1.  Hans Henrik Staerfeldt’s Law of Player/Admin Relations: The amount of whining players do is positively proportional to how much you pamper them.

"Many players whine if they see any kind of bonus in it for them. It will simply be another way for them to achieve their goals. As an admin you hold the key to many of the goals that they have concerning the virtual environment you control. If you do not pamper the players and let them know that whining will not help them, the whining will subside."

2.  Anonymity and in-game admins

"The in-game admin faces a bizarre problem. He is exercising power that the ordinary virtual citizen cannot. And he is looked to in many ways to provide a certain atmosphere and level of civility in the environment. Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former friends will turn against him. It may be that the old saying about power and absolute power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people"

3.  Hal Black’s Elaboration

"The more responsive an admin is to user feedback of a given type, the more of that type the admin will get. Specifically, as an admin implements features from user suggestions, the more ideas for features will be submitted. Likewise, the more an admin coddles whiners, the more whining will ensue."

4.  J C Lawrence’s “stating the obvious” law

"The more people you get, the more versions of “what admins are really doing” you’re going to get."

5.  Rewarding Players Law

""It is not possible to run a scenario or award player actions without other players crying favoritism."

6.  Staff Rewards

"The longer your game runs, the less often you get kudos for your efforts."

7.  J C Lawrence on Utopias

""Don’t strive for perfection, strive for expressive fertility. You can’t create utopia, and if you did nobody would want to live there."

It's very interesting, after running UO Evolution for 7 years, how true all of these Virtual Game Laws are!

Those laws might apply to the virtual world we all love and cherish when playing UOE...


  But I believe those laws are founded in reality. Take the good and bad kids at the supermarket... one is crying the other is using manors to get what they want. (not to mention behaving)


  Just saying.