From: msjle@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Joi L. Ellis)
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin
Subject: Re: Transcript of the "God Conference on Players' Rights"
Date: 12 Jan 1993 12:18:04 -0600
Organization: Educational Computing Network
NNTP-Posting-Host: uxa.ecn.bgu.edu

trsnyder@mcs.drexel.edu (Bob Snyder) writes:

>>>>>> In article <1ish71INNr0k@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu>, msjle@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu
>>>>>> (Joi L. Ellis) writes:

Apologies to Dragon's Dawn.  I should have said Dragon's DEN in my first
post.  I didn't notice the mistake until I re-read part of this today.
Sorry!

>Joi> Ask?  Get real.  Every wizard I've talked to has refused to answer my
>Joi> questions on policy or basic rules.  I'm left to experiment and
>Joi> trial-n-error to find out what the gods allow and what they don't.  I

>Every wizard?  One is left to wonder if this is the wizards' fault, or the
>player's.  As a god on an LP, and a former wizard for a MUSH, I answer(ed)
>every question I get on policy.  Sometimes, though, the answer is "I don't
>know" or "I'll have to check to see what the other admins think about that."

Yes, I get that one, too.  Rarely to I ever get an answer.  Mostly I get
no answer back at all.  It's like talking to a dead phone.

>Joi> stopped playing SouCon because everything I tried to do that I thought
>Joi> would be appreciated turned out to be against the rules.  And these
>Joi> rules were never posted.  NONE of those objects were malicious or
>Joi> out-of-theme.  I got *really* tired of wasting my time coding objects
>Joi> that could never get put to any public use. 

>SouCon does have rules posted.  However, I suspect you were bitten by
>the "common sense" rule that a lot of muds run under.  If using the
>common sense of the administrator, something is "bad", then it is
>stopped.  You can't legislate everything.  If you try, you'll spend
>more time reading/writting rules than enjoying yourself.  For example,
>there's no rule (that I recall) that prevents you from calling
>yourself in roleplay the illigitimate love child of Player X.
>However, if Player X objects or isn't told, most administrators would
>deem this "bad" and put a stop to it.

Every mud/mush has different rules.  I had gotten the impressions that
SouCon was rather new and still lacking many of the items because no one
had had time to code them yet.  I saw similar things on similar muds and
found them to be very useful items.  There was even an function
documented in the help but which was supposed to be restricted to
wizards.  A bug in the server allowed non-wizards to use it.  The help
there was several months out of date and a lot of functions were
undocumented.  Nothing was posted that said this particular function was
not to be used by players.  I wrote an object that did, so solve a
particular problem, and the wizards came down on me like a ton of bricks. 
I suppose this was all my fault, right?  Just like everything else.
 
With every mud having different, unposted policies, there is no such
thing as common sense because none of it is common to all mushes.

>The problem comes, of course, when your common sense is different from that
>of the administrators.  In that case you probably want to move on to a
>different mud which is more closely aligned with yourself.

>Joi> the legality of some action.  On a mush/mud/lp, who do you ask?  No game
>Joi> I've been on has had  100% wizard coverage, and none of them had really
>Joi> helpful wizards.  The wizzes on Dragon's Dawn don't answer questions,
>Joi> and even basic questions and suggestions get wizard-flamed.

>100% coverage is impractical.  However, usually the mud will provide mail...

>Joi> Hell, Dragon's Dawn won't even fix drastic damage done to a
>Joi> player by a bug in new code.  And they don't have much in the way
>Joi> of rules and guidelines online ANYWHERE.  I asked for *that* and
>Joi> got flamed by a god and a wizard.

>Sometimes this can't be done, as Amby pointed out in a different article.

Both the cases I described were called BUGS by the wizards, not DB
CORRUPTION, in the cases where you could get an answer at all.  The
attitude seems to be "Well, gee, my little objected destroyed your
character because it had a bug?  I'm sorry,  but you're screwed.  You've
lost two weeks worth of time and progress?  Tough."


>Joi> The only thing I'd like to see you all agree on is fair treatment for
>Joi> your players.  If you write a new combat system that ends up killing
>Joi> most of your players, you shouldn't be surprised to hear complaints
>Joi> about it, especially when you didn't post anything about the changes
>Joi> anywhere.  WHen you change the store code and introduce a bug that
>Joi> STEALS MONEY from characters, you should be willing to restore the funds
>Joi> if players can produce logs or other proof of their previous status.

>Fine.  I don't see a problem with this.  I also don't see a connection with
>this and the previous section of your article.

You don't?  It seems pretty clear to me.

>Joi> If players offer suggestions or comments you've heard a million times
>Joi> before, but which aren't discussed anywhere in your help or rules
>Joi> system, you don't need to jump down their throats about it.   If you
>Joi> deliberately boot your game so you can install something on it, and
>Joi> don't give your players enough (or any!) warning, you don't need to jump
>Joi> on their butts when they complain afterwards.

>Sometimes muds need to come down quickly, and often when they come back up,
>the admins are quite busy trying to reslove the crisis that caused it to go
>down.

This isn't the point.  Yes, games do go down on their own.  If, though,
you take it down yourself and don't warn your players about it, expect
them to be rather irritated about it.  On a Mush it's not any big loss.
On a LP with a quest, it can cause the player to lose hours worth of
work.

In the cases I'm discussing here, said wizard simply stated "I wanted to
install a new object" or "I didn't like the lag."  

This kind of thing is extremely frustrating to players.  If lag is a
problem, players don't object to rebooting the thing.  They *do* object
to losing 3 hours worth of advancement because they didn't get enough
warning to get back to a store to save/sell what they had acquired.  
Solving quests is required for advancement, and many of them take
literally hours of real life time to solve, and being *that close* to
solving one, only to lose it in an unexpected reset, is rather
infuriating.

>Joi> The most frustrating thing I've seen about playing muds/mushes/whatever
>Joi> is the high-handed way wizards and gods treat their players.  If you'd
>Joi> COMMUNICATE with your players instead of flaming them, you'd all be
>Joi> better off.  I detest asking some immortal a question, only to be told
>Joi> GO READ THE HELP.  It's not IN the damn help, or I wouldn't be asking!
>Joi> 50% of the entries under DD's main help have NOTHING in them, and most
>Joi> of the rest are out of date.

>I would say quite a bit of the same stuff, except reverse "player" and "god".
>Jumping down some god's throat about x, y, or z, when they are volunteering
>their time to run a game for your amusement isn't particularly nice, and tends
>to irritate them.

It's always the same thing, isn't it?  It's ok for you to be rude to
your players because some players are rude to you?  Hmph.  I've ALWAYS
tried to be polite and abide by the posted rules.  I'm continually
getting bitten by unwritten, unposted rules and rude wizards.

I've decided that playing Muds and Mushes aren't worth the frustration
they cause me.  Hriss on Dragon's Dawn, and Dishana on SouCon are no more.  
Feel free to @toad or @dest them as you see fit.  I no longer enjoy playing 
your games.  

If you with to discuss any of this with me, you'll have to use email
because I'm unsubbing myself from this entire area.  I no longer want to
artificially raise my own blood pressure with this crap.


>Bob
-- 
Joi Ellis                      msjle@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu
Student Residential Programs   Western Illinois University