

Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds - brown9-2
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia_i.html

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johns
Original article this is pulled from (uncited in submitted post)
[http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...](http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse_mafia_or_why_to.html)

It's a little ridiculous that you can quote the meat of an article from
another blog, write a short intro _sentence_ , not cite the original and post
it as insightful. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he just
forgot to post the link to the original

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jacquesm
I'm assuming it's an accident but it is pretty sloppy.

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juliusdavies
Be careful who you call sloppy! You have been warned:
<http://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/top>

Seriously, people, would you have preferred Bruce Schneier have not posted the
excerpt at all to his _personal blog_? Because it seems that way.

ps. I got the schneierfacts.com link from Schneier's own blog:
[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/bruce_schneier...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/bruce_schneier.html)

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jacquesm
Bruce Schneier literally lives by his reputation, to dent it due to
carelessness is sloppy, that's simple.

What bothers me is that this has now been up for hours, and the comments there
even mention the source but Bruce has so far not felt the need to place a link
to the source.

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johns
The link is up now.

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danteembermage
My brother played sims online on a demo and joined the mafia. The requirements
were 1. own a tuxedo. That's it. Things got interesting when his sim
girlfriend stalked him to mafia HQ and was shouting in the lobby to see him in
the middle of a mafia staff meeting. The don was a little less than pleased.

Even though it made the game a lot worse, it's probably the most interesting
example of emergent behavior in a game I've heard of. Maybe if an Eve online
corporation has an IPO.

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euccastro
_Maybe if an Eve online corporation has an IPO._

Would a successful Ponzi scheme qualify?

<http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/23/1918246>

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DarkShikari
It is a hard and fast rule of online games that no matter how the game is
designed, players will find holes in the game design to abuse it. IMO the only
good way to deal with this is to build the game from the ground up with the
_assumption_ that players _should be allowed_ to abuse most core aspects of
the game.

EVE Online did this pretty well and to date the developers have continued to
encourage all kinds of cheesy tactics. Of course, even they have their limits,
and will ban people for a few extreme abuses, but scamming, griefing, and even
suiciding into newbies in secure areas is all perfectly fine.

If you try to lock down the game and prevent players from doing anything
except what the developers intended, the game will usually end up being rather
uninteresting.

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jfarmer
EVE is great, but WoW is way more profitable.

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DarkShikari
That kind of comparison is exactly why the MMOG market is filled with so many
failures.

Everyone says to themselves "WoW does this X way, if we do this X way, we can
earn lots of money like WoW!" So you get a ton of failed WoW clones that earn
pennies.

Just because WoW does something in X way doesn't mean that doing something in
a way other than X prohibits you from making a lot of money. And it also
doesn't mean that doing it in X way ensures that you _will_ earn lots of
money.

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jfarmer
Fortunately I never said any of that!

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jfarmer
Alright, I'll elaborate, you vicious downvoters, you.

EVE is a great game. The way the game world evolves naturally it's fascinating
for all sorts of reasons, and I love open-ended gameplay.

I played A Tale in the Desert for some time.

But this time of gameplay is hard for people to get into. It demands a lot
from the player. You might call it "active" gameplay.

WoW is the opposite. The story is crafted for you, not by you, and it is more
about pure gameplay than these higher-order things in EVE. It's a much more
passive experience.

I don't think it should surprise anyone that EVE is less profitable. It is, by
it's nature, less inclusive.

EVE is your favorite indie band. WoW is the latest pop hit.

Also, I wouldn't discount the amount of time Blizzard puts into crafting the
in-game experience of WoW. It's very polished and very fun, even if on some
level it's less fulfilling than the do-it-yourself nature of EVE.

The upcoming Cataclysm expansion is just one example of the kind of thing that
can happen in WoW, but could never happen in EVE.

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chrischen
I've never played The Sims Online, so I don't know exactly how it works, but
if this becomes widespread, wouldn't trustworthiness ratings lose validity
eventually?

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RyanMcGreal
First comment:

> "If you allow players in an online world to penalize each other", um without
> cost to themselves, "you open the door to extortion."

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rbanffy
Perhaps we could take a lesson and bring it here - maybe if downvoting cost
karma people would prefer to disagree by replying and to save the downvote for
trolls.

An added benefit would be to have a metamoderation Slashdot-style that gave
back your karma if the metamoderator agreed the comment was a troll.

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NathanKP
Downvoting isn't always about trolls, its about pointless comments as well.

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rbanffy
Anyway, it should cost something to downvote. It seems people are all too
ready to downvote comments they disagree with without much regard for engaging
in a constructive discussion.

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noodle
simple solution: personal reputation that accrues over time, and have each
vote be worth a set fraction of your reputation, and nonrefundably deduct it
from your total after the flag. or something similar.

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gojomo
I'm reminded of this Nick Szabo post on ways the Coase Theorem fails when
actors are incented to be more of a nuisance to extract payments:

[http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/09/coase-theorem-in-
ac...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2009/09/coase-theorem-in-action.html)

(An on-point Dilbert cartoon is featured there, as well.)

