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Online Justice Systems
The
Current Methods While
existing systems for controlling PvP show some very creative design
solutions, each of the following strategies nonetheless suffers from
certain flaws that arise from the different priorities assigned to game
play elements. Administrative
Control (Simutronics’ Gemstone and Dragonrealms)
Simutronics
gives its players wide leeway in resolving conflicts among themselves,
and generally limits its hard-coded restrictions on attacking other
characters. New players may not be attacked and are not strong enough
to harm one another. Stealing from a person’s inventory is limited to
coins and small gems, and corpse looting is either not possible (as
in Gemstone III) or has safeguards that allow careful players
to prevent it from happening (as is the case in Dragonrealms).
The leeway afforded the players allows the responsible players a great
degree of freedom in how they play their characters. To balance out
this freedom, though, Simutronics strictly polices its player base.
Its players’ terms and conditions agreement, for example, states, “What
is not acceptable is to initiate combat against unsuspecting victims.
Anyone exhibiting such behavior, especially one who chooses to prey
upon weaker players for his or her own enjoyment, may be in violation
of…policy.”
“Unsuspecting
victims” can be a difficult standard to enforce. It’s fairly obvious
when someone is on a mass-murder spree, and we remove such characters
from our games immediately. If the offender is an experienced player
who knows better, we generally penalize the account with official warnings
and restrictions from playing for a period of time. If the player is
new to our game, we explain our policies. If any player is unwilling
to abide by the rules, Simutronics usually recommends that he or she
try a product better suited to his or her tastes. Simutronics’
methods are effective for controlling those players who understand the
rules and deliberately choose to violate them. The system’s main weakness,
however, is in handling conflicts in which the two parties disagree
over whether consent to violence was given. For example, if player A
makes a few choice comments about Player B’s suspected lineage, and
Player B attacks, is the conflict consensual? Some Simutronics staffers
would say consent was implicit in the insult, but others consider consent
to be something that must be explicitly stated by the victim prior to
any attack. When staff tread such nebulous ground, they’re fighting
a battle that is impossible to win. No matter how they handle the conflict,
their intervention often creates hard feelings among the players. Resolving
these squabbles also uses staff time that could be spent on game development,
requiring a higher developer-to-player ratio than would otherwise be
necessary. Simutronics has made the choice to incur these higher costs
in order to maintain games in which our customers may play in relative
safety from arbitrary attacks. Whether such a solution would be viable
in another game depends on the developers’ goals and budget. Player
Policing (Origin Systems’ Ultima Online) Ultima Online’s
developers decided to forgo administrative policing and leave its justice
system entirely in the hands of the players. Raph Koster, Ultima
Online’s lead designer, said Origin designed the game this way in
the hopes that, “given the tools to police their own environment, [players]
would do so…. Our experience was that every method of administratively
imposed policing either failed or led to intense resentment of the administrators
of the game. We were particularly concerned because traditional models
on MUDs for enforcing social mores were very administrator-intensive,
requiring a large number of skilled administrators willing to devote
a lot of time to soothing ruffled feathers on the part of players who
felt wronged. In a commercial venture of a large scale, we didn’t think
this was sustainable.” Allowing
your customers to police themselves is a noble goal, but one that is
difficult to implement. The most infamous result of the Ultima Online
hands-off policy was the gangs of player killers (PKs) that formed.
Such gangs would station themselves at key locations in the game and
ambush any poor soul foolish enough to travel with a group smaller than
a mob. “I just got PK’d,” was a refrain commonly heard outside the game’s
banks, where naked adventurers would come to beg for money to re-equip
themselves. Some players formed anti-PK militias, but, as Raph says,
they were “inadequate for handling the problem of player killing. The
actions of the few police were both insufficient in quantity and inadequate
in severity to curb the activity of the player killers and the player
thieves.”
Ultima
Online’s greatest strength is that it places administration of PvP
entirely in the hands of its players, giving them an unrivaled sense
that they, and not the Origin staff, control their world. The benefit
of this feeling among players shouldn’t be underestimated; it’s a powerful
contributor to a sense of immersion in the game environment. The system
is weak, however, in controlling random aggression. Only after five
reported kills does PvP activity have any real repercussions for the
aggressor, and the game does little to track long-term aggressive behavior.
If a player waits just eight hours of online time between murders, he
can kill one player a day without ever reaching the murderer threshold.
No penalty exists (other than being flagged a “criminal” for a short
period of time) for attacking someone unless that person dies as a result
of his or her injuries. Harassment attacks that fall short of a murder
are still extremely common in Ultima Online. I was, for example,
attacked by total strangers an average of once a day over three weeks
of playing while writing this article, and killed three times. (Note
to game designers: other game designers get really grumpy when your
players kill them, especially when their colleagues make fun of their
poor fighting skills.) Player-toggled
Flags (989 Studios’ Everquest) The developers of 989 Studio’s
Everquest implemented a flagging system that will mark characters
either as able to attack and be attacked by other players (+PK), or
completely unable to engage in such activities (-PK). The method is
a common one for controlling violence in small text-based MUDs, but
my experience suggests that in a large-scale game, where the community
is of sufficient size to allow true anonymity, the use of “throwaway”
(also known as “mule”) troublemaker characters with -PK flags will abound.
Such characters, immune from physical harm, can do many nonviolent but
extremely annoying things to other players, such as following another
character around wherever he goes, blocking entries to important areas,
attacking monsters other players are already fighting, engaging in verbal
harassment, holding goods stolen by +PK characters, running cons and
scams, refusing to leave someone’s home, and more. Brad
McQuaid, Everquest’s producer, says his team is aware of the
PK flag’s potential abuses and is prepared to combat them. The game
will have a squelch command to combat verbal harassment, and out-of-context
(non-role–played) harassment will result in punitive measures against
the offender’s account. As for killing the creature another person is
fighting, Brad says, “…the player or group that does the most damage
to an NPC gets to loot it and receives the experience for the kill.
This stops the jerk who comes along and gives the killing blow to a
creature even though another person or group had engaged the NPC long
before. He’s welcome to deliver the killing blow, but he will receive
no experience for doing so.”
The general principle behind the Everquest kill-stealing prevention is sound, but what does one do about the high-level, -PK player who goes to a low-level hunting ground and steals kills repeatedly, doing more damage to creatures than the new players fighting them by virtue of an incredible advantage in skill? Does one block entry to such areas for high-level players? Does one prevent high-level players from attacking low-level monsters? Does one simply warn the player for disruption? The number of ways to get around the game design illustrates the greatest danger to the PK flag solution, namely that it creates an invulnerable subclass of character that players will be unable to police, thus shifting the burden (read: increasing staffing costs) to the game administrators. However, I suspect the flagging solution will be popular with a significant portion of Everquest’s customer base, because it allows responsible players who don’t enjoy PvP to play without interference from their more aggressive cohorts. ________________________________________________________ |
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Features
The
Current Methods
