Anti greifing mod idea. Wheel of Trust

[seronis]

I helped in the past making security scripts for games like Second Life where griefers was a huge issue in some areas of the game world.  Judging by the activity on the DS reddit forum griefers is starting to become an issue in DST.

 

For griefing to be handled you need to do two things, have the ability for a game at any time to deal with someone griefing at that instant,  and the ability to prevent known griefers from joining your server to begin with.

 

*** WHO HANDLES ACTIVE GRIEF

 

A game host obviously has the power to kick/ban.  There needs to be a system where players other than the host are considered TRUSTED and can earn kick privileges, and temporary/permanent ban privileges. 

 

One method of earning TRUST would be the server host just flagging you as trusted. 

 

Alternate method would the ability for trusted people to vote to give you trust.  Voting would require some percentage of ALL trusted individuals (not just those currently online) to vote.  This would prevent someone with an 'inside friend' from getting trusted by finding a time when only their friend is online.

 

A third method of earning trust would be accumulating enough hours of "good behavior".  Good behavior is just a timer that accumulates while you are online.  It can only accumulate when you are not afk.  It can only accumulate when someone else trusted is online and also not afk.  Thus good behavior by its nature is something you cant just idle to earn.

 

 

*** WHAT FEATURES ARE NEEDED

 

 

We now know who can handle grief.  But what can they do with their power?  We need a few main abilities and each one would have some minimum TRUST level required to initiate.

 

0.  no ability to act

1.  Participate in a vote to kick someone

2.  Initiate a vote to kick someone

3.  Kick someone without needing a vote

4.  temp ban someone (for some configured number of hours/days)

5.  perm ban someone

 

Kicking someone will also temp ban them from rejoining for 1 hour to give them a cooling off period.  If the server is configured to use 'good behavior' then any punitive action can have preconfigured penalties applied, clear all earned behavior, or even prevent the user from earning additional privileges permanently.

 

 

*** WHY IS THIS THREAD TITLED "WHEEL OF TRUST" ???

 

Because the final most important aspect of handling griefing, is to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

 

Q: In the grand scheme of things, what good is punishing a griefer on your server, when he is just gonna go to another server and start the same things all over again?  And what about when he then tells his griefer friends to go to your server to cause more problems because he is pissed you banned him?

 

A:  not much good

 

What is good?  Using a security script that when someone joins your server, it sees that this person has been banned 3 times for destruction, and a dozen times for racist/homophobic slurs.   You have your server set up for no more than 3 total historic bans.  Now your security script auto kicks him.

 

The Wheel Of Trust concept means when you choose to kick or ban someone, you are willing to select a reason why.  Some possible reasons:

 

* Just dont want them here. (default)

* Destructive Griefing

* Player harassment

* Spamming / Advertising

* Racist slurs

* Homophobic slurs

* PK violations  (killing friendlies)

* Killing pets/followers

* Swearing

* NSFW behavior  (would only apply to a place wanting to be child friendly)

 

An ideal ban system would probably add a few more categories just to be fully fleshed out.  And then a given server could set up which ban reasons are important to them.  Some servers might care so little about heckling each other they wouldnt care about racist or NSFW stuff and turn it off but would still care about players who attack friendlies and betray their teammates.  The default reason would be one that is never propagated out to the wheel of trust. Useful to get rid of someone without considering them a bad player.

 

 

[seronis]

--- reserved for adding further main points ---