Another post from elsewhere, moved here as it is more relevant. It deals with the kinds of people who can cause serious trouble for the community. It was the sequel to a post in this thread, which discussed what we thought web-based cities were the way forward.
I think, for many users, they still will be, so buildings in the MMO could be reflected on the web: you could then play the cities/thud side of it without ever connecting to the MMO.
Griefers
This is a generic term for the kind of people who can kill a community by their actions: griefer-management is a topic large enough for its own post, or even its own series of books.
The bad part of it is that if they are handled too harshly, then the community feels oppressive, and if they are handled too leniently, then the community feels out of control and overrun. And there is no happy medium: there is a significant overlap between the two, because different people have different opinions of how much administrative harshness they like to see. So the very best we can hope for is to make everyone unhappy.
Some common ones:
Spammers
We know these guys already, we get them on the forums. Now imagine them in the client too, coming online with names like "viagra.example.com", or spamming a 10-line bold red blinking marquee'd advert every 20 seconds. They would drive legit players away.
For this, anti-spam filters on the server would help as would volunteer admins with access to a ban command.
Harassers
These are harder. Someone sends us a log of someone harassing them. What do we do? Do we trust the log?
There are technical solutions: a "log to server <password>" command that would log, say, two minutes of channel text to the server, encrypting it with the password, and providing a log id number. Sending in the id number and password to us would allow us to view the log and make a judgement call about harassment.
HOWEVER... harassment is never simple. There are always two sides to any argument. Logs are likely to be chosen to be specifically incriminating and the logger would know not to be their normal obnoxious self in the log, but would subtly egg on their harasser to make them look worse.
Harassment in large enough doses can kill a community, by tainting the atmosphere. It only takes one or two total gits to ruin a good community. About 1% are griefers, so in a community of 4,000, you'd have 40 of them.
Harassment can come in far too many forms to ever make a rule about each form (harassment usernames like "Dewi Sucks", constantly sending private messages, and so on).
One of the ways to manage harassers is to have powerful tools: ignore, and so on. For the forums you can have "++" and "--" and let people choose not to view posts that are from users who are downrated enough.
Crusaders
Harrassers often stray outside the rules, and so can be banned with justification. The flip side of the coin, however, are the crusaders. They are In The Right, and they know it. They, or someone they know, has been wronged by the system, and they will fight and rail against it constantly, without ever breaking any rule that could get them banned.
Say we banned someone for harassing someone else: the harassment was mutual, and both sides were at fault, but we banned only the party with a history of repeated and unpleasant harassment, and left the other with a long talking-to.
But the Crusader, a friend of the harasser, saw this as unfair: the victim was also a total git, and in their opinion should have got the same punishment. So the crusader constantly harps on about the corrupt administration, the nepotism, and so on. Some will believe him, and side with him, and harass the now-reformed original victim, and get banned themselves for so doing... perpetrating the crusader's crusade. His popularity, and the popularity of his cause, will mean that his posts get uprated by people who read them without knowing the whole story.
If the administration gets involved publicly, then they are doomed to a long argument which they cannot win: any post they make will be replied to with ten or a hundred replies picking it apart. They will never have the last word, and will never be believed. They are already in the wrong for giving out confidential information about the arbitration procedure, and it just gets worse.
Harassers and crusaders are a taint. Clamping down on them can be a problem, because it causes some serious negative backlash from the community, especially if they are popular people. They may well have bought a lot of stuff over the years, since they tend to be very interested in the community they are inadvertently destroying, so banning them will either be tantamount to theft, or will cost us a lot of money that we have already spent, if we refund them.
The best approach is to give them time, understanding, and talking to. But sometimes the time is not available, sometimes they are just not willing to talk, sometimes they just will not understand what they are doing wrong.
And then they need banning even when they are fully within the written rules, because no matter how carefully you write the rules, they will always find loopholes that allow them to continue their campaigns.
(H|Cr)ackers
Not much to do or say about these. Whether they call themselves Hackers or Crackers, they do malicious stuff to the system.
All we can do here is keep decent backups, keep ourselves current with patches, monitor the system constantly for dodgy activity, only run the minimum services necessary to accomplish our tasks, never process payments ourselves, never store any exploitable payment information, and have a disaster recovery plan: basically, stick to security best practice.
If someone trashes our system, we'll lose stuff. If someone finds a way to subvert our system without us noticing, we could lose everything. One of the risks of doing business.
Alt hoarders/traders
("alt" is the MMOG name for a username or character). People will register all the popular names they can get their hands on, and then sell them to people. Free money for those that get there first. If you forbid it, they'll do it anyway, but underground, dodging any system you have to prevent it. If you permit it, they'll do it on an industrial scale.
Eventually, all reasonable names are owned by hoarders. If you make it so that idle names are culled, the traders make scripts to log their alts in periodically, and even to make them play a game if necessary. If you make it so that only a certain number of names are permitted per IP address or email address, they'll use proxies and free email services.
How do you detect an alt sale? Suddenly, an alt starts connecting from another IP. Have they been traded? Have they just reconnected their modem and been allocated another IP?
Scammers
An item owner complains that someone else stole their item. The recipient says they bought the item, or won it in a gamble. What do we do, if...
- Our logs show the owner's alt logging in from the recipient's IP address and transferring the item.
- Our logs show the owner's IP transferring it. The owner claims they were hacked and have found sub7/BO/pcanywhere/whatever on their machine.
- Our logs show the owner's IP transferring it. The owner claims they lent it just briefly, and have a log of the recipient promising to give it back.
- various other scenarios involving scamming.
Alt thieves
Someone complains that their alt has been stolen (someone guessed their password, or they "lent" the alt to someone for some reason, or whatever). The items attached to that account have since been traded from that alt to other people, for real-world money. What do we do?
Gold farmers
"Gold farmers" is the term for people who spend time doing nothing but gaining ingame assets with an aim to spend them on real-world wealth.
End comment
Spammers aside, we have none of these types here yet. It would be nice to have processes, policies and tools in place by the time they do become needed, but those things need to be developed with the community, making sure that they're things the community wants. We want to discourage the bad eggs, not the good ones.
Comments? Also, what kinds of bad people have I missed out on?
