players as physical barriers

[Seytra]

Hmm, even with shoving, given sufficient dedication and time you can still abuse it, especially if you team up. It\'s a fact that what can be abused, will be abused. There is nothing that furthers people\'s creativity more than trying to hurt someone else. Thusly, things must be designed to be not abusable, or at least make the abuse so hard that it takes very long time and very much effort, and also can be easily traced back to the abuser. While shoving might account for the first two, it doesn\'t solve the latter. Logging shoving attempts is an option, if you compress it to report shoving only when done more than 4 times within 5 minutes, and also just count the number (like X shoved you 10 times). That way, it can easily be proven that someone was being shoved in an attempt to grief.

[DaveG]

Everything has the potential for abuse.  If 5 people team up to grief with shoving... well... they\'re morons.  And they can only keep it up for so long.  If they continue to be a problem, other actions would need to be taken.  (unfortunately, logging wouldn\'t be that useful... hard to log justifications; we\'d need situation info)

But, player conflicts in general need more ways to be settled.    

[Seytra]

Originally posted by DaveG
Everything has the potential for abuse.  If 5 people team up to grief with shoving... well... they\'re morons.  And they can only keep it up for so long.  If they continue to be a problem, other actions would need to be taken.  (unfortunately, logging wouldn\'t be that useful... hard to log justifications; we\'d need situation info)

But, player conflicts in general need more ways to be settled.    

There is no way to get me to accept open PvP. That is being abused all the time everywhere.
Yes, almost everything can be abused. However, this most definitely does not mean that things that can be easily abused should be put in anyway, neither does it mean that nothing needs to be done to prevent abuse.
As for the logging: the situation info would be clearly have to be provided by the players, as untrustworthy as that is. You might log death, though, to have added proof.
You can\'t just say \"if they do they\'re morons\", because obviously they will consider themselves very sly or funny or have some other purpose, like protecting their spawn camping turf. Seeing how hard the tracing of killstealing is, there must be extreme care taken to not add another way to hog spawns or grief players.

[DaveG]

Originally posted by Seytra
There is no way to get me to accept open PvP. That is being abused all the time everywhere.

I believe some form of limited open PvP system can be implemented with minimal risk of abuse, or at least such that it counteracts other forms of abuse.  (ie allows people to settle grief fights one way or another)  But yes, I agree, this sort of a thing is usually screwed up.  Massive quantities of countermeasures would need to be created, and it would be a big undertaking.  But I used the <>-ness because this discussion is off-topic, and I don\'t feel like arguing my points here.  

Originally posted by Seytra
Yes, almost everything can be abused. However, this most definitely does not mean that things that can be easily abused should be put in anyway, neither does it mean that nothing needs to be done to prevent abuse.

Agreed.  A feature should only be allowed if its potential for use distinctly outweighs its potential for abuse.  I think collision detection (in association with shoving and debug measures) is too needed to do without, and can be implemented with only minor headaches... eventually.

Originally posted by Seytra
As for the logging: the situation info would be clearly have to be provided by the players, as untrustworthy as that is. You might log death, though, to have added proof.
You can\'t just say \"if they do they\'re morons\", because obviously they will consider themselves very sly or funny or have some other purpose, like protecting their spawn camping turf. Seeing how hard the tracing of killstealing is, there must be extreme care taken to not add another way to hog spawns or grief players.

This sort of immature junk is annoyingly hard to keep track of.  With everything going on, it\'d be hard to make the server detect such things without logging everything and analyzing it constantly.  (which is not an option; to much drain on the server)  So yes, this sort of a thing should be player/GM controlled.  It wouldn\'t be too hard, and would  simply be unavoidable.  Some sort of a risk is involved with all features, and I think dealing with the occasional moron is a valid price.

[Ivniciix]

I\'ve played more that a dozen MMORPG\'s and only one, EQ, had players as impassable objects to other players....and it was used to block doors, paths etc. simply to annoy other players. OK that\'s not quite true. People used it to block access to a spawn until they\'d killed itto complete a quest or get a rare item. Frankly, that is something a burly group of adventurers might really due. However, the potential for abuse is so high, I think it out weighs any addition to the \"reality\" of the game. Even shoving will be used to push other players off cliffs etc. unless there is some sort of semi-collidable positioning and animation that keeps players from actually being moved while they are being \"shoved\".

Someone in this thread already postulated what has been my First Law of MMORPG\'s for many years- \"Anything that can be done, will be done\" The Second law is, of course, -\"The chance of any particular female character actually being female is smaller that the square root of Pi\"

[DaveG]

Originally posted by Ivniciix
players as impassable objects to other players

No, I\'m not advocating that.  You\'re misunderstanding me.  I just don\'t want to be able to stand inside other players and NPCs...  Again, I will use my analogy:  Try pushing to pencils against each other, point to point.  No \"pushing\" is going to happen; they\'ll be shoved aside.  Anyone standing in the way of anything, will not be a plausible obstacle.  And to push someone over the edge of a cliff, would require 4 or 5 people working together.  The victim could escape by running between 2 people in the group, and forcing them aside.  (I\'m thinking now, that some sort of maximum shoving distance could also be added to help stop this.)

[Ivniciix]

Matrix Online has a cute animation where players actually do shove incidental NPC\'s out of the way as they walk down the street. The real problem is, as stated, the grief aspect of either blocking or pushing people off cliffs...or interupting their ranged or melee combat in some way too, I suppose. If your simply asking for an animation and that players not be able to \"stand inside\" each other, I\'m all for it from a visual reality standpoint. The trick is to not have it actually cause a player to either be moved by pushing or blocked/impeded by groups of players. How easy or hard this is to do is entirely beyond my expertise or knowledge however. Good Luck on this one though.

[Richard Siddall]

I\'d like to thank everyone for their responses to the post, every one of them. the sarky ones and the critical ones. Thinking about what has been said i have to agree with the argument that people could and will abuse such a system for their own gain. As a compromise would the system work if NPCs were solid and had the ability to block the way till negotiated with or defeated in combat?

Please forgive me for putting more than one wish/idea in my opening post. I started rambling.