Fascinating insights, fellows. Bill and I have been discussing this over email as well.

The key problem for developers in this: how can you minimize the damage done to the community by abusive or hopelessly inept players? There are many possible solutions:

1. Have police. I'm talking about paid employees who go around the game world, monitor chats, channels, etc., and administer justice. If you're being a dick, they can fine you somehow--up to and including suspending or revoking your account. The obvious problem here is expense and the older problem of who watches the watchers. The police could also help out noobs, though this problem is probably best handled by preventing low level characters from escaping a "play pen" or the like until they've proven themselves.

2. Community-based policing. I'm thinking here of players reporting bad behavior, reputation systems, and the like. Again, many obvious problems, mostly the potential of abuse. You hate some dude, so you get all of your friends to help get him punished or banned. Also, it's hard for a company to quit taking someone's money just because others don't like him. "Is that fair?" I say, yes it is.

For the sake of comparison, let's consider someone who is at a baseball game and being really obnoxious. Maybe he is throwing ice cubes at the folks around him, yelling out stupid things, or even just farting or belching a lot and being generally offensive. If the guy was annoying enough, something would be done. Assuming that people couldn't just move to another part of the stadium...Probably what would happen is that enough people would notice or grumble until someone (an official or a fan) would ask the guy to shut up or leave. If he refused to cooperate, then it would escalate until something was done (up to and including the police or a fist in the face).

The real world has ways of discouraging such behavior without excessive force. If you get drunk in public and make an ass of yourself, you will probably be told by a bouncer or cop to get a cab and go home. If you don't cooperate, you get arrested and thrown in the "drunk tank." This does two things--(a) removes you from the scene where you were creating the disturbance, (b) gives you time to sober up and hopefully enough "slap on the wrist" to make you reconsider such a course in the future. Of course, you could do it again and again anyway, just because some people are nuts. I guess in extreme cases you'd be kept in jail for weeks or months. You might also return with a weapon to "exact vengeance" or some other insanity.

3. Individual censorship/exclusion options. This is what most MMOs do now. Instead of doing anything to the punk, players have lots of options to ignore them. You can easily block their chats or messages, stop incoming requests, etc. Maybe this is the best solution, and most people seem fine with this. However, to my mind it only treats the symptom, not the actual disease. What's interesting is that there really isn't a real life equivalent of this. You can't just selectively filter out the noise made by someone talking on a cell phone during a movie, for instance. If you put in ear plugs you can't hear the movie, either. However with a game you can opt not to hear the cell phone conversation at all. That's pretty neat.

The only real problem with this is that people might take it to extremes, ignoring everyone they don't know, or causing bad feelings to new players. Maybe someone isn't a real pest; they just don't know how to act because they are brand new. If lots of people ignore them, it might cause them to feel alienated and quit playing. On the flipside, it's not very pleasant when you first start a new game to have to ignore lots of annoying people. The whole thing is unpleasant, but especially damaging to normal people trying the game for the first time. You really don't want the first people they talk to be the wackos that everyone else is auto-ignoring.

What are other people's thoughts on this? Is there a better way than #3 to deal with nincompoops?