All two of you who visited my message boards will see that I am not a big fan of being explicit with rules. In fact, there are three rules on the Orb Boards; Don’t incite a flame war, keep your account secure, and don’t be a spambot. Apart from those basic rules, I don’t think the rest needs to be explained. What it comes down to is: Anything you wouldn’t do in real life, don’t do here. Unless you make a living out of stealing people’s identities, in which case…still don’t do that here.
I often like to see Game Masters getting intuitive when it comes to removing problems that may not warrant a complete rule, or that may be such a special case that putting a rule would be far too generalizing. Say, for example, the issues Aion had when it launched last month. Players were clogging the servers by going away from keyboard so they could sleep, go to school, etc, without being logged off. Rather than pull out the ban-stick and taking things far over the edge, NCsoft quickly released a patch making such an exploit impossible.
The idea is that you don’t have to issue permabans to get a point across.
More on Aion, World of Warcraft, and more after the break.
Knowing that you have the GM’s as your sidekick is a comforting feeling to the players, who can rest easily knowing that anyone slipping by the rules will be caught. My next example, and the reason for this article, pops up from a recent posting I found from World of Warcraft, and that is Game Masters taking action against players who scam group members.
In World of Warcraft, groups are often at risk of becoming victims of “Master looting ninja-looting” where the head of the group steals all of the loot for himself. Under the false pretenses that everyone will have an equal opportunity to get loot, the group master simply walks off with all of the loot for himself.
So how does Blizzard hope to do this? They look at chat logs, of course! If your group agrees, before the raid, on an equal opportunity system, with master loot on, and the master turns around and takes the items, it is considered a scam, and bans are being handed out. Group Masters who are found to have scammed their group will have their loot taken away, and receive temporary bans from the game (I believe anywhere between a day and a week).
In normal internet fashion, the response to this type of rule enforcing is mixed. There seems to be a group in any game that take solace laughing at the victim in scams such as these, claiming that the person deserves it. Scam victims very rarely deserve what is coming to them.
Giving the controls to a complete stranger is like letting a random homeless person drive your car. You don’t know who it is, what they are likely to do to your car, but for some reason you put them behind the wheel. Just don’t be surprised when Homeless Joe decides to take a nap en-route, and you both go careening over the guard rail.
Similar efforts are being taken in other MMOs. In Runescape, for example, staff have been spotted in the past busting up clans that are formed for the purpose of manipulating the ingame economy.
MMO Fallout 