The Elephant in the Room

I hesitate to air these sorts of administrative concerns over the idea board, so rather than post my response in-game where everyone (especially impressionable newbies) can see it, I'll write it out here.

There were a couple of idea posts overnight that are oddly atypical of what we administrators hear from players.  In effect, they called for tightening up regulation of unmanned looping to get gold or level up... Imagine that.  Players asking for rules making it harder to get to 50 and get rich.  On the one hand, it pleases me to hear players starting to appreciate why this sort of gameplay is bad.  On the other hand though, I'm not pleased that we let the situation get to a point where players are starting to complain about it.

The years of admin experience we have means we can typically spot problematic behavior early on, and this is why we try to nip this sort of unfair play in the bud by coming down on people who start doing stuff like gold looping.  What's sparked this most recent bout of outrage was certain individuals quietly roboleveled for months during the summer.  There was little harm was being done, the admins were largely away on vacation, and nothing came of it.  Here we are a few months later, though, and now we've got players equipped with an army of indescript, throw-away, power-combo alts that have tons of money and all the perks that come with that (level 50 baking, crazy quest weapons, etc.).  These players have started leveraging their armies of alts, and now suddenly there's a problem.

Addressing these issues is quite tricky; in the past (which I have dubbed Dark Risings 1.0), dealing with isolated abuses were often compulsive and sweeping.  A great historic example of this is when the game's economy was redone and a lot of players lost all their gold because a few abusive players (I'll call them powerplayers) got crazy rich.  Here in Dark Risings 2.0, we've been trying to curtail these sweeping, reactionary changes in favor of more conservative responses that don't impact the entire game.  For example, one of our current powerplayers continued roboleveling despite being told many times to stop, so we made all mobs in all leveling areas aggressive towards just his character.  Permanently.

The downside to this approach is that it's extremely time consuming.  Once we impose such a punishment on an individual, there is a pretty predictable chain of events that follows:

1. The player argues and complains with imms, then admins, then imps.  It's not fair, this isn't fair, life's not fair.
2. A smear campaign is launched against the immortals over IMs for singling out and picking on one poor guy who was just trying to level his character.
3. The player gets over his butthurt and just looks for another way to exploit the system.
4. The player finds a way to exploit the system, and the cycle repeats.

This process is extremely aggravating and time-consuming for us admins, and this is why, despite our desire to limit fallout, we still sometimes introduce sweeping changes.  The case of rose bushes no longer being immune to squires was kind of a balance between the Dark Risings 1.0 approach and the 2.0 approach; initially, I was going to just remove their immunity to pierce altogether, but Sidonie (who has been really championing sensibility) suggested we limit the change to squires so that rose bushes can still be used for honest reasons elsewhere.

The situation in which we now find ourselves is at stage #3.  The truth is, there are other charmable mobs in the game that are immune to pierce; people just haven't discovered them.  As soon as they are found, I'd be willing to bet that our resident powerplayers will abuse the hell out of them, and we'll have to change them as well.  The ultimate question is, how do we break this cycle?  We could...

1. levy some sort of punishment against the abusive character.  This won't work because powerplayers' characters are usually interchangeable and disposeable, and we don't have the effort to persecute every new character they pump out.
2. make a sweeping or semi-sweeping change.  This is what we've been doing, but it sucks.  It's a lot harder for a casual player to get gold now, because all the "easy" ways had to be plugged up on account of powerplayers grossly abusing them.
3. ban the powerplayer.  But for what?  Having the time and dedication to play the game hardcore and make juiced up characters?  That's not against the rules.
4. make it a serious rule violation to robolevel/robofarm gold, then ban the powerplayer.

I think option #4 is the gist of what the recent idea posts advocate, but the truth is, this option sucks too.  If you think back to the time when afk spamming wasn't allowed, people were still doing it.  Even after we've told people that they aren't allowed to robolevel or robofarm gold, they are still doing it.  When we catch someone in the act, there's always an excuse.  My Chinese food just arrived.  I had to walk the dog.  I went out for a smoke.  My kitchen caught on fire.  And even then, we wouldn't be preventing the problem players from manually farming gold.  It wouldn't change the facts that they continually strip an area and prevent anyone else from using it, they hog charmies, and they really disrupt the gameplay for others.

So do we still ban them and embitter them against Dark Risings?  I'm not sure that's any more fair than saving powerplayers from themselves by plugging up exploits.  Both cases are just addressing the symptom, not the problem.

The underlying problem is that powerplayers, to a large degree, just don't "get" Dark Risings.  To them, Dark Risings is something for their sole enjoyment (not unlike a single player game), and they don't care about anyone else's fun.  They want the high score--the highest hp, the best PK record, and the highest hit/dam.  They want to get guilded and become a vampire because they want the best spells and the best equipment in the game.  RP is just a formality required to get those things.  In many cases, it's not that the player is mean-spirited or "bad," it's just that they don't understand the game that us admins are trying to make and that the majority of our players enjoy.

Dark Risings 1.0 was not a bad place to be for powerplayers; they were on staff, they were in guilds, they were everywhere.  And there's nothing wrong with that kind of MUD per se, but it's not the game that Dark Risings has become.  Us admins don't have the energy to run a game with the deep undercurrents of acrimony that those games can breed.  We want to run a game that's fun and fair to play.

So I guess the punchline here is that I don't know what to do about the bad apples who spoil the fun for others.  They tend not to listen to us staff because they don't "get" us, and since they don't understand what we're trying to accomplish with our game, they often assume that we're just out to get them.  Maybe they'll listen to what their peers (all you players) are saying instead.  Give it a try.  Just remember that you catch more flies with honey.