I'm just curious what people think of this...
Have you ever played a game with admins, immortals, etc. that watched over everything... You played for a while and really got to liking the game and the people in it...then the immortals took a disliking to you? So much for that gaming experience! It's off to find a new game, whic his a shame, because you really like that one! Stupid admins.
Now, the idea with the IRS is that the play world would be divided into different regions. Perhaps 4-5. Then, there would be 4-5 different immortals ruling over each realm. (And probably a godlike GM game creator who likes to have his powers wherever he goes...). Now, if you happen to be player in realm 2, and suddenly you do something that really pisses the immortal off. Now, according to the immortal rules set by the Maker, you're allowed time to retreat to a different realm before the immortal is allowed to take action against you (boot, ban, delete, etc.). In the other realm, the immortal there probably wouldn't have anything against you, so you're free to play so long as you stay out of realm 2, and the immortal in realm 2 is powerless against you so long as you stay outside his realm.
This is kind of like the idea of "Angering the Gods" where you can run to another god to protect you from the first. This way you don't have to, as a player, put up with bad admins. You can find a realm with an admin you like, and stay there. (This also poses some fun little "adventure missions" into the realm of an immortal you don't like, to see if you can make it without getting caught :o)
Anyway, tell me what you think of this concept.
ID:154435
 Sep 17 2001, 7:32 am
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Sep 17 2001, 7:35 am
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Nadrew
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That sounds cool in my game I am the only admin but I am not a bad pking kind cause once I activate my admin powers I lose my attack verbs so I just watch and make sure that everyone is having a good time.
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Oh yeah, I forgot to add that one's admin abilities in the IRS system are disabled once they leave their own region.
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This brings up the question (again) of admin vs. immortal. An admin shouldn't have any limits on his or her power, because they exist purely for the purpose of enforcing external game rules (as opposed to internal game rules, like "no walking through walls" or "no flying without a fly spell") and possibly maintaining game flow.
An immortal representing a god-like figure, though, probably should have limits on his or her powers, a clearly defined sphere of influence, and if the game is heavily roleplaying-oriented, a set of guidelines of what ends their powers should be turned to. (A deity of war, for instance, could be given the directive to encourage players to form factions and factions to go to battle. This is a great way to encourage roleplaying, in my opinion: manipulate players into it.) Games in which admin-style immortals behave according to whim and boot or ban or harass players merely because they don't like that player have developed a flaw. Instituting a system which presupposes this flaw's existence seems kind of silly to me... and more to the point, I can't imagine that if this sort of flaw were extant in a game, the immortals wouldn't band together in a clique and enforce each other's prejudices across the borders. I'd just say, get better immortals. If I were going to make a game where immortals are supposed to be limited in how, where, or to what end they can wield their powers... I'd probably hard code very little of it. I'd simply choose immortals for their dedication to character/role-playing. And keep a log of their activity. It's easier to give immortals broad, sweeping powers and decide in retrospect what is abuse, then to give them broad, sweeping powers and try to code against abuse. Plus, this ties back in to the "angering the gods" thing. Don't forget, the gods themselves inevitably have a parental figure whose edicts they must obey or circumvent. | |
This is kind of like the idea of "Angering the Gods" where you can run to another god to protect you from the first. This way you don't have to, as a player, put up with bad admins. You can find a realm with an admin you like, and stay there. (This also poses some fun little "adventure missions" into the realm of an immortal you don't like, to see if you can make it without getting caught :o) Another similar concept which could be linked quite effectively: "themed", in-character immortals. Go out and log into most any MUD out there and look at the list of immortals/gods, and you'll see Immort #1- Head Administrator, Immort #2- Main coder, Immort #3- Webmaster, etc. Wouldn't it be so much cooler if rather than presenting the immortals/gods as an administrative hierarchy if they were actually represented as in-game gods? You could have your own little pantheon. Of course, there are some drawbacks to this approach... although some shuffling wouldn't be too much of a problem, you would probably need a very talented admin staff to pull it off really well. And one of the great things about this approach is that, although you'll often read about "So-and-so, god(dess) of such-and-such", the truth is that most ancient religions were really quite muddy and chaotic, which you might naturally expect seeing as they were generally pieced together bit by bit as various cultures assimmilated one another, in part or in whole. Thus, just because a god is "God of the Winds" or "God of the Sea" doesn't mean they need to be limited to blowing stuff around or making waves; ancient peoples ended up attributing all sorts of crazy things to their gods, the end result being that they all could do a lot of different things (often, things that are totally unrelated from modern perspectives or even other brands of mystic thought). The "regional" aspect of your proposed system also ties in decent well with the way many classical polytheistic religions worked. Although there was one set pantheon of "Greek gods" recognized by the ancient Greeks and the areas that they had influence in, different cities would have different emphasized cults (generally the city's patron god or goddess, as in the case of Athena for Athens). Moreover, different regions would have different local gods, either remnants from earlier religions before the Greeks became a culturally united (well, somewhat) people, or gods "imported" from other contemporary religions, often again basically determined by local cults of worship. The end result of all this would be a system quite similar to the one you propose, but with some enhancements which could make for a little bit of added drama... your gods would be given some powers outside of their local regions of influence, but generally pretty indirect ones with no immediate in-game repercussions (as opposed to a good smiting). Angering a god(dess) and then retreating to more friendly territory would still allow you to avoid their immediate wrath, but they would still have the ability to watch you from afar, perhaps even taunting you or inflicting minor harassment (hopefully in-character harassment, although I won't claim that this system would actually eliminate corruption in the administrative ranks as well as a system with a more dramatic loss of power outside of an admin's area of influence). I don't know if any MUDs out there actually use this idea to any degree... I've never really seen it (although ocassionally an admin will adopt a themed persona on a whim, I don't really count this). | |
Leftley wrote:
This is kind of like the idea of "Angering the Gods" where you can run to another god to protect you from the first. This way you don't have to, as a player, put up with bad admins. You can find a realm with an admin you like, and stay there. (This also poses some fun little "adventure missions" into the realm of an immortal you don't like, to see if you can make it without getting caught :o) I was part of an Immortal staff on a Roleplaying MUD, and this theme was pretty much run on it. The code was unstable though, had too many memory leaks, and the MUD went down after a while. But it was pretty nice, I was surprised at the amount of roleplayers you can find on MUDs. Alathon | |
Foomer wrote:
I'm just curious what people think of this... Ever here of the RP Nazis? Thats the name used for the admins in Ultima Online. In no other game in history have the admins been such a corrupt pact of self centered bastards. There have even been confirmed cases of the admins using their admin powers to instantly create super powerful characters and rare items and auctioning them on eBay! | |
Wouldnt you need 4 admins on all the time then to govern the realms?
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They're not governing the realms, they're just doing the admin work, making sure players don't cheat, booting or banning people who are OOC harassing others, etc., generally just making the game less enjoyable for everyone else. You can get players to do the governing.
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I think it should be a player voting system to prevent abuse.
For example, everyone can have a faith varible. They then choose someone that they know to place faith in. If that someone attain a certain level of faith (maybe 10% of the MUD population) , then he/she gain some power. With more people with faith in that person, he/she can have more power. If he/she loses the required amount of Faith, then the power is lost. In this way, the player will not abuse his/her power to kill/annoy everyone. It will be a simple question of preventing mutis. Of course, in this senario, the player/imm will not be admins (to prevent abuse). | |
Is it possible to do? Maybe...
In my power as a BYOND programmer? Maybe not yet... If it is ever done, I'll keep everyone informed... | |
sunzoner wrote:
I think it should be a player voting system to prevent abuse. Hmm. That's actually a very nice idea, particularly in a MUD with heavy religious or moral overtones. It wouldn't be a cure-all for power abuse, but it would at least make for a nice change of pace. One of the big problems is that players tend to be predisposed towards forming power collectives--hence why virtually any game which could concievably have "clans", does. If one group of players managed to build up and consolidate their power well enough, they could start bullying around other players just as before. I don't see that as being too much of a major concern, though; if you had a supplementary, traditional admin system to back it, chances are things would never become a real problem. Balancing would be a fairly tough issue, though... for one thing, do you give each player only one "piece" of faith to give, or do you let them spread their faith across as many players as they want? If the latter, is their starting "pool" of faith to invest distributed evenly across the board, or can they appoint faith in more and more people without diminishing the amount given to each? The biggest concern, however, would be how you determine your playerbase. If you simply increment a total census count variable every time a new character is started and gauge faith pools towards that, it would be hard for anyone to gain faith under normal circumstances: large numbers of newbies entering and then leaving forever without having appointed any faith would weight the "vote" against giving power to anyone. This would also open the door for people to write scripts to log in under various randomly generated keys, create a new character, appoint faith in their main character, and then log out forever. You could solve the former problem, but not the latter, by making it only count players' faith totals against the number of players who have appointed faith in someone. You could thwart newbie-spam vote-rocking by putting in some sort of requirement... you could require players reach a certain level or other arbitrary measure of power, thus discriminating against non-powergamers. Or you could make it an arbitrary length of time, thus discriminating against quick, rapidly-conforming learners. The latter of these two options would probably be more favorable, since it would be powergamers who would be most likely to attempt to illegitimately rack up faith points in this manner and powergamers who would also be the best at raising newbies to "voting level" the fastest. One could rank people's investments of faith in terms of how much they play and check faith pools against a total count of "faith-hours", thus making intermediate-level players count considerably more than freshly-made newbie players, but with proportionately diminishing returns from there on out... but hours logged in isn't a very good measure of activity, in any sense of the word. Being me, I'm most inclined to suggest a combination of as many of these and other implementations as possible, such as to create as complex an equation as possible, containing as many different independent (and sometimes random) variables as you feasibly could, to make the general structure of the faith system as indecipherable as you could. You can't exploit something very well if you're not sure how it works. But I know a lot of people disagree with me on this point, so I'd imagine arbitrary limits would be most popular. | |
Leftley wrote:
cut... Hmm. That's actually a very nice idea, particularly in a MUD with heavy religious or moral overtones. It wouldn't be a cure-all for power abuse, but it would at least make for a nice change of pace. One of the big problems is that players tend to be predisposed towards forming power collectives--hence why virtually any game which could concievably have "clans", does. If one group of players managed to build up and consolidate their power well enough, they could start bullying around other players just as before. I don't see that as being too much of a major concern, though; if you had a supplementary, traditional admin system to back it, chances are things would never become a real problem. Balancing would be a fairly tough issue, though... for one thing, do you give each player only one "piece" of faith to give, or do you let them spread their faith across as many players as they want? If the latter, is their starting "pool" of faith to invest distributed evenly across the board, or can they appoint faith in more and more people without diminishing the amount given to each? My original idea is to have Faith tie into the leveling/exp system. But having read your posts and others' post on leveling, I have my doubts. It is better to have only one Faith to one person. That way, in a large clan, members may want to break away and form their own clan. The biggest concern, however, would be how you determine your playerbase. If you simply increment a total census count variable every time a new character is started and gauge faith pools towards that, it would be hard for anyone to gain faith under normal circumstances: large numbers of newbies entering and then leaving forever without having appointed any faith would weight the "vote" against giving power to anyone. This would also open the door for people to write scripts to log in under various randomly generated keys, create a new character, appoint faith in their main character, and then log out forever. You could solve the former problem, but not the latter, by making it only count players' faith totals against the number of players who have appointed faith in someone. You could thwart newbie-spam vote-rocking by putting in some sort of requirement... you could require players reach a certain level or other arbitrary measure of power, thus discriminating against non-powergamers. Or you could make it an arbitrary length of time, thus discriminating against quick, rapidly-conforming learners. The latter of these two options would probably be more favorable, since it would be powergamers who would be most likely to attempt to illegitimately rack up faith points in this manner and powergamers who would also be the best at raising newbies to "voting level" the fastest. One could rank people's investments of faith in terms of how much they play and check faith pools against a total count of "faith-hours", thus making intermediate-level players count considerably more than freshly-made newbie players, but with proportionately diminishing returns from there on out... but hours logged in isn't a very good measure of activity, in any sense of the word. I agree with you to a certain extend. The attempt to prevent login newbie abuse can be two way. 1. To have the protential players apply before they can play. This is a elementry screening system. More advance screening can be done. 2. Random event asking for revote. The players will be asked for revotes randomly. If there is no reply within a certain time frame, the vote is voided. Other means of preventing abuse can be as you suggested. It is more inline with what I have in the beginning. Instead of using time, it might be area explored, with new areas bringing more voting power. Being me, I'm most inclined to suggest a combination of as many of these and other implementations as possible, such as to create as complex an equation as possible, containing as many different independent (and sometimes random) variables as you feasibly could, to make the general structure of the faith system as indecipherable as you could. You can't exploit something very well if you're not sure how it works. But I know a lot of people disagree with me on this point, so I'd imagine arbitrary limits would be most popular. Yes I agreed with this. | |
I was considering a more diabolical variation on this idea. Each player in the game has a soul. One of the ways to attain an immortal state in this game (not admin, simply unable to permanantly die) was to harvest the souls of willing victims in exchange for powers from the harvester (a.k.a demon).
Aside from the problem Leftley noted about people making characters only to steal their soul and forget about them, I had another problem. How do I keep demons from exerting force to take the soul? Even if Demons can not directly effect a character with a pure soul, they could just have a powerful minion (player that gave their soul to the demon) kill them if they don't give up the soul. Spending your entire life on holy ground can be very boring... | |
Shadowdarke wrote:
I was considering a more diabolical variation on this idea. Each player in the game has a soul. One of the ways to attain an immortal state in this game (not admin, simply unable to permanantly die) was to harvest the souls of willing victims in exchange for powers from the harvester (a.k.a demon). Call buffy? Ha, ha, ha. Anyways, Ive seen this done only too much on MUDs. It starts out fine with Faith, or Religion, or DemiGod, or whatever. Then people discover mass logins, or rigged votes, or bugs, or the fact that they can just get 2 friends to do a soul-loop (in Shadows example) and gain power instantly. I've been part of a Status Loop, where I gained 654 status I think, where I was promptly doing 2500000 or so per kick in damage (100,000 hp being the max) and taking 0, of course I didnt get to enjoy this much, getting banned 15 seconds after. Point is: Systems like these are VERY VERY easy to rig, Ive yet to see one that hasnt been rigged, or bugged in some way. If you do find a way, call me, any time, day or night :P Alathon | |
Make forcibly taking someone's soul another form of combat, only spirit/will vs. spirit/will instead of strength/dex vs. strength/dex. It wouldn't be a single action, but a progressive, back-and-forth battle, where the demon can get ahead, and then the victim, and then the demon again. If it's no quicker and no easier than killing someone... then there shouldn't be any balance issues.
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Call buffy? Ha, ha, ha. Anyways, Ive seen this done only too much on MUDs. It starts out fine with Faith, or Religion, or DemiGod, or whatever. Then people discover mass logins, or rigged votes, or bugs, or the fact that they can just get 2 friends to do a soul-loop (in Shadows example) and gain power instantly. I've been part of a Status Loop, where I gained 654 status I think, where I was promptly doing 2500000 or so per kick in damage (100,000 hp being the max) and taking 0, of course I didnt get to enjoy this much, getting banned 15 seconds after. Point is: Systems like these are VERY VERY easy to rig, Ive yet to see one that hasnt been rigged, or bugged in some way. If you do find a way, call me, any time, day or night :P Very simple... make it so that an inexperienced (or even underexperienced) soul is worthless. | |
Argh! Why are people thinking of the same things that I do? (Those damn gnomes have gone rogue, I think!)
Since one way or another people will pretty much say my system exactly at some point along the way, I'll claim my own position and say it first! The deities in Haven operate under certain principles: What deities do is customise their following as desired... they can set ritual sacrifices, prayer requirements, etc. Each of these religious deeds will give the deity power, in the form of Divinity Points (yes, its a numeric system, but the deities won't have access to the figures... not even the numbers or the amount of points they gain). With these points, the deity can then battle other deities and otherwise administer to those of his faith, punishing the unruly members of their own faith as needed. Naturally, a deity has a very hard time causing punishment upon other members of an enemy deity's faith. I'm not sure exactly how much more expensive it would be to affect heathens, but it'll be rather pricey. A deity cannot, however, simply strike down one of their followers, unless they were really, really mighty (and Evil Malevolent in ethics/morals). That's why you have followers in the first place -- the followers are the ones who convert heathens, not you. The stricter a deity makes their teachings, the more points they get from any particular religious deed. The deity will naturally gain points logarithmically (formula not yet finalised), based on the number of followers they have, but the real value comes from the special things that their followers do, and DP are hard to come by. Since a pre-requisite for becoming a deity is months of game play, deities are generally the productive members of the game society, regardless of their in-game ethos and morals. And, since they have elevated powers, they're under even more scrutiny than "mortal" players (deities can be killed, but their powers make it rather difficult). There's a lot more I have written down about my deity system, but I'm not giving up trade secrets. =) | |