Anti-D00d measures

[athelas]

What anti-d00d measures will be in Plane-Shift?  Here is an essay that may give some ideas.

An essay on d00dism and the MMORPG

(C) Copyright 2000 - Arios Truthseeker - Retired guild leader of the Circle
of Truth

It\'s Friday night. You and a group of close friends have gathered to play in
your favorite MMORPG. After many deaths, false starts, and wrong turns, you
and your party have finally reached the lair of the evil drog beast. You
give the order to buff the group. The sound of protective spells being cast
is accompanied only by the fetid sounding breath of the creature behind the
door. It has taken your group 4 weeks of hard play, tons of cash outlay for
equipment, countless deaths, and hours of corpse recovery to get here.
Knowing this, you can barely contain the excitement you feel at reaching
this goal as your casters announce their readiness one by one. This is it.
This is the moment you\'ve been waiting for. It doesn\'t get any better than
this.
All of a sudden, from behind you, you hear the sound of running footsteps.
You turn to look at what can only be yet another surprise, prepared for
battle, and...
...some player character equipped in armor, you\'ve never seen wielding a
weapon you\'ve never seen, moving faster than you thought possible, rushes
through the door. This person engages the drog, kills it in 2 seconds, loots
a weapon none of you have ever seen before, exclaims \'This suxor!\', then
offers to sell it to your fighter for an outrageous amount of cash.
Congratulations. You\'ve just met a kewl d00d.
Current evolutionary theory suggests that we evolved from voracious life
forms who fed on anything that they could possibly kill, with no regard for
anything other than their own hunger. Nowhere does experimental evidence
support this theory more than observing the feral estrus of greed known as a
\'kewl d00d\' inside MMORPGS.
Aside from the emotional conclusion of the above story (i.e. finding the
human on the other end of the avatar and paddling it\'s behind until it can\'t
scream anymore due to lack of breath), there are many reactions to this type
of player. Some attempt to oppose these creatures wherever they can. Some
others try to get on it\'s good side. A few attempt to rationalize with it,
usually to no avail. Some attempt to harness them into a collection of
creatures known as an \'uberguild\'.
All these reactions are useless.
The main purpose of this essay is to explain the problems and suggest
solutions about kewl d00dism in MMORPGS. Specifically, the best advice is to
treat them just as you would indigenous and dangerous creatures in the
MMORPG you are playing, attempt to avoid them at all costs and if you must
engage do so with caution, skill, and wit.
In order to see why and how this works, we have to understand the background
behind the d00d, why he exists, and what he really wants.
Let\'s start out with some basic concepts.
Determinism
There are various levels of determinism in any human endeavors which can be
briefly categorized like so:
Self-Determinism - In this, the lowest of the deterministic states, the
person is little different than any random biological creature out to
survive. Anything that is even remotely desired by a creature in this state
is taken by force, cunning, or whatever means works. Any creature in this
state will refuse to understand anything that does not relate directly to
the perceived and/or actual needs of the self.
Other-Determinism - The next level up is determinism for self and others. At
this point, the \'creature\' becomes a \'person\'. In this state, basic caring
and consideration (along with politeness) is expressed. This person
determines what is best for themselves AND others, and actually attempts to
understand what others need in this process. Not all others are considered
in this state, merely the ones that the person knows and cares about (e.g.
family, friends, lovers).
Pan-Determinism - This is the highest level of determinism known. The scope
of determinism is everyone, there is no thought towards or of self. All
determinations are made for the \'greater good\'. All people are cared about
relatively equally. Acts taken by such a person are generally in the best
interests of the entire community.
It\'s not hard to see that kewl d00ds are purely self-determined. One is
tempted to consider the lower end of the \'other-determined\' spectrum as
inclusive of d00ds. Unfortunately some d00ds are good at appearing to care
about someone, when in reality this appearance only serves as a tool to
satisfy their immediate needs.
So why is the d00d self-determined and not other-determined?
The profile of the d00d
It\'s very easy to theorize a profile of the kewl d00d in real life. The
typical profile is a human being in the age range of 10 to 17 with upper
middle class to wealthy parents, mental intelligence from mid to extremely
high, and emotional maturity in the fairly low to abysmal range.
Lets face it, our culture has a dismal environment for raising children.
Most kids share a televised reality which distorts the nature of beauty
until it fits a narrow category most people do not fit in. This reality
presents materialism as good and rewarding, and threatens to cast you out of
\'cool\' if you do not wear the latest styles, listen to the trendy depthless
music, or talk with the latest confusing lingo.
Most bright kids are aware of this at some level. Some have the courage to
attempt independence, some are so much smarter than others that others have
a hard time dealing with them, still others simply don\'t watch TV at all.
For this, and other reasons, bright kids tend to be ostracized by the
average intelligence peer, and this ostracization prevents the normal
development of other-determinism.
In simpler terms, when everyone is calling you uncool and teasing you, it\'s
really really hard to care about anyone other than yourself.
The end result of these pressures are not good:
* Self-worth is taken from outside stimulus (forget d00ds, most humans
have this one)
* A desperate need to be accepted by others, so as to influence and
reinforce one\'s self-worth
* A desperate need to gratify the ego, i.e. be perceived as \'better
than\', in hopes that this will achieve the acceptance they need
MMORPGs are an alternate reality. They are literally another world, where
the mistakes and memories of the real world can be rendered a distant
memory. This alternate world has different rules, a different social
structure, and most importantly a method to determine rank (levels and/or
possession of rare items). This ranking system, regardless of whether
meaningless or inaccurate, serves to distinguish players from the others.
High level players wearing cool stuff stand out from the crowd, are looked
up to, are accepted, and are considered \'better-than\' others.
The d00d is overjoyed upon seeing this alternate world. At last he has a
clear method to achieve this acceptance and ego-gratification. If only he
can get some levels and phat l3wt...
In this way, levels and/or equipment are seen as \'needs\' for the avatar.
It\'s something to prove, respect to be earned, and acceptance to be gained.
This is what the d00d perceives as real, never mind that this is not really
how things work. Remember that self-determined creatures will refuse to
understand anything that does not relate directly to the perceived needs of
the self.
Thus the d00d logs into the MMORPG, and the battle to regain his lost
self-worth begins.

[athelas]

D00d handling 102: For Game Designers
Ok game designers. Lets get real.
Eventually, no matter how well intentioned you are, or how good a designer
you are, your game will have bugs. These can and will be exploited by a
d00d, possibly ruining the game for others.
There is not a damn thing you can do about this. If you can\'t understand
that now, you are doomed.
Long beta test phases work to get rid of more and more, but remember that
you have to incentivize the discovery of bugs so that it is worth more than
the gain you will see in-game from the exploitation of the bug. About the
only thing that works for a d00d in this regard is cash, although creativity
will possibly find other things.
The real problem that occurs when game designers forget that they are
essentially powerless to stop the onslaught of d00dism from finding these
problems is the inevitable war that occurs. Game designers, frustrated at
the d00ds \'ruining the game for others\' (and not about to be out-done in
that endeavor....EQ was a classic example of this) consider themselves at
war with the d00d. They begin nerfing the game or putting draconian rules
into the game and banning people, and this is all done in the name of the
non-d00d. In reality, this hurts the non-d00d even worse. The d00d does not
care, he will simply adapt. The non-d00d who has learned to use what is now
nerfed, experiences the most frustration, and eventually leaves...beset by
d00ds on one side and game designers on the other. No one wins here.
Getting rid of d00ds is not possible either. Given any cool game, and you
want your game to be cool, you can expect d00ds to be there. It\'s a fact of
life, like when you spill sugar on the ground and don\'t clean it up, ants
will appear to clean it for you.
So what to do? You can\'t get rid of them, they are going to find and exploit
all your bugs, and they aren\'t going to tell you what they are. These d00ds
drive away certain types of players who you\'d dearly like to see play, and
all they do is finish the game in some small amount of time
Wake up Designers! What you need is a paradigm shift. You have a gold mine
on your hands and you don\'t even know it. Try considering d00ds as a genetic
algorithm with the express purpose of solving the problem of finding bugs.
Once loosed on your world, they will find all of them...of that you can be
sure. What a deal! Now you have literally thousands of d00ds debugging your
game for you, and they are paying you for the privilege. This kind of
economics is rarely a losing proposition.
So how do you find out that they\'ve found them? Simple. You log everything
that happens. Now I can hear you scream \'that\'s far too much data to keep\'.
I\'m sorry, if you have a large complex world, good software design
principles demand that you log everything that happens. You cannot
accurately debug the world without logging, even cooperative avatars are
likely to miss important details which could be valuable clues to the
problem. The only reliable way you are going to find problems is to log
events. A side benefit to this logging is solving the common problem of \'how
do you know someone died to a bug or died to a legitimate game event\'. A per
player log of where they go and what happens to them, with 48 hour retention
should be good enough.
However, that is not the only thing you log. You also need to log
experience/loot/etc. rates per unit time. Why? Well, you take the fastest 5%
of those and review their logs. Just who is leveling that fast? How? Oh
look, a bug! See?
The same principle applies for anti-social behavior. Logging everything that
was said and done exposes you to the problem from an objective perspective.
Why hire GMs to hide and play thought police? You have logs. Someone is
training mobs to newbies? You can see from where, and this may suggest how
to fix it without banning the d00d. Remember, ban one d00d and another will
figure out the same thing.
This suggests a general principle for d00d handling. Never ever put a
behavioral rule in place when you can fix the real problem in your game. If
you have to put such a rule in place, people are going to violate it. If you
instead make it difficult or impossible for the behavior to cause problems,
people are not going to behave in the way you don\'t like. Again, a paradigm
shift, but one that works.
D00d handling 102: Advanced anti-d00d design strategies
There are many other good design principles which serve to mitigate the
effect d00dism has on your world.
-- NEVER ever design with any naive idea that \'it will take them no less X
amount of time to get to Y level\'. D00ds are genetic algorithms. They will
find any flaws in your implementation of this, and in any complex system
there are going to be flaws. Once they find these flaws, everyone else will
find out and want to level this fast too. Then you will fix this bug and be
the \'evil nerfing game designer\'. Nip this in the bud and don\'t adopt this
mindset. If you are trying to keep people playing, slowing their leveling is
by far the worst implementation of this goal. Keep this mindset out of your
head when you are designing your game.
-- Refrain from designing closed ended games. It\'s not hard to design a
system where people can climb to any level of power they choose, Asheron\'s
Call did it fairly well if you want an example. Let the d00ds far outstrip
the average players, it will keep them out of the mid-range levels so the
real role-players can have fun there. Set it up so mob power scales with
player level. This will give the d00ds something to fight.
-- Unless it is a bug or you are in beta, NEVER nerf abilities. Buffing
monsters is just as balancing, and prevents common player objections. If a
player has been used to an ability, nothing causes them to want to leave
your game more then losing an ability they previously had. The time to nerf
is in beta. Once beta is over, nerfing must be done with extreme discretion.
Avoiding the nerf is not always possible, but 99% of the time it is really
unnecessary.
-- Do not force people to camp to get necessary items. Bilbo did not have to
camp for the One Ring, and neither should our heros.
First off, the mindset that \'not everyone will have this item\' does not
really work if the item is essential to efficient fighting. You may question
\'essential\', but if the item gives significant advantage enough to power the
wielder through several levels or allow them to kill certain previously high
risk mobs easier, it will be considered as \'essential\' by the d00ds. Camping
for something considered \'necessary\' is just like those ants, if something
is good enough d00ds will sit there until the monster drops it.
If you must have rare uber drops, one solution is to make loot drops
entirely random, i.e. do not make the same mob at the same spawn drop
something rarely or even each time. If it can be farmed, it will be. Another
solution works if you are going to put a rare drop on a class of monster:
scatter the spawn points of this monster around the world and make many of
them but not close together. This will at least spread the camping around.
In the opinion of this writer, rare uber items are bad news. While many game
designers see rare uber items as fun, they are the death of any game with
d00ds in it. A rare item that someone has means that most of the other d00ds
do not, and that makes them envious. Envy drives d00ds to camp, kill steal,
and generally be anti-social until they get what they desire. Don\'t do it!
The only time you can get away with that is if there is one and exactly one
of that item in your game universe. Rare items are status and allows the ego
of the d00d gratification when everyone sees them with it. If you are
putting this kind of status in the game, expect the worst infighting to be
over this item.
You might ask what is a substitute for rare uber items? You don\'t need them!
Base 90% of your effectiveness on character skill development, or good
gameplay, and you have a different form of status.
- If you are going to force people to group, make ye no level or skill
restrictions on the grouping, so that all people of all levels and/or skills
can group without penalty (or bonus). This is tough to do but worth it.
Forced groups tends to work against the d00d, but you can\'t achieve the kind
of peer pressure necessary if friends cannot group because their playtimes
are different.
This is also good business too. Friends like to group together, but if one
has been playing for a month and the others haven\'t, it\'s likely that the
first friend will be much higher level than the others. They have all got to
be able to group and make progress commensurate with their level.
In conclusion
D00ds are a fact of MMORPG life. They aren\'t going away, you can\'t spank
them when they need it, and they can make game life hell for you and/or your
game unless you learn to handle them. It is hoped that the topics touched
upon in this essay will assist the intrepid adventurer and the overworked
game designer in handling this genetic phenomenon.

[Link]

I didn\'t read it all, because I am not in a reading mood. But, It should be whoever gets to whatever the monster is, should be the one to kill it and get the loot.

[Aztec_Brave]

You know. I have to agree with you. Kewl D00ds suck. A lot of games have a manual sign up system where you have to write something roleplayish to get accepted. But heat isn\'t much of a solution. I see the only Way to get rid of the Kewl D00d is to debug the game completely and ban anybody that looks like being a Kewl d00d.

I\'d also like to poin out that the Kewl D00d has a cousin called the PK. These guys often roleplay and stick to  therules making them very hard to catch. I once played on an Ultima shard when they were accepted and it sucked. You couldn\'t keep anything safe with them around. They concentrated mainly on mines which made blacksmithy almost impossible. You couldn\'t leave Britain (the other towns were empty, the shard didn\'t promote roleplaying) without being scared of being killed. I eventually quit playing because I was sick of these guys.

[Veretta Hayes]

Don\'t forget their very close relative, the Uber(or Power)gamer. Not really as much of a nuiscance (sp?) but can still be annoying . Also, you get those seemingly massive amounts of people thats can\'t go two words without swearing, and the ones that constantly diss NooBs. And in games with no safe-trade system, the thieves.

I could go on for a while - I\'ve played alot of MMORPGs .

hmm... *thinks about making an Encyclopedia or something with information about all the different types of (Idea for title:) People You Don\'t Want To Meet In MMORPGs*

Edit: that last bit

[Kiern]

I started to read it, but fell asleep



...sorry?

[TheGeneral]

Bravo, to the guy who wrote that. Although it becomes a bit unnecessary to use \"d00d\" so many times, I am sure he got his point across after the 10th \"d00d\"

And the sad thing is, after my travels through the lands of MMORPGs, I have met most of them. The worst I have seen was in Endless Ages. There was this bridge, connecting the blob Island to the rest of the land, and it was long. Every TIME i tried to cross it, or anyone else for that matter, there would be this one guy atanding there, always there, Pking everyone, and just being a real A-hole. And the thing is, he killed so many people, his name was ALWAYS red. And no one could kick his butt. I mean, i tried wacking at him, the best I would do was 10. Plus he lead the most powerfull guild in the game, so yeah, people were upset with him, and yet few could do anything.
The MOST horrible thing, is when those 3 combine into one. The ubber-Pking-d00d! ;(

[Aruneko]

Wow, long.  But good.

Why not squash the d00ds?  As long as the decisions are wise and well thought-out, I don\'t see how it could do any harm to ban a few people.  Or perhaps you could, say, take X gold each time d00ds act like d00ds.  Or a valuable item of theirs.  After a few warnings, of course.

[Vengeance]

I didn\'t read that whole damn thing, but the parts I read didn\'t seem to have specific ideas and the conclusion seemed to be that \"d00ds\" were unavoidable.  Can someone summarize what it said please?

- Venge

[TheGeneral]

Ok, this is going to be REALLY short, so here we go:

-d00d, a by product of society, and can not really be blammed for his/her stupidity, your average scenario.
-best be left alone, and ignored, since other solutions like banning have little effect on the dude infestation.
-provides for some \"other\" solutions as to how d00ds can be used for the good of the gamers (somewhere mid point of the second \"section\")
-read the indented parts of the second part (midpoint), if you are a developer, and don\'t want to read the entire thing, since they provide for some ideas as to how the d00d thing can be solved.

And more if you wish, or if you see that I missed something important.

[athelas]

Yep, that about sums it up.

Re:Veretta Hayes
I would suggest you look at an essay by Richard Bartle (founder of MUDs) called \"HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS.\".  http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

Don\'t know if anyone else played Runescape before, but that game is one of the most disturbing memories that I still have in my tiny head.  It evolved (AACK!  the E-word!) from a close-knit community of mutal respect and all sorts of warm-and-fuzziness to a cold, competitive, and very much rude atmosphere.

Here is my analysis of this process.

-ALmost all games start with a very nice group of people, because through the beta-testing process many d00ds are eliminated, for they cannot survive in a situtation which is as unstable (Oh no!  my unfairly earned 46345376436 gold is gone!  IMMS!)

-Immortal influence is essential to preserve this state as long of possible.  For coding concerns see essay.  However, in RS, this state was quickly lost as the immortals refused to listen to complaints, even after a player was bragging on its boards about some cheating program or another.  In fact, the imms removed the boards because they could not take the criticism or reports.

-A number of uber-gamers is the first sign of degradation.  They find the methods for people to exploit systems, farm exp areas, practice skills ridiculously high, etc.

-Then you have the arrogant people who base their self-worth on 1s and 0s.  They completely take over the economy.  

Fade to black...

-athelas

[Golbez]

To summarise, for the ones who don\'t have time to read it or simply do not feel like it:

- d00ds are unavoidable, yes, but they can be exploited. Use them to find bugs (they are very good at this) and fix them. Do not implement rules that will prevent people from taking advantage from the bug, as this will encourage them to break them.
Now, to find bugs, athelas recommends logging EVERY EVENT in the game.  I quote: \"A per player log of where they go and what happens to them, with 48 hour retention should be good enough. However, that is not the only thing you log. You also need to log experience/loot/etc. rates per unit time. Why? Well, you take the fastest 5% of those and review their logs. Just who is leveling that fast? How? Oh look, a bug! See? \"
This method may seem very effective, but it would be very hard to implement and take time away from game developing.

- banning is unnecessary and essentially does not help to reduce the amount of d00ds (I personally do not agree with this, banning may be a solution, but only if it is extremely necessary)

- rare items encourages d00ds to kill, steal, camp, etc until  he can get it. Thus, a solution is not having powerful items with strong effects, but letting skills have a more important role in gameplay.
If you need to create a rare item, make it so that it is dropped randomly by an NPC whose respawn points are very varied. This would scatter the camping.

- No party should have bonus/penalties depending on the skills the characters in it have.


Perhaps I missed some suggestions and comments, but I think this is much shorter and easier to read.

Good posts, athelas. Very interesting.

[Vengeance]

So basically in this guy\'s lingo, d00ds are power gamers?  Cheaters?  Non-roleplayers?  I still don\'t get it.

We are certainly going to be interested in exploits as they are found.  I think our biggest risk is of macros and bots, not really hacking and cheating.  We have some diabolical plans though...  

As far as static spawns go, there obviously won\'t be any, so camping should be minimized.

As far as nerfing goes, we can and will change whatever has to be changed to make the fun maximally fun for all involved, and I don\'t see any reason not to nerf abilities if those abilities are shown to be out of whack with others.  How to protect yourself from being nerfed?  Don\'t play characters with obvious huge advantages over another, or ejoy it while it lasts.

- Venge

[athelas]

Heh.  Just so you know, I did NOT write that essay.  Someone else did; read the first post

as a matter of fact, I don\'t even know what nerfing is  :rolleyes:

Definition of d00d: (note: this is my definition, not that of the essay) They have qualities of power gamers, yes.  However, they also base their self-worth on the game statistics.  They generally dominate the system (because of their power-gamer-ness) and are usually arrogant and downright annoying, at least when no imms are around.

After playing RS, and seeing the havoc that the d00ds wreaked there, I\'d hate to see PS go the same way.

Note: def of d00d is my own opinion.  MINE, you hear?  MINE!

[ParaSite]

Ok, I have some counter args
#1: We are already randomizing
#2: We make easy avenues available knowledge to all to exploit
D00dez will compete with newbs
Ie: Its easy to go adventuring of you want
But the HOW is variable by current player dynamic
Thus making d00dism almost vanish as only those folk who talk to folk and interact get ahead
Those that repetively do same thing hurt themselves whilst they do it
But it was a good post