[avar]

> This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other.

This isn't a problem with these games. It's intentional. Everyone knows how to mitigate it, you introduce a factor of significant loss aversion into attacking or being attacked, e.g. what EVE Online has where you might lose significant resources as a result.

Players by an large don't like that, and just want to join multiplayer and shoot and be shot.

The general public multiplayer mode in games like RDR or GTAV is always utter chaos like that, but you can just join private groups where it isn't like that.

I think that's the best of both worlds, you can still die (e.g. accidentally) and respawn quickly, and if you're being a dick the moderator of that session can kick you.

[space_fountain]

Something that a was part of for a long time which I thought had a good mix of this was Civcraft a Minecraft sever/collection of mods.

It made pretty much all resources scarcer and plants and animals harder to grow (biomdepenedent). Then mods allowed users to reinforce blocks meaning it would take repeated breaks for them to actually disappear. (cooked stone meant 25, iron 255 I think and diamond 1255 or similar). Reinforced doors and similar also had permissions associated with them.

Kill other users with a pearl in your hand would trap the player in the end till the pearl de-spawned, you released them, or logged out with it in your inventory. On top of that there were a few other mods, but in my mind it did a remarkably good job of keeping a server with anarchist rules from imploding. I think a lot of it was that Minecraft is a game you can do something other than kill people in.

[ehnto]

My solution was to play modpacks that no sane person would be bothered grinding in order to grief. Svens and Test Pack Please Ignore are what our servers were based on. If you wanted to grief you would uabe to grind for hours before being capable enough to bother anyone.

So in your case and mine it seems the solution was giving serious players tools to defend themselves that were resource or time intensive to defeat, so the griefer wouldn't be bothered.

[space_fountain]

Getting sort of off subject, but one of the things I liked about this set of mods was that they were entirely server side. It got a bit awkward in that it required text commands in the place of interfaces in a lot of places, but it meant that the difficulty of getting people to join was a lot smaller. I think at the peak it was still fairly small but a healthy 100+ on most days.

My first big bit of software development was a mod that ended up getting used on the server and that's still updated by some of the copycat servers that got created after.

[the_gipsy]

Do you happen to know any active copycat servers?

[space_fountain]

Haven't played personally, but https://www.reddit.com/r/civclassics/ seems to stil be kicking.

[the_gipsy]

Civcraft was one of the few games where the economy felt really real, and the gameplay truly emergent.

[ehnto]

I haven't had that much trouble in GTAV. It definitely happens, but it's normally hackers rather than people abiding by the rules.

I think the fact that people have such a grind to get anywhere, and there is so much to do other than grief. Perhaps people sympathize because they are trying to do the same thing. Even though you get rewarded for it, most people don't try and ruin your missions.

It's possible I get matchmade into more polite servers because I never cause trouble. I don't know if they keep track of that. They definitely track it during each individual session.