I concur. The point of the rules is to prevent the eq being on someone that the recently deceased has no flags on

-Axiom One-

So does this mean if my friend pk's someone and then 10 minutes later toss's me some extra junk from the victim that I could be punished? Regardless if I knew he had pked someone for it? Just asking to make sure its very clear =)

Similar discussions have came up in the past. Every situation will probably be handled differently depending on what information is available to the imm making the decisions. I've worked in law enforcement type field before and know that you can only work with what you have in front of you.

Its hard to write rules to work for every possible scenario. This game is way too complex and much to the dismay of most people, the punishments will differ depending on who gives them. I am sure the 33+'s try to do their best to be consistent, but its really hard to when there are so many variables.

In response to your question Mr. Brafu, my guess would be that if someone complained about illegal equipment distributing, then an imm would look into it and you probably would be initially punished. You may be able to talk your way out of it if you were truly clueless although your "friend" would be stuck in the abyss probably.

The one potential problem I see with this thread is that people are going to quote Noryl's response and bend it a little and come back to what he said when something similar but different happens again and someone is punished.

Cordova,
This self-zombifying mantra "its hard to write rules to work for every possible scenario" has gotten old already back when I started playing. If it's so hard, why do imms still bother and write them? Why not just drop them all (which is a good enough approach).

But I'm afraid I have to disappoint you. Arctic is a very restricted virtual world with fully controllable mechanics. It's EASY for all the rules except multiing which relies on out-of-engine uncontrollable stuff.
This particular rule is perfectly formalizable e.g. by adding extra flags on items such as 'pkloot of X by Y', making them lootable only by/givable to murderer(s), victim and murderers of murderers, and self-destructing if they end up on the ground/mob when flag goes off.

Hence your sacred mantra actually translates into 'we bother with that crap because Aristox is the only coder and has no time to handle everything'. Would you please use this less hypocritical interpretation in the future.

So, with all of the things on the mud that need attention coding-wise, this should be top priority? Are you morons that completely out of control that you can't stop yourselves from doing this? If you are in the process of dying, just don't ditch your equipment, it's a simple concept. The person dealing with it may not have a half hour to listen to everybody's stories, to go through the logs, and to seek out who took/lost what, so the end result will usually just be whoever did the initial dying/receiving will be smote, because there is no real reason or excuse to do it to begin with. I'm guessing this is stemming from the Luze/Lauriel passoff, and if it is, both should feel lucky that Vespin decided to let Lauriel sort it out before abyssing both, especially considering Lauriel's exploits through this wipe.

If you think no rules is a good approach, log on during a Chaos Day, after the first two hours or so half the logged players are crying for it to end already. 90% of the people on the mud have no self control, and the worst part of it is that almost all of them fall into the larger clans.

Like most other complaints, this all comes down to one thing-
Stop playing like morons and you won't have any of these problems.

Re: Shesh

What I wrote were my opinions, nothing more. I am only a Hero and do not enforce or write any of the policies for the mud. Yes, it would be possible to add addendums to the rules/policies help file for every new episode of mechanics abuse, but then the help file will become huge, and we all know people love reading those big things. I am guessing the rules are set out in the most basic form with the hope that people get an understanding of what is desired. I am pretty sure the rules for Arctic have not really changed in my 8 years of playing this game. Multying is the only major change that I can remember, but that was before my time.

The coding for the game mechanics is controlled, however, unfortunately a coder may miss a possible scenario where what they are coding can be abused. It is probably possible to make a perfect system, although it would require a few more coders, preferable ones who would do it full time rather then in their free time.

Lastly I did not mean to point fingers at anybody for anything, I have no real opinion on the incident that happened between Outlaw and BSP in Flotsam. I fail to see how I come off as a hypocrit. I am probably missing something. I am sure if I was a victim to what I felt was unfair punishments I may hold different opinions but I don't see how the system could be any better then it is. Removing all rules would not work at all. Chaos is great fun for awhile, but it gets old after a day.

Re: Kiff.
Yes, that's my point, I believe turning the set of so-called 'rules' into game mechanics wherever possible, should be the top priority coding-wise.
And no, I have no relation to Lauriel/Luze incident.

Re: Kiff, Cordova.
Your example of chaos days just doesn't fit; that disorder is caused more by the upcoming restore than by the absence of rules.

It could be just me, but every disappointment I ever felt playing Arctic, was caused by immortal intervention which I considered at that time unfair or biased.

If you've been involved with immortal intervention enough for it to become a problem, and it seems biased, maybe it's because you're on the rule bending end of it a bit too often? I wasn't talking about you being involved with the Luze/Lauriel thing, I was refering to the reason why this thread was started.

Implying that it's somebody's responsibility to code a way to make everything unabusable is rediculous. If you don't like punishments differing, then consider when it was quite common for people to be deleted on the spot for things that now warrant a harsh talking to, and consider yourself lucky every time an immortal intervenes and nobody loses their character.

Every time something is coded into the pkill system to curb anything from randoming to trash, to passing off equipment, it is abused to no end by everybody until it has to be removed.

There was the (person in group A) attacks (person in group B), *everyone* in group B has flags against *everyone* in group A. (I personally prefered this) It had nothing to do with death, other than getting a longer flag, and simply attacking someone left you open for revenge...
then everyone started provoking groups into attacking low levels, or taking low levels around large groups to get caught into area for flags.
Then a dozen systems in between, leading to the current mess where you have to actually die to be able to get flags on anyone, which makes absolutely no sense, unless you have more people able to back you up, or the person who killed you was pathetically weak.
And still, people abuse it. I see mid sized groups composed of one or two good characters, and three trashy ones. Without fail, they will go out hunting their targets and as soon as the target is held/immobilized/close to dying, the decent characters will flee off and leave the flags to the crap ones.

Then there's the idea of having items flagged lootable by certain people. So if you and I kill Cordova, we and he are the only ones able to loot him? (and possibly his groupmates) So if a third party comes in, they have absolutely no access to the equipment no matter what, even if it was someone allied with Cordova but not grouped with him at the time. Then, if you loot it, you can't be able to drop it, otherwise another problem arises. Equipment laying on the floor with no owner, that cannot be looted by anyone but this small select people on the mud. And if you can't drop it, then you get the people who will do things like carry a near full inventory of bread, so during frantic fighting, when looting needs to be done fast, their assailant gets a handful of food and they get to run back in and loot. If it's flagged to me only, and I'm carrying it, can thieves steal it? Mob thieves? (If so, only non charmed ones?) Did you just make all equipment temporarily nosteal so long as somebody wants to throw it onto a low level and kill them to flag it all to themselves? If I kill you, and then Cordova kills me, and the three of us are completely unaffiliated with eachother, are you still allowed to take that equipment that you lost? Or is it now semi-permanently Cordova's? The no give/drop thing was tried before (in a somewhat primitive form) and was a spectacular failure, because all of these variables that can pop up inevitably will pop up, because if a rule gets coded into the game then everybody acts as if that is absolute law, and anything that can get around it is completely legitimate. You code one more thing on top of the existing system and it just opens up an innumerable amount of loopholes.

With people able to fight as they choose, with several groups against eachother, or several solo people against eachother, the amount of time just working out a system that would be fair to everyone in the fights and make some vague semblance of sense wouldn't be worth the effort, when it's easier to just give people a simple guideline and damn them when they can't follow it.

Wether it compares to Chaos Day or not is moot, with the amount of self control the current players display, the mud would be unplayable without rules. Even this wipe, when the BSP/Ahma side had wiped out Wild and found themselves without any opposition, what was the next step? To kill every single person they came across on the mud, be it level thirty or level one, until they started getting deleted (for something similar to what started this thread off, but surely compounded by their behaviour). Sooner or later it needs to be dealt with by immortals because it hurts the playerbase in general and has no benefits other than bloating the egos of a handful of people.

And was it last wipe, when the same general group of people had leveled faster than everyone else, and took that advantage to park themselves outside of a zone to kill everyone that approached, so nobody else on the mud could get the spell heal. While it's a strategic move, and helpful to their group of people, it just fucks up the mud for the other 90% of players, and nobody is going to want to cater to the clans that cause more problems than they're worth a lot of the time.

If you know of some way to set all of this up without leaving dozens of gaping holes in the system, feel free to post suggestions, there's always ongoing conversations about the pkill system. But just criticizing Cordova when he offered a polite assessment of the situation then insisting it's somebody's responsibility to code a way to force people to behave themselves isn't going to win any fans.

Re: Kiff.
Unfortunately if you're looking for common sense and simplicity while I'm looking for the fair game of zero sum, we are unlikely to come to an agreement.

Nevertheless, I sense some flaws in that 'let's not touch it or it goes boom' logic of yours. To handle the undesirable side effects there's a reactive management approach and it works; for example, unlike you, I consider current pk system rather good.

And lastly, I have never said it is someone's 'responsibility' to do anything, I just believe it's the way to go. You are missing the whole point, you're trying to apply your RL morale principles on mud when you're talking about how people should 'behave'. It's not people, it's characters, their 'ethics' are set up by Aristox.

Those characters in the MUD are played by RL people who respond to RL morale principles.

Although this is indeed 'just a game', you can't simply sever it from 'real life'.

If you allow people to do whatever the hell they want, the MUD will burn out.

I'm not asking anyone to show morales, the only way I suggest people to behave is within the rules stated. In my last post, if your reference to morales is what I mentioned about the genocide of the mud by one clan, or camping of a zone, this has nothing to do with morale but an appreciation of the rules. In help pkill it states that pkilling is a feature of the game, not the purpose, and the rules are there to protect players while restraining or punishing "grief players". People who are just killing everyone in sight just because they can do it without repercussions, or whos actions have a generally negative effect on nearly everyone else who is trying to play would fall into the "grief players" category for me.
But if it's too much to ask people to show common sense, then the mud is doomed. Why should the limited coding staff make it their first priority to code a way to force people to display common sense or self control? And aside from the practical part of it, is looting and passing equipment really that much of a problem for *EVERYONE* that it needs an elaborate system in place to be prevented? Will this be more beneficiary to the average player than the amount of potential problems it will cause, or should it just be in place to take care of those once a month clan skirmishes where somebody grows the balls or loses enough brains to do it?
Things that are restricting to what you can do generally end up causing so much hassle to the rest of the playerbase that the occasional victim that benefits from the system is far outweighed.
Some fairly recent, somewhat similar examples would be the changes to charmies and reciting scrolls/using wands. It helps out for those people who get caught by Trashmage and his eight firestorm wanding pigeons, but at the same time it screws soloers who would use the same thing to pass a part of a zone they otherwise wouldn't be able to, or to help them out with a last minute recall so they don't lose potentially days of playing time to an otherwise avoidable death.
The only thing I don't like about the current pkill system, which completely turns me off to the whole thing, is that you have to actually die for a flag. It's not a huge deal for clans, but for an unclanned player, if you get pkilled you might as well just rest up and head back into a zone because you have an extremely slim chance of ever getting revenge now. By the time you get enough equipment to kill whoever killed you, or remem, then get mobile, you have to hope you can find them before they run out the flags. Then, on top of that, in your weakened state you have to kill them before their flag wears out, since it will never renew itself (unless they kill you again). I've watched people in this situation, only to end up finding their killer, attacking them around an inn, then watching helplessly as the killer just flees their way back into the inn and rents seconds later. The system totally caters to the aggressor, and is great for small ambushes, but it really screws over people who don't have immediate backup waiting to help out.

In the end the solution is simple:

Stop stepping into the gray area of the rules at every turn and you will have nothing to worry about, topics like this will never be started, and the staff can spend their time on more productive things, IE tournaments, quests, class improvements, new spells, fixing old zones, creating new ones, etc.

-Sancho

I agree.. No matter what rulez or system is in place. There are ALLWAYS grey areas that people find and try to abuse it.. All people havet to do is stop going into the grey areas and the mud will be just fine and everyone will have fun.

The problem with this mud is that 60% of its population is nothing more than jackass's who love screwin with everyone. Maybe if the imm's would start getting tough and start week bannings and deletions we would not need to create new rules and all this bull. Im sorry but I fail to see how warning someone 50 times and then abyssing them for a few days does jack to show them how "serious" you are about the rules. This isn't some game run by a company thats making money so they have to be "fair" and even handed. I say just bitch slap anyone who steps outa line and you will see all the jackass's shape up or leave.

Course I have a low tolerance for ignorant people so I tend to believe Aristox punishment policy is VERY VERY weak. "Hang em High" is my policy.

[color=blue]And when people like you are in charge, games lose about 2/3 of their players, then after some endless zoning, the other 1/3 either leave because the game is stale as shit, or they start pking.[/color]

With people like me in charge games tend to be played by decent people who wanna have fun more than they wanna screw with other people. I can't see how anyone who follows the rules would give a damn if some jackass who's always skirting the rules gets banned or deleted.

What does it say about Arctic if getting tough on the losers means killing the game?

In all my years on Arctic (and in really any game) I have only gotton in trouble maybe 3 times and I have been gaming online for some 7 odd years. Its not very hard to stay outa trouble so long as your not trying to skirt the very edge of whats legal and whats not.

I think there are some problems that could probably be dealt with a little better. But I have to disagree with you on this comment. I've been mudding for 5-6 years now which as been under Aristox's rule.

That being said I am still fairly familiar with what happened before that time and Aristox is the best overlord by far, as far as enforcing game rules and limiting/stopping immortal cheating of any kind.

I'll be agreeing with Haley here. Anybody remember that paladin cheater char that was nobash, could cash heal, etc, that was used for randoming purposes?

Heh anyone remember the paladin that was rewarded with fireshield for testing some things out?

Aristox is much more strict in terms of enforcement of rules than anyone has ever been, and he always has been. He just doesn't intervene as much these days (maybe not around, maybe letting others do it instead)

Generally I agree with Brafu. I've gotten abyssed twice I think and both time I probably deserved it and I certainly never repeated the offenses that got me in trouble. Generally if you are playing the game and have to think really hard on whether something is within the rules or not you probably shouldn't do it.

I would like to add that I don't agree with Brafu on how aristox is not harsh enough with the punishments. This wipe and last to a certain extent were by far the funnest wipes i've had here on arctic. Maybe I'm only saying this because I really haven't been killed that much, but that's what happens when you don't mess with other people.

Don't get me wrong!! I totally agree that Aristox is probably the best head imm this mud has ever had and I know he takes the rules serious. But I just don't believe that trouble makers should be given as many second chances as they have been given. If you get into trouble more than 2 times a wipe for doing something illegal then you should be at the very least mass deleted and told that the next time you will be banned. Now granted sometimes people get into trouble for a simple mistake and that can be taken into account. But it seems that the SAME people each and EVERY wipe are getting into trouble time and time again and no amount of punishment by Aristox seems to be getting the message through. I say we need to stop giving these people another chance to find a grey area in the rules that they can abuse and then go "Its illegal? OMG I had no idea!! Im sooo sorry."

PS. I realize that bans are easy to get around if you know a bit about the internet. But some people rather not have their IP range banned (its simple faster mudding) so they would take it serious.

Please just remember there is a difference between being abyssed because you might have done something wrong and actually doing something wrong.

I'm quite sure that Aristox and company deal with offenders and repeat offenders qutie harshly.

[color=blue]I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that it was one of Morgion's many... 'special' characters? I remember when people like Cale were still around, and I think a large part of Aristox being better to many people is that he communicates with them much more...

Also, certain imms are gone now. I could only imagine how certain people would react if someonelike Morgion was still around, nuking characters because he's in a drunken rage, or poofing around as a 400+stab dmg hasted ams nobash thief killing whomever he happens to see.[/color]

You won't get any argument from me that the imm's we have now are probably the best bunch of people we have had as far as not abusing the players go. I personally have been abused by Morgion (only once) when he was drunk and its not even remotely fun. He even banned me when I finally blew up at him and told him where he could shove his abusing ass. Lucky for me he was already retired at this point and Aristox had been in power for a year or so already.

So I do have a firm grasp at just how bad things could be with the wrong head imm in charge of things. People had better prey I never become a imm because I will have nothing better (or more fun) to do with my free time than sit on the mud and police their every action.

Directed mainly at Shesh.
If we were to code a perfect system to prevent any sort of illegal activity (aside from multi-ing) I think the size of the source file would become immense. Hard coding every rule into the system would truly be a waste of time.
The time invested in coding that perfect system would be easily exceeded by testing, bug fixes and tweaks. Not to mention the effect that it would have on currently stable game code not related to pk. One just never knows.

No offense to you intended, but if you truely think our top priority is to strictly code something like this over all else, then i'm glad you are not in charge.

-Axiom One-

Yeah, much more easy to have 101 bored idiots around like imm XXX who will piss ppl by his actions. Complet solution. *Appl*.
You doesnt even try to code such things - just talking about "ahh, its impossible!", "ahh, its too complex", "ahh code will be too huge!". Fuckyou.

Yeah seriously, who needs features? I mean, why would we want faster boot times/more reliable data, more skills/spells, revamped classes, game balancing, and newer better zones.

2Aristox: How about to ban me from forums, dork? Keep going its so fun!

You mean to tell me I read all the way down this entire thread just to see what Loretta wrote... And that's it?

Dork? The final blow was "dork"

I've never been one to make fun of people who don't know how to speak english well. The amount of time they spent to learn what they know for excedes any time I've spent learning another language, so they certainly have one up on me.

However, as a connoisseur verbal assault, I do believe you could have done much better with utilization of any curse, follow by a body part.

It's a very easy forumla to follow, and it's a win-win situation. Even if the name you come up with doesn't make sense, chances are it's funny, so you win either way. Lets try: f*ckhead sh*tface c*ckfoot

Now you see, the first two are reasonable things to call another person, the third one however... Well, it makes me giggle.

Cockfoot, oh the novelty just doesn't seem to wear

-Sky

you're a dumbass

It's not easy being greeeeeeeeeeeen...

I'd have to agree with that analysis.

~Rorc

is rorc the kettle or the pot in this situation?

He's the saucepan.

I think Cordova sounds like a Jedi.. reread his post and think about it.

Anyway, during the 4th pwipe I was deleted by an imm, due to having my name similiar to someone else's who broke the rules. I confronted the imm, about the situation, and he actually apologized and remade my character.. He also gave him some incredible stats, nothing broken but well worth the trouble of having my highest level char at the time deleted. I dont remember his name, but I do know that it was an accident, and when everything was said and done I felt that his folly was mended.

I'd also like to say that making a perfect code is impossible. Perfection is a goal unattainable, and even if it was attainable.. it wouldn't be perfect to another person. Now that I believe that is said.. Does anyone remember the days of Shriners.. They changed the way the game works, and we are still here. Not because of rules, or harsh punishments, but because in the simpliest terms... we endured. Artic is based loosely on the fact that you can be killed anytime by anyone if they are stronger.. If that isn't the type of game for you, then might I suggest Solitaire?

Now use your imagination, we have this near perfect code in place.. but the ping ( lag ) is horrible.. How long did it take to make this code? How much time was taken away from creating new zones and classes, or even fixing bugs? How much longer will it take new zones to come out, just because the imm's have to mesh the code in properly? Would the reprecussion's of a good code, keep the old player's.. while attracting new ones? I know your going to say yes of course.. its a great system, but in actuality we really have no idea.

There are many factors that must be put into account before any one person can make a judgement on the matters at hand... And also please think about the imm's coding Artic. I dont believe they get paid to try to improve this on there offtime... so why not stop complaining about how the system is, and use the idea forum.