this system will mainly be enforcers and story generators.

Although I admit, the reason we're even considering gods is that the guy who's making this mud doesn't wanna let anyone else code/build on it, so I had to think of *something* to be allowed into it in something like a staff position.

[JilesDM]

Originally Posted by I agree with you, except in one instance. It seems like you're basically saying "players will cheat anyway so why should we try to stop them?"

I'm not saying that at all. I'm simply saying that attempting to fix a certain class of cheating (OOC communication) is something that cannot be adequately addressed by in-game mechanics.

We log everything just in case we need to verify facts when presented with allegations of cheating. Actually proving that cheating did take place, however, is next to impossible, even with logs.

As for gods being empowered by players, doesn't that simply exacerbate the hypothetical situation of a group of jerks?

A system like you describe is interesting, and might provide a very unique experience, but, in my opinion, it would be folly to attempt to use it as a mechanism to enforce rules. Punishing players for rules violations is almost certain to be undesirable to the said players, making it among the least desirable courses of action for a "god" whose powers stem directly from what amounts to player popularity.

[OnyxFlame]

The way I see it, the players need the gods, and the gods need the players, so ideally there'd be enough checks and balances to make sure everything runs smoothly. Of course this is providing the gods don't start cheating themselves, but if they do then the admin of course can can them.

The way I visualize it, the gods wouldn't punish the cheaters so much as try to dissuade them from their course. At this point in the design, we're unwilling to give gods the ability to straight out kill mortals because of their obviously godlike powers. So the gods basically report what they see to the admin, and try to make things uncomfortable enough for the cheaters that they either stop cheating or stop playing, and if all else fails the admin either punishes the cheaters, or gives the gods permission to get rid of them. So most of the time the punishing of cheaters will look like an IC event (King Fred is under a curse, blahblah) and give real incentive to others to not cheat.

Of course none of this may work, but like I said the thing isn't nearly coded enough to be usable yet anyway, and we may end up totally changing it around by then. But our aim is to keep a buncha jerks from cheating and ruling the mud, and this is all we could think of to fix that problem. If you have other ideas that might actually WORK, feel free to share them. (I don't mean to be cynical here but in my experience only the most blatant cheaters ever get punished, and I aim to change that if I can.)

[JilesDM]

Well, about the only MUDs that I've run across that are meaningfully devoid of cheating are MUSHes, because everything in a MUSH is cooperative as opposed to competitive.

I really hate to say this, but it is absolutely impossible for an enforcement mechanism (OOC or IC) to eliminate all cheating. Until all players connect to your MUD through some type of remotely securable client (basically requires a TCP like Palladium, which I am strongly opposed to for home systems) there is no way to even guarantee that players aren't plotting their eeeevil schemes on an 8-way IM conference. Even if a TCP does gain widespread implementation in the home, those dastardly players could be exchanging email, talking on the phone, chatting over IRC, or even SSH'ing into a common private linux box and using wall.

Attempting to catch all cheating is an exercise in futility. Designing major MUD systems that have widespread effects specifically to do this will guarantee some very painful disappointments (and likely more than a few grey hairs). We only punish the most blatant cheaters because those are the only times we can actually prove with any meaningful certainty that they were, in fact, cheating. If we relaxed our standards in order to punish more probable cheaters we'd also end up punishing many innocents.

Instead of focusing on catching and punishing cheaters, design your game mechanical systems with the operating assumption that at least half of the playerbase will cheat successfully with every trick in the book and you'll end up with a more robust and enjoyable system for everyone.

[OnyxFlame]

We're not naive enough to think we can catch ALL the cheaters (or at least I'm not, I dunno about the other guy ). We just want to catch enough of them that the whole mud doesn't go down the drain because of them. And we want to set up the mud in such a way that cheating doesn't gain you enough benefits in the long run to be worthwhile to most people. How we intend to do this is by attempting to make it #### near impossible for any one faction to control the whole world of the mud for very long at a time, if at all. Our gods will, I think, add enough chaos factor that the mud doesn't just stagnate and collapse under its own weight.

Oh and here's another thing. The mud will probably eventually be pay to play, because the guy who's gonna host it probably won't be willing to do so indefinitely, and the mud admin will probably be unable to host it himself in the forseeable future. So do you think cheating is more, less, or equally common with pay muds? I've never played one, so I really have no idea.

[JilesDM]

Originally Posted by And we want to set up the mud in such a way that cheating doesn't gain you enough benefits in the long run to be worthwhile to most people.

This, in my opinion, should be one of your primary design goals. The logical conclusions of the goals of game mechanical balance and cheat tolerance are strongly complementary (often even identical).

A system successfully designed with these principles will make it practically impossible for a single player group to control the MUD through game mechanics. There will be times, however, when smart individuals are able to leverage the psychological weaknesses of others to their advantage. Though a balanced system will always leave vulnerabilities in even the most powerful characters, said characters may still successfully foster the image of invulnerability. In a permadeath system this can leave others paralyzed with fear, choosing obedience rather than the risk of the death of a character*. This type of control is good for the depth of an RP environment, even if it may leave one group of players dominating the MUD for a time. Control through force and fear of force is an integral part of human society that cannot be effectively replicated in a non-permadeath system.

If you do decide to go ahead with giving broad powers to IC gods, I would recommend that you have them try to interfere with this aspect of RP as little as possible. It might even be most interesting if they participate in it themselves . Fear is, after all, one of the most effective missionaries for the archetypal evil fantasy deity.

Originally Posted by So do you think cheating is more, less, or equally common with pay muds?

As far as p2p MUDs go, I haven't noticed any significant differences with respect to the amount of cheating that occurs. One thing to note, however, is that a lot of what we consider to be cheating on typical RP MUDs is completely legal on HnS MUDs, which happen to comprise the the majority of p2p offerings.

*Interestingly enough, in a good immersive RP environment, players become so strongly attached to their characters that the fear of character death can be real and quite intense, making this form of control incredibly effective. Most players who are meek and/or cautious individuals (i.e., the majority of the population) are unable to take substantial risks with their characters, even when they wish to portray a bold, courageous warrior.

[visko]

Back when I actively played a few HnS MUDs quite a few years ago, I ended up running around with a loose group of PKers who tended to stick to total-pk oriented MUDs simply because they got bored everywhere else, but who also liked to cause a little mayhem in rp/achiever MUDs from time to time.

Since they'd known each other for months or years, they all used IM, chat rooms, or other MUDs with sympathetic admin to devise an attack on a MUD. These attacks could take a day, or extend for months at a time, but the basic plan of attack was as follows:

One player logs, gets a general feel for the current society of the MUD, and befriends a few people on the game. He quickly learns the map layout and fun little tricks from the "explorer" class of people on the MUD, and hooks up with the "social" guys to get a feel for how he can start to undermine the current alliances kept together by the "sages" and other nonsense characters PKers have no use for other than fodder.

Then the posse arrives. They've been given constant updates by the scout as to how to powerlevel quickly, or failing that, how to attain enough power fast enough to start gang-banging some high-level guys to get the equipment to powerlevel to dominate the MUD. Usually, the goal is to dig in with a clan, make it exclusive to the kind of people they want (power-hungry pre-pubes who like to wreck everything in sight) and just take over. They sit outside of safe rooms and scream at the "wimps" who won't leave for fear of death, and meanwhile their clannies amass a huge stockpile of weapons and items necessary to maintain their dominance even through a major clan war.

The point of this is that perma-death is only a big deal for the first week. After that (unless your MUD requires months of work to get a decent character off the ground), perma-death is a minor annoyance, but probably even less of a problem than you'd expect; by the time a player is ready to take the risk of death, he's also got 4 or 5 other characters who always log from completely different IP addresses ready to be brought out quickly in the event of a character death.

Perma-death doesn't get rid of PKers you don't like. It's simply another obstacle that a resourceful PKer will learn to welcome as an asset and then use to his advantage to dominate a MUD.

The only way to get rid of PK mongers is to watch the pbase carefully and stay alert for the trends that severe MUD destruction comes from: a sudden influx of players who don't seem to be interacting with the RP side of the game much, who are quickly amassing power, and who seem to bounce around each other, pairing or grouping up to quickly advance. You see that, you watch it. Take action as soon as the massacre starts, and you may stop it before it gets out of control.

The other posters who said that using in-game measures to get rid of malevolent players was futile were basically correct. Until someone develops a highly advanced AI program to skim along the top of a MUD looking for certain abnormalities in your system and fixing them quickly, only humans have the freedom of will to be able to control a pbase that may or may not be getting out of control.

Perma-death is an RP feature. It should be used for RP purposes, and only for RP purposes. All other attempted uses for the feature will end up in either futility (frustration to the admin) or too much success (frustration for the player). Neither, as KaVir would say, is the usual goal of a MUD administrator.

-Visko

[fmike]

I'm agree with Xerihae. Realism is not the aim of the game. It should be a game with it's own rules. To have or not permadeath is a question of particular world without global answer

[Delerak]

The more realism a game has, the more entertaining it can become. I have seen all the other fantasy genres, and nowadays if the world feels and acts real, like virtual npcs and many many scripts that go from simple room echoes to advanced npcs whom will actually hunt down PCs. So the more real you make the mud, and the more rules you apply from real life, the easier things can be, and you won't have huge arguements like perma death, you die irl you're dead forever, no one is coming back, so on a hardcore roleplaying mud, you have to have it - and many other things. And if you don't. Well I will never play there.

-Delerak

[Eagleon]

Delerak, remember that some people believe that you DO come back.