There could be many answers here depending on if I was the victim of each hypothetical or just observing these happening on a MUD I was playing on.

1. Yes and no. If it's short-term behaviour on a MUD I loyally played on for a long time and I knew the person, I'd probably let it go, call them an ass and continue on about my business of playing because I'd recognize it as unusual behaviour, not a standard. If it did turn into standard behavior I'd start looking for a new game. If it's a MUD I'm new to and just trying out and see the Admin acting this way, I'd leave, because I don't put up with crap from strangers.

2. Players helping out on other MUD's… so what? Maybe that player even owns their own MUD. It shouldn't make a difference unless, as someone else stated, they start advertising to steal players and it becomes disruptive.

3. A very general situation so it's hard to say. Some people have a low tolerance for certain subjects. Here's a specific somewhat similar case; Myself and another player left our usual MUD and started playing on a new one so we could have a little more privacy to spend time together without all our friends around. I guess we made a bad choice of new MUD. The Owner/Admin there was overly friendly, almost like she was desperate for friends as she was constantly in her players business (the first bad sign). There were also a couple of coders acting the same way. Needless to say we didn't get the privacy we wanted but got drawn into the new community just fine. One day I try to log in and discover I'd been banned. No warning, no discussion, no reason. I find out through my friend (who wasn't banned) that in the Owner's mind I had been flirting too much with one of the coders who happened to be her net-romantic interest (not that I was, I was just being friendly like they all were). She had been snooping me and also made up logs of crap about it. Seriously stupid drama. That is absolutely no way for an Admin to act.

So, IMHO, Owner/Admin and even all staff behaviour is very important. If they can't treat their players with courtesy and respect then there are hundred's of other MUD's out there I can go to.

It seems to me that your specific examples are rather loaded questions. You've phrased them in such a way that almost anyone would be compelled to agree that they're all undesirable. The question is whether or not your description of what has supposedly happened is an actually an objective assessment. :smile: I'm happy to agree that, if that really is an accurate depiction of what happened and can be taken at face value, all of those practices are deplorable; but I suspect that no real-life life situation would ever be that simple and unambiguous.

Hadn't really realized they were loaded. I was really just pulling things out of my ass…

And that might be part of the problem when it comes to conflicts between MUD administration and the players - the players are in a sort of void, only receiving the administrator's actions through the filter of the MUD without any context from the admin's life or thought processes. Does that mean more players would stay happy the more open and revealing administrators are? Probably, but there are always some who will view your actions in a hostile manner (and, of course, there are the admins who actually are hostile/mean/dumb/Uruk-hai).

You could substitute "administrator" here; would "administrator" start being a bad word? Heck, we could put in "chief dude" – would that become a bad word too?

I think that what you're objecting to is merely people being stupid, immature or simply lacking professionalism and good judgment; I wouldn't attach so much power to the words themselves. You find bad "people in charge of a game" in many places, whether they're called immortals, administrators, facilitators, helpers, or employees.

Now, my issue with associating "immortal" with "administrator" is simply that I don't think the in-game story should be tied to people who can come and go. Associating a game-world character with a real-world person is just kind of a bad idea, for reasons that I could get into later but cannot now as I have to be off. :smile:

Yes.


You're correct in what I'm objecting to. However, observation (not just my own) has shown that far more of the ones called 'immortals' exhibit these behaviors that we both object to. As for words - they do have power. People categorize things by words. What they're categorizing in this case is a behavior.


I completely agree. That's why I addressed a similar point first in my original post.

Well, I guess our observations have just been different, then. I've seen lack of maturity, judgment and/or professionalism from people wearing any number of label. I think that the MUDs you cited (DBZ and Godwars) have "immortals" simply by virtue of being called that in the codebase. Had the codebase (and indeed the rest of the MUD culture) called it "chief dude", I don't think they'd flip it around and start calling themselves immortals anyhow.

In other words, when the vast majority of people assume that "immortal" == "administrator", it's kind of hard to use it as a discriminating factor: there are plenty of good imms out there just as there are plenty of bad ones.

That would also be why I established in my original post that my argument applied mainly to subsections of the MUD community. I know the tricks of your evil logic, Haley… :tongue:

However, I'd still argue that there are far greater instances across all MUDs of people with poor conduct being labeled as 'immortals' versus any other term. Perhaps it's because those people are already more prone to selecting codebases that call them such by virtue? The reason matters not, though. The fact remains that their poor conduct develops a negative connotation for the term that is used to label them.

Well, if you restrict your argument only to those subsections where it holds, I guess you have made a statement true by construction. :wink:

If a statement weren't ensured to be true by construction, then it would be false. What would be the point of making false statements in support of an argument?

Err… what?

I think I was just saying that one can construct any number of points that hold in a universe so restricted that the point becomes a trivial and uninteresting one, because it has no support for generalization to the bigger picture.

For example: "Admins from the subsection of MUDs run by immature people tend to be immature"

Anyhoo.

Then I misinterpreted your meaning. I don't think my statements or argument were that restricted. I even said two posts back that I'd still argue it applies across all MUDs. I only restricted it in the original argument to what I could personally attest to and prove was irrefutably true because I knew you, or someone else, would bring up the 'but not ALWAYS' case.