Jerks: How to deal with them in MMORPGs

SpittingTrashcan · 2003-09-06T10:45:12

Good forum users, Many game developers are used to developing single or few-player games. They focus on such (admittedly important) topics as engine code, graphics, play balance, level design, interface, story, yadda yadda yadda. One problem which a cursory examination reveals little discussion of is player-player interaction in MMORPGs, and how the game molds the nature of these interactions. People in general are nice. Some people, however, are jerks. Whereas in single player games, this is not a major concern, in MMORPGs the quality of the people you share the game with becomes a crucial factor in the enjoyment of the game. I humbly submit this paper, compiled by my friend based on discussions spanning at least half a year, and reedited by me, on what can be done about jerks in games. In MMORPGs, there exist characters controlled by players that do irrational, and often obnoxious things to other characters for the explicit purpose of bothering others for their own amusement. These players, abbreviated in this paper as DDI, are a serious problem for any game that actually wants to charge others for the right to participate in it. Other MMORPGs have attempted to deal with the problem, but its often not dealt with enough to actually prevent people from being DDIs. Thus, this paper attempts to work out how to discourage DDIs from their behavior, through a system of ratings, bounties, and a change in the level building system. Although simple logistics have prevented these plans from being implemented, they hopefully can begin a basis for a better MMORPG. [begin] Removing Deliberately Disruptive Players from Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games In any MMORPG, there are players who decide to derive their pleasure from making the game less pleasurable for others, generally by having their characters enact violence upon others. These DDIs (Deliberately Disruptive Individuals) make the game less pleasurable for a mass number of people for their own amusement. Given that there are players who use their characters specifically to irritate and frustrate others, how can you limit and discourage this behavior enough to make it stop? We think reducing the influence of level building, creating a bounty system, and also creating a rating sytem could sufficiently discourage this behavior. First, some terms should be defined. The player refers to the human being sitting at the computer, playing the game. Character refers to the being in the game as whom the player plays. Equipment refers to items carried and used by a character. A DDI is a deliberately disruptive individual, a player who is playing their character to make life harder or less enjoyable for others, for their own amusement, even if the action does not make sense for the character. For instance, if Bob’s character is attempting to scrounge for things to sell, and someone else playing has their character standing in front of some valuable items, preventing Bob’s character from getting them, for no other reason than because they are amused by making the game harder to play for Bob, then they are a DDI. Another example of a DDI would be a player who has his character run up to Bob’s character in the middle of town, kill his character and then run away. Real world analogues to DDIs would be homicidal maniacs, bullies, streakers (people who run about in public naked), loudmouths, and the deliberately offensive. One might question why it is necessary to remove DDIs from a MMORPG. After all, they are having fun, in their own way. The problem with this is that it makes it difficult for other players, who are also paying for the game, to have fun. The DDIs are not having fun from their own actions, they enjoy the way their actions adversely affect others. In the end, they take turn MMORPG from being an escape into a more enjoyable world to a chance to be tormented by a faceless person over the Internet. We decided that any game that could charge money while allowing this sort of behavior to go on relatively unpunished was ridiculous. We first looked at other MMORPGs to determine what they’re systems had done to deal with this problem. In Ultima Online, if a player attacks another player in town, computer controlled town guards come out, hunt the player down, and kill them. Unfortunately, these guards do nothing for people killed out of town, thus making leaving any town for another an exercise in risking death. Everquest deals with violence by separating the players. Players who want to have their characters kill other characters have to play on special servers where killing other players is possible, and players who do not want to attack other players play on a separate server. Unfortunately, this restricts the amount of involvement the storyline can have with the player’s characters. If one town in the game should decide to attack another, the player inhabitants cannot join in and battle for their own town by joining the armies and attacking other players, because player killing is impossible. Ragnorak Online (Korean MMORPG with english version in beta) has the same problem, except there is no option for violence against other characters possible at all. All three fail to pay much attention to non-violent abuse, beyond simple word filters that force people to creatively spell “f*ck”. We then looked to real life, to determine how people are discouraged from being deliberately disruptive individuals. In real life, there are very strong reasons for not being a DDI. While in a MMORPG, one can always eventually make a new character and play again if your character is killed for crimes against humanity, in real life, homicidal maniacs, once caught, do not get to start over again. Although pessimistic, this is the view that MMORPGs have demonstrated to be true: many people are not deliberately disruptive to those around them only because they do not think they could get away with it. The actions that the game may take against a DDI’s character do not actually affect the player in any way except in his capacity to play the game, and thus there are many fewer detriments to the player to act non-disruptively in a game than there is for the player to act non-disruptively in real-life. Because of this, it is difficult to find a way to discourage players from acting in ways that are not blatantly rude to the other players around them. Originally, we concentrated on all DDIs as a single problem. So we defined the problem as this: How do you make a MMORPG that discourages and reduces DDIs while still making it fun to play? We wanted to make the solution generic enough that it would not be relative to the world in which the game takes place, so that it could be applied in as many situations as possible. First, it was suggested that we simply drop the ability to attack other characters. However, this has several problems. First, it does not deal with non-violent DDIs. Someone can still parade about, performing offensive actions or making offensive statements, without the need to attack another. Furthermore, these people, under this plan, could only be dealt with by being ignored by other players, since players would no longer have the ability to chase these players off. Second, there are times when violence between characters makes sense, in character. For an example, envision the world of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. If a group of players play characters that are Orcs and decide to hang out in the middle of an Elven forest, the Elves are going to respond with violence. In a more generic example, if two players were playing characters from the opposite sides of warring nations, then they’d probably attack each other if they meet on the battlefield. So, instead of banning all character versus character violence, we looked at the Everquest solution. In Everquest, there are two types of servers, ones where players can attack other players, and others where players cannot. However, in a world where a war is going on, this solution does not really make much sense. Furthermore, all this does is move the DDIs to a different server instead of discouraging them. Finally, this still doesn’t deal with non-violent DDIs. Dropping the idea of moving or removing violence, as it seemed to only generate more problems, we switched to the idea of solving the problem from the viewpoint of the victims, and looked at how DDIs are dealt with in real life. If a person runs by streaking in real life, the police cart them off to prison, and they get locked away from society for a while. Someone tells the police that an activity disruptive to society is occurring, and the police take action. So we came up with a ranking and banning system. We first considered giving any player who has had an interaction with another player to rate this interaction favorably or unfavorably. An interaction was defined as appearing on the other player’s screen, or talking so that another player can hear the player. If enough players rank another player as being a DDI, then he would be banned from playing for a period of time, such as a week. The first problem we found with this was that several DDIs could get together and have legitimate players punished. It even opened up a new avenue for being a DDI, simply going about, banning people. So we then discussed whether everyone should have rating powers. The next solution was to set it up so that only players who hadn’t been given bad ratings before could rate others. The problem again was that this allowed for DDIs where the player would play normally, but rate everyone he came across poorly. A group of said players could remove a good player from play. Furthermore, good players that had been rated badly by DDIs wouldn’t be able to rate DDIs badly. So, we finally decided that the best way to deal with this would be to set up a system where when players connect to a server, some of them are randomly given points to use to increase or decrease the ratings of other players. These points would be limited in quantity, only one good or bad point could be given to any player in any one session, and points would expire on disconnect. In this way, it would be very difficult (although not impossible) for DDIs to organize a group to go and ban other players. Also, because the ability to rate comes randomly, DDIs that try to just go around and rate everyone badly will get rated badly themselves by others, such as their own victims. While not a perfect solution, because it would be possible for some disruptive acts to go unpunished, it was good enough that we left it in place. We then turned and took a specific look at violent acts of disruption, because we felt being violently disruptive should never go unpunished. So first we suggested setting up a bounty system, where in every town there would be a bounty hunter station. Every time a player attacks another player, the server would automatically place a bounty on them. Then, other players would be encouraged by in game money to go out and kill players with bounties on their heads. However, this would punish players who were actually role playing soldiers and the like, so we then changed it from automatically to being that when player A attacks player B, B would then be given the power to go and register a bounty against that player at the bounty hunting station. Whether or not he registers a bounty would be his choice. We also at this point realized that those who were killed as bounties were killed, they’d be able to take out a bounty, so we added in the extra statement that they had to have not been killed for a bounty themselves. Upon further discussion, we also agreed that killing in self defense should not warrant a bounty, and included that a character only gained the ability to take out bounties on characters that had done damage to them before they did damage back before killing them. This would prevent DDIs from attacking much more powerful people with the goal of being killed so they could take out a bounty on that person. At this point, the solution of bounty hunting became so appealing that we decided that for non-violent DDIs, they’d be punished by eventually being rated into banishment, while violent DDIs would be punished by bounties alone. We decided that being a violent DDI should come with the punishment of banning as well, so we decided that upon a bounty being collected upon someone, that person would be banned for a week. We then wondered if the punishment, banning for a week, would work. One feature of MMORPGs is that they almost always charge a fee to play, such as cable service or phone service works. This fee is necessary to pay for the company’s use of electricity, maintenance of servers, maintenance of the game, their staff, and things like this. Thus, if a player were banned for a week, that player would have to pay for a week where they were not able to play. This intrinsic monetary punishment, we felt, would have two results. One, people who were only playing to irritate others would either stop being DDIs or they’d quit paying for the game. If they quit paying for the game, the server would no longer allow them to connect, so there would be fewer DDIs either way. Two, players that wanted to play characters that went out and earned large bounties on themselves would end up having to play very carefully, because they would have to be ready to fight off bounty hunters, and they’d be unable to trust anyone else since all players would know that they were worth cash. By forcing them to be careful, they would have to play characters that pick their targets carefully for being killed comes with a hefty financial punishment (a week of paying for a game that you cannot play), and thus they would be unable to just run around killing people. Recall that in most RPGs, players are rewarded by experience and advancement. Every time the player does something that requires ability, they are awarded experience. When a player gains enough experience, he is given an opportunity to improve his character in some way. Generally, when a character gains a level, he is granted the ability to withstand more damage and deal more damage, and also gets a chance to improve his ability at various skills, independent of how the character earned the experience. Not all RPGs work entirely in this fashion: for instance in Everquest, one can only improve the things that his character has done. For instance, if a player wanted his character to become good at cooking, and his character was good at hitting things with weapons, the player cannot simply have his character kill monsters until he has earned enough experience to gain a level and can increase his cooking skill. Instead, he has to have his character actually cook and cook until he is good at cooking. Even then, every time a character gains a level in Everquest and almost every RPG, they are given the ability to withstand more damage from enemy attacks and deal out more damage to others. Either way, a character who becomes rather good at killing and decides to become a DDI would be a rather large problem even in the bounty hunting system. After all, if bounty hunters attack a bounty that defeats them, the bounty becomes better at killing. Eventually, there would be some players that could be DDIs and kill other characters at will without fear of repercussions, because there would be very few bounty hunters that could kill their characters and collect the bounty. So, with a new problem in hand, we began by talking about whether or not a character should get anything for killing another character. A character that kills another character could get that character’s money, equipment, and experience for killing that character. We decided right away that it would obviously promote DDIs if they could get all three, so we dropped equipment. We felt it would be unfair to give DDIs the items of another character simply because they killed that character. On the other hand, players whose characters are bandits have to be able to steal gold, or else they are not able to do much banditry, so we decided that a character could loot a portion of the dead character’s gold from his body. Then, we looked at experience. At first, we argued about whether or not a character should earn experience for homicide, but then someone suggested that perhaps the problem was instead the leveling system. Instead of having the character level up and become tougher and more powerful, it was suggested that again we should look towards real life for ideas. In real life, no matter how much of an expert one is at doing something, one generally does not take a sizably larger amount of damage to kill. A master chef, despite his obvious cooking prowess, is no more able to survive multiple fatal gun wounds any more than an apprentice. So, instead of raising a characters ability to take more damage before dying, we decided it made more sense if, at leveling up, characters only became better at what they had been doing. In this way, even if someone was very good at killing people, they could only take as much damage as any other person, even the ones that were not very good at killing people. In this way, we would prevent DDIs from becoming overpowered assassins. While a DDI’s character could become very good at killing others, enough attacking less skilled characters could bring one down. By balancing in this way, it would discourage DDIs from trying to fight large groups of bounty hunters. [end] ... Whew! Congratulations on reading this whole post. I don''t mean this to be the last word on the topic, rather the first step... Thanks to the following people, who contributed effort or ideas to this post: Syd, who wrote the original paper Dan Greg Andy Tom Jake C&C strongly encouraged.

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by SpittingTrashcan November 13, 2001 03:12 PM

43 comments, last by SpittingTrashcan 20 years, 7 months ago

Anonymous

September 05, 2003 06:01 PM

I think the best way to solve this ''problem'' is to let players do as they wish. I respect the opinion that you don''t want to develop your game around the ''jerks'', because then they win. But as long as we are talking about PKers.. I think they are players too, and should be allowed to enjoy the game as they wish. So a certain amount of development dedicated to these and other players isn''t unwarranted.. they have as much right to enjoy themselves as those heavily into roleplay. Some of the PKers ARE roleplaying.

I think an awesome way to deal with this is with race. Give advantages to the ORC''s (or if your orcs aren''t evil or chaotic, another race) that attract melee PKers for example. Dark elves could attract magic PKers. Humans could be neutral.. allowing both. Maybe high elves have more skills available.. or are more rounded in other ways. That way, everyone knows that most orcs are aggressive. Certain territories in your game could have wandering NPC''s, and of course will have PC''s that will attack other races. People deal with aggressive races as a race themselves.. and work as a team.

WoW almost has something like this. At least they have some sort of faction vs faction PK rules. Though Im not sure I like that most of the world (90%) is PK free altogether.

As far as the twerp 15 year old.. I think you deal with it how you deal with it most places on the net. Moderators.

LaCelestina

122

September 05, 2003 10:32 PM

Why not use a senate system? like in the ancient times;
500 hundred or so enter the senate and they vote for a law you want to activate, or maybe to judge someone?. that''s one of the things i have been thinking of, the possibility that for example, when a store is asking for someone to work, and a certain pc gets the job, nobody more will get it. one of the things i really want to be erradicated is the continuity in some jobs offered in games. everybody can go search the mushrooms! i mean, it is certainly necessary in some cases. but individualism is a fact that most people like. the fact that you can say, " i am working part time on the item shop" is in fact ( i consider ) really cool.

"For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong"

moonshot

122

September 06, 2003 01:02 AM

First off, I''m not huge on banning accounts, unless it''s for extreme actions. The orginal doc posted had way too much "ban the account for one week" solutions in it. To me, that shows your design doesn''t have a good enough way to handle DDIs as you call them.

I think a good start to this whole problem would be to implement factions, sorta like Everquest. When you PK someone, you effect faction. In EQ, faction is only effected when you kill a NPC. Players should also count. The place you kill them should also figure in. Here''s an example, using current Everquest races.

First, a quick who likes who to set this example up. Dark Elves hate Wood Elves, Barbarians dislike DEs, but aren''t exactly friends with Wood Elves either. High Elves hate DEs and like WEs.

So, lets say a DE, Darkie, walks into the great tree city of the wood elves and kills another player, Woodie. Factions would adjust as follows:

DE''s like Darkie a lot more
WE''s hate Darkie a lot more
HE''s hate Darkie a little more
Barbs don''t care.

So, by killing players, you''re effecting how you''re treated by NPCs. This also promotes more role playing and story telling. You''ll have to be very careful who you kill, because just a couple kills can make you KoS(Kill on Sight) to a certain race. Additionally, you''d want to make more roaming NPCs then what EQ has. Certain areas would have races that aren''t playable by players, thus allowing anyone to enter them.

Anyways, I''ve often thought of a rating system where you could rate players either good or bad. The problem with this is you''d have to have an extremely air tight rule set. It''s probably doable though.

The bounty hunter idea is kinda cool. Again, this would need an very good rule set.

I also wanted to touch on this idea that no matter what level you are, you should have the same amount of hit points. People argue this is how it is in real life. Well, when I see someone cast a fire ball in real life, then maybe I''ll adapt to this idea, until then, here''s the way I see the problem.

1.) Assuming you have a fair amount of hps to start with(the number of which never change), it''ll take the low level, unskilled characters forever to kill something. The fights may balance out and be of a good length later on, but the beginning will suck. You''re going to lose most players at this point.

2.) You don''t have a ton of HPs, and so fights for low levels are of suffient length. Then, as you skill up, fights are way too short. Opposite of problem #1.

3.) You create suffient defensive abilities that keep the fight the same length(or close to it) the entire level range. This means you''ll deal about the same amount of damage forever, which is really boring. On the flip side, if you do deal more damage, then its more of a game of chance. You get lucky and land a hit on someone who may be better skilled, and you win. Better skilled characters should win a good 80% of the time or more. Otherwise, what''s the point of getting those skills. Just run around and hope to be more lucky with the dice rolls then others.

moonshot aka Jayson Bailey

EdR

117

September 06, 2003 07:01 AM

Personally, I see only one consequence for twinks and other idiots that insist on causing trouble. Permaban, no refund, thank you, bye-bye. (Yes, I really hate them.)

http://edropple.com

rmsgrey

153

September 06, 2003 10:45 AM

This thread also covers this topic. If I had more time, I''d precis it here, but since I''m feeling rushed, I thought I''d just offer the link. Forum search offers a large number of other threads, most of which relate (quite a few permadeath threads cover jerks as well)

Jerks: How to deal with them in MMORPGs

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