Analysis Tools

To Keep the "Live Team" Aware of What's Going On

Richard Bartle argues that tools should be built into the original design of any virtual world which can be used to keep track of what's happening (once the activities of players get so large that the administrators can no longer observe most of it). I suspect that the entities envisioned under stillflame's SimCulture idea will be very appropriate for this kind of monitoring.

Because the primary and secondary statistics of covenants and cultural objects will be adjusted to reflect large-scale changes in the activities of their members, I think they will serve as monitoring devices (and perhaps even regulating devices) for detecting such changes. Thus, if someone discovers an economic exploit based on information available to characters in a particular guild (and word spreads on ancillary web-sites or even in-game), the pseudo-entity which represents that guild (as a covenant) will detect an influx of members (assuming other players sign up to take advantage of the exploit) as an increase in the Function? statistics of the guild. The guild itself will have a "natural" reaction to this (which could include alerting admins or "live team" or whatever immortals might prove appropriate) which would be based on its own AI.

— Scotus - 28 Dec 2003