[Research/Experiment] Players and Rules

Hello everyone,
Over the past few months it has come to my attention that players, are not following tutorial very well. They are griefing and stealing, running through tutorial, and happily and regulary shopping at the Empire Shop
So I decided to create 3 experiments:

Experiment 1- Griefing and Stealing

I set up a fake base in the wastelands, built of cobblestone, inside there was a chest, containing a few useless items. I wanted to research how many players grief and steal. I then friendly asked players if they wanted to go mining/exploring.

80% of the 20 players experimented on, griefed, and/or stole. That is 16 players.

20% (4) of the 20 players experimented on, didn’t grief or steal.

90% of the 20 players experimented on, griefed, and/or stole. That is 18 players.

10% of the 20 players experimented on didn’t grief or steal. That is 2 players.

90% of the 20 players experimented on, griefed, and/or stole. That is 18 players.

10% of the 20 players experimented on didn’t grief or steal. That is 2 players.

100% of the 20 players griefed, and/or stole. That is all players.

Player Reactions:

Upon me reminding the player that griefing and stealing is not allowed, this was some of their reactions:

• And what?
• Whoops, Oh well, just a few items
• Sorry, I'm new and I just need items ok
• Since when was that a rule?
• *Player disconnected*
• Who cares, it's not your place
• It's only the wastelands ghee
• Calm down Rule Nazi

Please note:

The players did not know they were getting tested.

I did not report, or tell anyone the names of these players.

The players were between 1 day- 100 days old.

I pretended I had no connection to the Base whatsoever.

Basically, players are griefing and stealing out of their own will. I done this research to raise the awareness of players not getting the do not grief or steal message. I understand that we all know that griefing and theft occurs, I just wanted to create some data to show this.
Please share your thoughts and opinions.

Reserved for Experiment 2- Tutorial

Reserved for Experiment 3- Empire Shop

Reserved for Summary

Hmm, Interesting.

In response to experiment one, I'd like more info on it, in particular I have one question: Did they steal right in front of your eyes, or did you log off? If it is the later, how do you know it was them and not someone else who found the base? How far was the base from the spawn?

Now, remember that you invited them to mine with you. How do you determine whether they were just borrowing some items or actually stealing?

I also had the same idea, since i noticed a huge number of people in chat that didnt even know a bit about what was talked about in the tutorial. The most obvious one is chat spam.

I did not log off, it occurred right in front of me (otherwise this data would be invalid)
The base was a significant amount away from spawn (can't quite remember).
Well, taking iron, string and cactus (some of the items) wouldn't be classed as "borrowing". They took it and we carried on, with our journey.

Yes, you can only "borrow" stuff, if you've asked for it. Just getting the things you need, with the silent intend of putting the same amount back in later, is still stealing.

So you pretended you had no connection to the base? That makes a lot more sense.

Yes, sorry if it was not clear
Edit: Added to OP

Oh crap.
lol, jk but anywho, I find this pretty interesting. Do you plan on mentioning this test to any of your subjects?

I'm curious if you'd see the same exact results in the wild as you did in the waste (of course, waste is easier since you can invite folks out on a mining trip). A while back, a new player said something to Tojoro86 that surprised me. Tojoro was out building roads in the waste. A new player was taking the stone brick from the road he'd put down earlier. When Tojoro asked why the player would grief the roads, the player said he was not griefing, and informed Tojoro that this was the waste and that it would all reset and be back. I don't know if that's a common misconception or not, but food for thought.

I am in shock. This is a very interesting experiment. I look forward to see the future results of the experiments.

However, I do wonder what would happen if you did the exact same thing to players that are older than 1000 days, and compare the results.

This is.. Interesting data.

Were the players told anything about stealing the items of the base?

Well, *Aikar un-bans Nick5013 for a day*

Jk

I think one of the biggest problems that causes newbies to grief and steal, among other things, is the tutorial. I much preferred the old, sandstone corridors one. It was boring, but it got the job done most of the time. I tried out the new tutorial and explored it: my frames dropped into oblivion in it (as it also does in the town spawn) and I wanted to get out as soon as possible. A lot of of the new people on EMC are kids and just people who don't have amazing gaming PCs, and big flashy areas with loads of entities can be taxing on hardware.

I'd also like to give a big shoutout to Mojang: I had no problems before 1.8, and always got 30 frames or above. After they switched to running the game off GPUs in 1.8, I get 1-5 FPS and Minecraft is literally unplayable. I know this is the case for a lot of people, and it was a factor in my framerate hell in the EMC tutorial.

Maybe not, they might feel embarrassed or under fire.

That's quite funny, because the feedback I received from players did actually have the occasional mention of that. If i recall correctly, some of them said "it's called wastelands, waste, meaning you can do anything"

Well, I might just do that

Yes, I will add their reactions to the OP.

Are the reactions you added in the OP the only reactions, or were there more?
Also, were there any cases when the player returned items?

There were more, those are just some of the more significant ones.
There were some cases when 1 or 2 of the players returned the items.