Member Discussions

We all have them – the problem players, the ones that we’d rather NOT have. They come in many shapes, but they usually have two things in common; they want maximum attention for themselves and they are disruptive to the Mud in general. I am not speaking about the common ‘Twinks’ now. Those are usually easily dealt with. (On a side note, I wrote a number of light articles on the subject of Twinks some years ago. They can be found on http://www.topmudsites.com/articles.shtml, for those interested).

Anyhow, the REAL problem players are the ones that affect a large part of the playerbase in a negative way. They can be hackers, large-scale cheaters or bug-abusers, pkillers that get out of control, or just people who create social disturbances in the community, either because of their personality or out of sheer malice. But common for them all is that they are generally negative for the community, and that they scare away other players rather than attracting them.

Quite frequently the worst disturbances are caused by player relations gone sour. The REAL problem players paradoxically enough often are long-term, dedicated players, with a ‘position’ in the Mud (based on either power or politics). They often genuinely love the Mud - in fact they seem to think that they should have special privileges, because they have been playing there for so long.

There is a certain type of Twink that generally is known as a ‘Griefer’. Those have as their main hobby to irritate as many players as possible. When confronted, they usually fall back on the defence that they are doing it because it makes the game ‘fun’ for them. Of course they blatantly ignore the fact that what makes the Mud fun for them, at the same time makes it seriously NOT fun for a significant number of other people. Usually you can spot a Griefer right away. But long-time players, even those with a previously clean record, can sometimes turn into Griefers, if they start to get a bit bored by the normal gameplay and really would be better off leaving for a fresh game.

And then there is another type of player, who can be just as detrimental to a Mud, albeit often not intentionally, at least not from the start. Usually this type is referred to as ‘Drama Queens’. They are the ones who really cannot distinguish Roleplay from Real Life. They are often (but not always) female, very emotional, easily offended, and tend to get all worked up over nothing. They often lack a sense of humour, or at least take themselves – and the Game - way too seriously. They also like to involve the entire playerbase in whatever personal relation problems they might have.

And of course the real explosive situations occur when a Griefer clashes with a Drama Queen.

Below are a few examples of problem situations that involve large parts of the Mud. All of them but one are caused by player relations gone bad - especially when sex (virtual or real) is involved.

1. Player A systematically seeks out and abuses every bug he can find, and by doing so creates problems for several other players (the most common example is abuse of crash bugs). (The obvious way of dealing with this is of course to fix the bug. But all developing code usually has a few bugs. And all bugs aren’t always that easy to fix, or even to find).

2. Player A hacks or cracks the identity of player B and
a) acts like a total jerk publicly, thereby discrediting player B in the eyes of others
b) steals part of or all Player B’s equipment
c) deletes Player B’s character

3. Player A gets into a quarrel with several other players and decides to get even by ddosing the server. The Mud goes down for 3 days and everybody loses, including Player A, who just meant for it to go down 5 minutes, but couldn’t control the effects of what he started.

4. Player A gets into some conflict with Player B (usually pkill or just mouthing off) while still at low level. Player A decides to retaliate, and spends the next few weeks/months/years maniacally ‘levelling’ and collecting powerful equipment. Once he is strong enough, he starts repeatedly killing not only Player B, but also all his friends, Clan mates, group members or other allies, many of them totally innocent bystanders.

5. Player A and Player B hit it off in the Mud and decide to meat up in Real Life. Later their RL relation goes bad, and this poisons their virtual relation too, but also a large part of the other players, who are forced to take sides in the conflict.

6. Player A has mudsex with Player B’s virtual partner, and Player B retaliates extensively, by any means available, (verbal or physical harassment). The same situation often ensues when one partner tires of a virtual relation and hooks up with someone new. Or when Player A and Player B have a RL relation, and one of them decides to fool around a bit in the Mud, without the other’s approval.

7. And of course the most common ‘harassment’ situation of all, when Player A complains to the Admin, ‘He did this or that to me’, and player B retorts ‘He started it, he called me an (insert invective here)!” – ‘No, I didn’t!’ – ‘Yes you did!’ – ‘He’s lying!’ – ‘No I’m not!’

8. Or worse even, Player A has a bone to pick with Player B and accuses him publicly of cheating, possibly with no other cause than sheer spite. The Admin are left to decide who is telling the truth and who is lying in the tangled web of accusations and counter-accusations that ensue.

All of these examples have occurred in my own mud over the years, and most of them had rather serious ‘global’ consequences at the time. Several of them led to players leaving - and sometimes not the ones you’d have preferred to see go.

So, how do y’all handle situations like the above?

Molly O'Hara of 4 Dimensions

I tend to have a pacifist manner of rule when it comes to things. If it involves people, you can step in and do something, but you are going to piss someone off. If you let it work itself out, someone will get pissed off. Only different? You did not take sides. People are going to get pissed and leave because of something. If you make it because of you, they are less likely to return down the road.

Cheating/Bugs/Crashes/DDOS

This is another story altogether that you do have to handle. Cheating is typically part of the game, it is finding a "loophole" in the system and using it. Sometimes this makes a good player, sometimes this makes on a cheater. Finding the fine line is hard and threading it even harder. Typically, I will just patch a problem that is reported and leave it at that. If the "cheater" is abusing a large bug that has unbalanced the game to a great deal then you will have to rectify the problem by taking equipment/reducing stats/etc. This is never pretty, but it has to be done. If you get your player base in the understanding of what is acceptable and what is not, it makes things better.

This is for 1/2 incidents, if you have someone that is a chronic abuser, you might unfortunately have to start looking into banning or logging the player. Only exception are for players that crash the game on purpose. You need to evaluate for what reasons (duping/cheating/malicious/etc). If they are doing it to be bastards, they need to go. If they are doing it to dupe or go through some other method of cheating, you need to patch it or watch others and try to catch them. Banning might come in again, but then again, it might not.

I can say I have been lucky not to have too many problems. Most of the "cheating" I have had has been on the small scale. I don't have to many problems because mainly my playerbase has been mostly male (problems as relating to relationships between male/female players, etc). I tend to let some problems work themselves out so the players know that I don't pick sides or play favorites.

Forgot to add, getting some abusers on your side is a good thing, they have a knack for finding bugs that normal players won't find. If you toss them a bone sometimes you will get a good player. A lot of "abusers" I found are actually good players who have a tendancy to win at all costs. If you can get them to side with you and report bugs, they will become a valuable assist in catching giant gaping holes before they happen and save you time in cleaning up the mess. Have had a handful of players like that and haven't banned any of them, instead they worked with me in finding bugs and reporting them.

--X

Number 1 and 2 may be problems with the mud requiring me to address (programming not punishment). Although in my experience number 2 is far more likely a problem with the player who got 'hijacked' as I've never seen a brute force, sniff attack or server side 'hijacking' in any of the muds I've been a part of. And none of them implemented any reasonable mechanisms to guard against it.

Number 3 may also be a problem assuming you are talking about an actual network server attack rather than a player gleefully crashing the mud repeatedly. In that case I'd first try firewalling, filtering, and legal options possible. After all this is recognized as a criminal act today in most locales.

Number 4-8 are none of my business. Although establishing an environment/culture/community where that is so is my business. ;-)

> 1. Player A systematically seeks out and abuses every
> bug he can find, and by doing so creates problems for
> several other players

Without wishing to sound too pompous, this is mostly your fault for introducing the bugs in the first place. :-)

The best way to deal with this is several levels of careful testing and scrutiny of any and all code *before* it goes live.

Of course something will inevitably slip through, I do realise that. The best way to deal with that is to offer (small) rewards to players who report bugs without exploiting them.

Tackling issues that are not so much bugs as game balance problems is trickier. On the whole I think the best thing to do there is change the rules (if you need to) but *don't* penalise anyone who has taken advantage of it. You have to be very careful about (effectively) penalising clever game strategies.


> 2. Player A hacks or cracks the identity of player B

Restore player B to his previous state (you have backups of everything, of course!) Then give him a stern lecture about not revealing his passwords.


> 3. Player A gets into a quarrel with several other
> players and decides to get even by ddosing the server.

Have him arrested. Then talk to your ISP about technical solutions which might help avoid the problem in the future.


> 4. Player A gets into some conflict with Player B
> (usually pkill or just mouthing off) while still at low
> level. Player A decides to retaliate, and spends the
> next few weeks/months/years maniacally ‘levelling’ and
> collecting powerful equipment. Once he is strong enough,
> he starts repeatedly killing not only Player B, but also
> all his friends, Clan mates, group members or other
> allies, many of them totally innocent bystanders.

You either allow player-killing or you don't. If you do, you have to accept that players are going to kill each other sometimes. If this sort of situation bothers you then the best (actually, to my mind, the only) way to deal with it is within the game world. For example, introduce NPC town guards or bounty hunters whose job it is to track down players who have committed murder and throw them in prison.


> 5. Player A and Player B hit it off in the Mud and
> decide to meat up in Real Life. Later their RL relation
> goes bad, and this poisons their virtual relation too,
> but also a large part of the other players, who are
> forced to take sides in the conflict.

I can't really see why that would be a problem.


> 6. Player A has mudsex with Player B’s virtual partner,
> and Player B retaliates extensively, by any means
> available, (verbal or physical harassment).

On the whole that, again, doesn't seem to me to be a problem. It could just be good roleplay. Most MUDs will probably have some kind of policy on harassment, but (IMO) it should be strictly limited to out-of-character interactions. Thus, it is fine for a dwarf to go round muttering 'f*cking elves, I'd like to send the whole f*cking lot of 'em back to the Forest Of Alfheim'. It's not acceptable to make a similar sort of remark about black people and Africa.

If harassment gets to the point of making out-of-character threats then it may be necessary to step in, but simply allowing one player to ignore anything another player says is probably all that's needed.


> 7. And of course the most common ‘harassment’ situation
> of all, when Player A complains to the Admin, ‘He did
> this or that to me’, and player B retorts ‘He started
> it, he called me an (insert invective here)!” – ‘No, I
> didn’t!’ – ‘Yes you did!’ – ‘He’s lying!’ – ‘No I’m not!’

The answer to this (and, indeed, to many other such problems, including number 8 on your list) is to keep a logfile of absolutely *everything* any player types at all times. Typically you don't need to keep it for very long (the past few days' worth) and the data is probably highly compressible, so it shouldn't take up too much space if zipped.

Generally I just make everything thats going on public, everyone stupid will flee the MUSH because they think it should have stayed private, and the kinds of mature players that you want to keep around will wave to the losers that are fleeing.

IMHO The real problem players are the newbie fakers. You know, they do nothing wrong, but constantly want something and try and act like know nothing newbies. They are experienced MUSHers or MUDers but try and take advantage of admin to attain an alterior motive. They also tend to try and trick staff into agreeing to things that they know are not allowed or standard by using word games and situational ring arounds. The biggest thing is they ask if they can RP something because they think it will be cool, then after you say yes because you to think the rp will be cool they turn around and say something like, well if I can rp this RPG book WTF says I get nine gagillion gold coins because of it.

This is very true, on my game I award experience for reporting found bugs/cheats.

#1-3 are all very serious offenses, IMHO.

#1 - I'd ask chronic abusers of any rule to leave the game. I happen to view bug exploitation as particularly bad, so they wouldn't get many chances.

#2 and #3 are just plain antisocial. Delete/ban. In the case of #3, I'd also inform them that I'm investigating legal options.

#4 seems acceptable to me, as long as player A follows the game's rules on repeat killing.

#5 and 6 - Warn players to keep the subject off of public channels/boards/forums. If they persist after a few warnings, start handing out nochans. The topics are completely nonconstructive, and this is the only neutral way to keep it from polarizing the whole pbase. They can still argue on tells, but that's far less inflammatory.

#7 and 8 - If there's no evidence, you really can't make a decision. IMO you should just tell everyone to drop it, as above. The conversation's going nowhere fast.

You sound like my wife (office manager) to whom all interpersonal conflicts are complicated, that these conflicts deserve a big slice of her thinking time and energy, and if any of the parties walk away angry then she failed as a manager.

Her scenario descriptions are always complex and she gives me way more information than I need. They usually end with me saying, "Warn them, and fire them if they do it again." Somehow she gets bogged down in the details and she never follows my advice, so we go round and round with these same issues all the time.

Honestly, I think she secretly takes pleasure in the poilitics and high drama. But anyways, maybe you will follow this simple, yet elegant advice: :-)

1. Publicly applaud their bug finding skills and give them rewards for all the bugs they report (key word is report, not exploit). Fix the bugs. Warn them against exploiting bugs though, and ban them if they do it.

2. Ban them. Help the victim with replacement items in game. It really costs you nothing but a few minutes and generates a ton of good will. If it happens again to the same person, fool me once shame on you...

3. Track them down and go after them to the extent that you're comfortable. I'm personally very comfortable going after people and if they tick me off enough, I'll spend a lot of my own money to get face to face (no I'm not talking about violence, unless you like that sort of thing). Move to an ISP that knows how to mitigate DDOS attacks.

4-6 Warn them, and ban them if it continues.

7. Tell them to work out their differences privately or they are both banned. Put the responsiblity to solving the problem on themselves. Don't fool yourself into thinking you were going to be able to solve it anyways.

8. Accuser must show some proof of cheating or shut up. Ban them if it continues.

1. Make him/her an admin if it's a notorious bug abuser that abuses hard to find bugs.

2. Harsh punishment, this way you avoid future problems. To compare it with RL, just because someone doesn't lock his front door doesn't mean you can steal his furniture.

3. Same story as above. In 90% of the cases it's the admin's fault though.

4. The player would have done so anyways. Some people will kill everyone just because they can. Tell them to find a hardcore pkill mud to blow off steam and ban them if they don't.

5. This is only good for the mud, drama keeps things interesting.

6. See 5.

7. Kids will be kids, tell them to find a mud with other 12 year olds to blow off steam and ban them if they don't.

8. This isn't the player's fault, but the admin's fault. If you are too stupid to see who is lying there will be people who take advantage of it. Generally the drama queens are good at exploiting the admins, just keep in mind they love strong man who tell them to shut up and be a good girl.