Rule Poll - Cheating

[Hazmatt]

I've been debating about this a lot lately. I've seen a few players taking advantage of exploits, treating other players rudely OOC (In-character rudeness is okay), transferring HUGE amounts of money (in excess of 10 million gold!) to their low-level characters... and so on.

I want everyone here to have fun. If cheating is fun for you, why should I stop you? Sure, you can't cheat in sports because it gives you an unfair advantage over the competition. But this is not an arena server - there is no competition here. If you want to rush to high levels, never pausing to RP, just so you can say, "Level 40! I win Itropa!" should that be any of my business?

And assuming it is my business, how do I punish these people?

[Soon to be really old]

10 million!?!?!?!

The most I've ever seen is 1mil... Jsuth ow much farming must that have taken?

My other vote:
Warn them, then if they fail to mend their ways, it's Open season. GP and EXP loss, maybe even in extreme casses charchter deletion.

Edit:
Slightly more alarmying was seeing this at the bottom of the page:


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Last Updated Topic: Rule Poll - Cheating by Listy (Today at 5:58)
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[Lord Surge]

Ive been using the 'reward good players, ignore bad ones' policy a bit...

Warnings, followed by a punishment befitting the crime is probaly my vote.

[catnipdream]

Muling is generally a bad thing, simple because it is overdone. 10 mil or even 1 mil is a lot. Sure the better goodies cost more, but I still think they should be earned by each individual character (re-rolls excluded of course).

The "player" should be able to get their 2nd+ characters up in levels and equip quicker anyway because they already know about how the world works, where to go, what areas to avoid, that kind of thing.

The only thing about "cheating" is that it does in a sense punish those who dont cheat, when it is allowed to occur. The "Why should I earn stuff for my new char when I can just switch stuff around?" syndrome.

At worst, if it is allowed, put a limit on it. You can get decent gear for way under 1mil. You could outfit pretty much any low level char with decent eqiup for say 2-300k.

Sure they won't be able to have the Ubuer/Great/Spiffy Weapon/Armor/Ring of Killing/Maiming/Protecting...right away...but who needs one of those anyways? ;D

[pat2010]

*guilt* 400K is enough to let a low-level char buy herself up far enough to play with the big-boys straight out of the box, and still have change, because Mer did (NB, the money was from a different player, and there's an IC reason for it, but still *guilt*). If what a player wants to do is be able to safely travel and play with his/her friends, who've got established chars, I can see why they'd want to buff up to a fairly survivable level quickly, but I'd like to think we're all reasonable folks who know the difference between some judicious brevetting, and taking the mick. ...Though 10mil seems to suggest otherwise. I mean, what would you spend that much gold on? There's a limit to the number of suits of ass-kicker armour you can wear at any one time, and even for a total clothes-horse and tailoring-fetishist like me, crafting isn't _that_ much of a money sink... I wouldn't say, crafting included, that Mer's got more than a third of that much money in her gear, and she's epic-levelled!

[Hazmatt]

Btw, if it helps people in posting, how about this declaration:
Anyone who posts their cheating experiences in this thread, is absolved of punishment/guilt for those crimes. (This does not cover future instances of cheating.)

[Lord Surge]

I too have bought a few things with one character, that ended up on another.

Generally however, this is because the recipient character is one I spend most of my time RPing with. And it's not a level one character... (Strangely enough, most of my characters are around the same level now)

Also have given (fairly extravagant) gifts to others. This I see no problem with...

The gold for this stuff was earned legitimately, however. Looting and killing, not lag-generating processes, or the other bad ways gold has been earned at one time or another on the server.

Nothing wrong with wanting to be on-par with friends and their characters, or helping out new players/characters in an ic (or even slightly ooc) manner. If we police ourselves, there is no need for the dms to go around and dole out punishments.

However, I think we all know where the line is.

[Martessa]

I took a few things someone let one of my characters pick up and put them in the donation box then waited 10 minutes before bringing my other character in to take them, nobody else took them and the server didn't reset so I consider myself lucky but I won't do it in future. It's so hard to get a lower level character to the point where they can afford the 25,000 gp items though, mine's got about 4,000 gp since I made the mistake of starting at lvl 9 and didn't have the equipment to handle anything you need to go after at that level if you want to make lvl 10...unfortunately due to my time zone and schedule I'm not often on at this time or when there are more than a few people on..it seems I'm just missing the most popular times.

I don't agree with transferring a whole set of items to a character, but I do like the "take your chances it'll still be there" donation boxes, IF you let some time go by rather than logging out then in as fast as possible, and only for a very few things.

If anyone really wants to do it they'll just get another person to 'hold' things for them and they'll return the favour...if the DM's want to spend all their time tracking down powergamers then I suppose they can, but there's so much more I'd like to see them doing...so don't abuse it people

[Steph]

As most everyone knows, I don't powergame. I prefer the RP aspect. However, I, too, have transferred some items from a higher level to a lower level. Most of my transfers are done IC, i.e., "The next time you see my student/friend/business partner, would you give him this bag as a small present from me?"

There have also been instances where I was the only one on the server (when the game was still on Matt's machine) and transferred OOC.

Powergamers don't stay on the server long as they find it fairly boring.

[serpent7]

kravchick2000 said:

Powergamers don't stay on the server long as they find it fairly boring.

Yay!

[aszhra]

Having started with Ana, most of my characters have received hand-me-down equipment, or at least the means to purchase the equipment best suited to the character in question.

As an experienced DM in PnP, I can honestly say that, items a character starts with should be right for that character just starting out.
Anyone remember the percentage chance list at the back of the old 2nd ed DMs Guide. Level determined your chance at having starting treasure.
Think it was like a 5% chance at 1st lvl to have a +1 weapon, that was only a chance to hit. 10% for a potion. Higher the lvl the greater the chance for any meaningful magic item.
If anyone even looks at my equipment for my characters, most items are not all that powerful.
Only gold has ever been exchanged, and that is from items sold for coin.

Mind you this is sci-fi based mod. You have to ask yourself, if tech was to go to hell. What equipment would you have? By scrounge, by happenstance or by something you made with your own hands.