Member Discussions

Ever have a player that is repeatedly banned, but keeps popping up every few months? And their sole existence seems to be to cuss and spam everyone in the most attention-getting way, in as many ways as possible? They just appear with a new IP and despite your lists and strings of bannings, they're still finding new ways to show up?

How do you get someone like that, who's been a est for literally years, to stop? Barring that, how do you minimize the impact of their channel spamming and high-traffic-area blasting ways without making the game unplayable for your newly created characters, and guest characters?

Stop banning them, and try talking to them about what their grievance is. Chances are, there is -something- that originally set them off, and if you can get to the root of that problem, then maybe they will stop.

Next time they login, goto the player and ask them to talk and try to be reasonable.

You might actually get to the root of the problem, or maybe even treating them like a human with feelings might make them take a second look at their behavior and make them stop. Obviously, we have no details about what got this player banned originally, but in my experience, 95% of the people who mis-behave on a MUD are actually reasonable people that can be dealt with in a certain way that can defuse a situation.

Of course, there exists the completely non-reasonable %5 that no matter how much you try to reason with them, they'll continue to act like a child. If that's the case, I'm not sure that anything short of a permanent block on new characters would get the job done.

(Comment added by Hades_Kane on Sun Jun 24 18:20:44 2007)

Barring that, how do you minimize the impact of their channel spamming and high-traffic-area blasting ways without making the game unplayable for your newly created characters, and guest characters?

In regards to that, KaVir's thread on preventing undesirable actions might be a bit of a help, as he's come up with some very useful ideas on dealing spamming and such.

How do you get someone like that, who's been a est for literally years, to stop?

You have two options:

1) You don't. --- Eventually, hopefully, he'll grow up.

2) You change the game to prevent or discourage him from being a problem. For example, you only allow players above level X from using public channels... or you only allow approved players to use them... or you remove public channels entirely. Also take a look at the spamming thread that KaVir started a couple days ago. You could also require email confirmation from a non-free email address for all new players. You could also remove all restrictions on pk, so that your playerbase could repeatedly kill him when he started to become a problem. Or, you could implement a justice system run by your playerbase... where either of the last two options would facilitate *anyone* being able to get rid of him, rather than having to wait for you to do it for them. Also, consider implementing reasonable "ignore" features, so each individual can choose to stop listening... and perhaps remove the ability for guests and/or low level characters from being able to even *hear* certain global channels (except newbie/ask/etc), so that new players aren't discouraged by a rowdy/unruly/annoying individual.

If you make it hard enough for him (while not making the game too annoying for *good* players), he'll either learn to grow up, as with your first option (1), or he'll take it as a challenge and wait even longer to decide to gain some maturity.

Essentially, you're screwed either way, unless he decides on his own to be a bit more mature. Sorry to tell you.

Best of Luck,
-Jess

Keep immediately banning them and ignore any pleas they make about anything. Simply don't talk or acknowledge them beyond banning.

Hades_Kane every time we have a new batch of demis and the guy comes around, someone always tries to be 'the one' to be the nice person and sort the fellow out. I'm pretty sure that whatever the root cause might have been if there was one, they do this now just for their own entertainment. Nice thought though.

Jess: hahaha I like the honesty. I was just wondering if there was some super cure that has eluded us. I think we went a little too far in making the game annoying for normal people with little impact. it's going to take some persuasion and better ideas to move int back.

I was just wondering if there was some super cure that has eluded us.

Frankly, for a non-commercial game, I don't really see a problem with requiring approval before a user is entitled to use public channels.

Anyway, logically speaking, you only have a couple options:
1) Prevent the action: Change the game to prevent him from being annoying. If you do that, however, you have to do it unilaterally for *every* player, so it can't be too drastic. Approval is the best solution, in my opinion.
2) Instate better/swifter detection/punishment: Create a system where someone or something takes care of him when he causes a problem, where he will be dealt with immediately. (This goes along with my suggestion before to allow players to take care of the problem). In the case of a commercial game, this solution would involve having 24/7 staff online.
3) Do nothing: Ignore him. With that approach, however, nothing changes from where you are now until he decides to grow up.

Nothing can exist outside of that realm, only from a logical standpoint. That being said, if you're not willing to change the game any more drastically, that rules out (1), and obviously by posting here we've ruled out (3). That means your only option remaining, assuming you don't budge on what we've already established, is to:
1) Hire 24/7 staff
2) Give the code the ability to detect and deal with annoyances
3) Give your playerbase the ability to deal with annoyances

Those are the only possible options. Unfortunately, you're going to have to choose one. They suck. We know. *shrug* *smile*

Best of Luck,
-Jess

> Ever have a player that is repeatedly banned...

Create a new flag that you set on them. The flag simply makes it look like they're chatting, yelling, etc., but in truth the game is just dropping their communications on the floor. They see themselves doing it but don't see anyone reacting -- because no one can tell that they're doing anything. Once they get bored of not getting a rise out of anyone, they'll leave on their own.

The flag simply makes it look like they're chatting, yelling, etc., but in truth the game is just dropping their communications on the floor.

Even more fun would be to make them entirely invisible... as they weren't even playing the game. (If a player wanted to be annoying, he could just spam a social -- like walking into a room and hopping repeatedly -- which that would solve).

I naturally assumed the "ignoring him" option had been exhausted... but, for some reason, now that I think about it, it probably hasn't been in that manner. That's probably the best option.

Best of Luck,
-Jess

(Comment added by mann_jess on Mon Jun 25 12:04:59 2007)

By the way... if you wanted to do that with a minimal amount of coding, you could check the flag in interpret for socials and in act for other messages. -If- your channels are set up to use act properly, checking the parameters on act will tell you if the message is being sent to the speaker or to the listeners... Then just test it out before you use it, and you'll be good to go.

Best of Luck,
-Jess

Create a new flag that you set on them. The flag simply makes it look like they're chatting, yelling, etc., but in truth the game is just dropping their communications on the floor. They see themselves doing it but don't see anyone reacting -- because no one can tell that they're doing anything. Once they get bored of not getting a rise out of anyone, they'll leave on their own.

That's actually a very clever suggestion.

I suspect that's a pretty widely-used method. We've done that for years.

--matt

I've never actually seen it used anywhere, and I've been around the block a few times so to speak.

In addition to what others have suggested, you could give the ability to longer-term players to help curb the behavior of newbies. This is risky and I think it works best when combined with other less-standard restrictions. For instance, instead of banning the player from channels outright (staff ability), a regular player could slap another player with a flag which causes the system to be more strict in evaluating that players’ actions. In essence the players are giving the newbie the rope to hang himself.

I've never actually seen it used anywhere, and I've been around the block a few times so to speak.

I've seen it myself on numerous muds of varying kinds, called by different names. I know the DBS line of codebases for instance have that feature and call it "noscream". It's rather effective.

Necessity is the mother of invention, or so they say...

Epilogy does have a point. I suppose having never needed such a command would lend itself toward having never thought of something similar.

On the same note, I can see why a line of Dragonball based MUDs would almost certainly need something like that.

Then he'll figure out what's happening and treat it like a ban and just change his ip again. Changing your ip is easy

I say address the problem rather than keeping banning him, but you haven't told us why he does it.

The flag simply makes it look like they're chatting, yelling, etc., but in truth the game is just dropping their communications on the floor. They see themselves doing it but don't see anyone reacting -- because no one can tell that they're doing anything. Once they get bored of not getting a rise out of anyone, they'll leave on their own.

Do it both ways. That is make everyone else both invis and silent to them. They'll check the who list and see the mud is empty and log out.

You could also intercept their login, connect to another mud and pipe through all their input and output to that mud. ;-)

Send them to Medievia.

> I say address the problem rather than keeping banning him,
> but you haven't told us why he does it.

Every screwball usually has a different reason. Some simply enjoy being jerks and seeing everyone react to them being jerks. You're not going to reason with them and change their behavior -- they ENJOY their behavior.

> Send them to Medievia.

I'm having trouble deciding who is getting punished there.

>I'm having trouble deciding who is getting punished there.

(Comment added by Brinson on Wed Jun 27 13:25:42 2007)

Exactly.

Hi -

My advise would be to create an email filtering system. I use to have some problems with various players that logged from AOL - I simply created an email masking system that would check any site from *aol.com - then have a seperate masking system that would check for *@aol.com for their emails. Then simply create a filter for the allowed & disallowed emails within your ban code, write in your function prototype in your nanny.c or nanny.cpp file to send an unlock ID to the accepted email address & a close_connection() call on the unaccepted address.

This of course all depends on your codebase.

- Daos