man-man Posted:

I think part of the problem is the difficulty of pinning down a set of clearly defined rules, such that there aren’t large grey areas or loopholes, while maintaining the original intent of those rules. Taken to the extreme you get something like the legal code of a country – a vast mbum of statutes covered with a morbum of amendments and sub-clauses, all of which requires trained specialists to understand, interpret, argue about and judge legality/illegality.

At the risk of sounding too old-farty, that sort of **** is why back in my day, when we had TEXT ONLY AND WE LIKED IT GODDAMNIT NOW GET OFFA MY LAWN – read, when MUDs were kings, queens, the alpha and omega – and I ran some, my rules were simple. Be a male reproductive organ, get banned. I get to say what being a male reproductive organ is, and it’s not a democracy. Rules lawyers hated it, but it made things nice and simple. I used to get a lot of complaints about it one place, but then I quit (tired of the complaints) and got replaced by one of those rules lawyers. It wasn’t long before people were asking me why I had to go and quit.

TL;DR: If you want clearly defined rules and regulations, careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

Every community I’ve been part of since about 0.5 seconds after I got ‘net access has gone through this, btw. Cool people get ****ed off and leave, while the bumholes never seem to go away. It really sucks. But life goes on.

I hope that enough cool people stick around here that the Ep3 stuff we’re working on is appreciated by people who understand. The best part about games for me has always been helping to create something other people enjoy, and I think and hope the community will enjoy Ep3.