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<H1>[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</H1>
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<LI><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI>
<LI><em>Subject</em>: [MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</LI>
<LI><em>From</em>: "Dr. Cat" <<A HREF="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</A>></LI>
<LI><em>Date</em>: Sat, 2 May 1998 16:33:24 -0500 (CDT)</LI>
<LI><em>Reply-To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI>
<LI><em>Sender</em>: "Petidomo List Agent -- Kanga.Nu version" <<A HREF="mailto:petidomo#kanga,nu">petidomo#kanga,nu</A>></LI>
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<PRE>
Raph Koster wrote:
> On Friday, May 01, 1998 2:30 PM Dr. Cat [SMTP:cat#bga,com] said:
> >I think making a game that accentuates the difference between
> old-timers
> >and newcomers strongly is a bad idea commercially. It makes it so
> that
> >your customers from your first few months are the most likely to be
> >satistisfied, and so it's a lot harder to grow your customer base
> with
> >new players after that. Artistically I think it's a bad idea too.
>
> I agree with that too. We went to great lengths in UO to minimize
> this, but we faced the competing pull of "advancement" which is of
> course a very valuable part of any game framework. We pushed
> "alternative forms of advancement" such as ownership and access to
> greater range of activities, but nonetheless retained enough
> traditional advancement and acquisition of power that it still is
> somewhat of a problem.
I remember in my early days as a designer identifying the "hooks" that
drew me into games like Wizardry, Ultima, Bard's Tale, etc. The gaining
of power, money, and magic items was a very obvious one to spot, and it's
very effective. It ties in to the sorts of desires people have in real
life, only in the fantasy world they can achieve them far more easily,
rapidly, and to a greater extent. I would argue that this is such a
powerful "hook" for a game, that if you want a large percentage of player
attention to be focused on other things, you almost have to omit some or
all of that hook, because it will overshadow all else. Of course leaving
out such a strong hook isn't necessarily a sound business decision -
especially when you're developing a franchise that has a well established
audience that likes and expects that type of play. I'm out on a limb
hoping I can perhaps tap into a different and bigger hook - the same one
that draws people into talking to each other on the phone (a highly
popular activity that has spawned a monstrously huge industry). Time
will tell.
> >The "influence trees" mechanism I plan to put in later
> >should do a lot in service of this.
>
> I'd be curious to hear more of this. Is it akin to the setup that
> Asheron's Call intends to use?
I really don't know. I haven't read very much about the game and their
plans for it. (quick peek) I don't see anything about it on their web
site, either. Our mechanism is basically going to be that everyone has
the ability to "assign" their influence to another person, be it the head
of their household, a guildmaster, baron, king, etc. We'd expect a tree
to develop, where the head of a particular dukes might be worth 137
"influence points" because of all the people pledging to him (or to one
of his followers), and he'd in turn pledge to a king, who'd have several
other nobles also in his court. Influence can be reassigned at any time,
so the defection of a major noble to a different kingdom could be a
pretty big deal - giving the king some incentive to listen to the duke's
opinions before making decisions, and take them seriously! There will
likely be some kind of "voting" mechanism that can be invoked to decide
things in the game, also. Apart from any game-global votes there might
be, any group within the game could call a local vote for any issue of
interest or concern to their members. My current thinking is that
there'd be a set date/time at which the influence totals would be
counted, but you could probably view the running totals of
"yea/nay/undecided" prior to that to add some interest to the lobbying
and debating. And that if someone high-up on the tree votes, that sets
the voting choice for anyone below them that doesn't cast any vote of
their own, but if an individual (or a sub-leader) casts a contrary vote,
then that takes precedence.
The simplest system would be that each person is worth one point. But
I'm thinking about requiring half an hour of play per week to reduce the
amount of cheating by logging on alts and pledging them to yourself. Or
even boosting the amount above one point based on total hours per week
online. Possibly giving people one extra point if they buy a $20 a year
"deluxe membership" - though people who don't buy it will complain
endlessly at us that it's unfair. (We're planning to try to make the
game advertising supported, so it will be free for players normally.)
There's also the thought of weighting influence based on your income,
since the income is going to be totally attention-economy based. And the
people getting the most attention having the most influence is sort of
"in tune" with the way things work. I'm concerned though that it might
be redundant, just accelerating things and giving us an "n-squared"
effect if the most popular people are also the best at recruiting, which
is likely. I also want to have "high score" boards with things like
"family/barony/kingdom with highest average income per capita, highest
total income, etc." That has more interest if income is kept a totally
seperate metric - then Clan A can brag "we have the most influence" and
Clan B can brag "we have the most income". Giving people more
alternatives to succeed in and feel good about means a higher percentage
of people feel satisfied and a lower percentage feel left out. The real
hope there is the multiple layers, though. Instead of only 10 people out
of thousands seeing their name in the top 10, if a kingdom is highly
ranked than many people can take pride, even if their results and their
family's results and their districts results are feeble, in saying "I'm
part of the best kingdom, we're so cool!" Kind of like millions of
people revel in the successes of their area's sports teams - only here
they even have some tiny percentage of the accomplishments that are
literally their doing, contributing to the collective whole.
Oh I might note in passing here that this is the kind of question that
many people concerned about "keeping secrets from the competition" would
have responded to with an "I'm not telling" because they don't want to
"have their ideas stolen". To those people, though none of them are
probably reading here anyway, I just want to say "get a life", "get a
clue", "figure out how things really work in this industry and what's not
worth time spent worrying about it", and various crude and childish
comments not suitable for reproducing here.
> a) the server wasn't designed with making a no-PK environment from the
> get-go, so a conversion task would be hideous
> b) maintaining two code bases would also be nasty
> c) we think it's a pointless experiment.
>
> The reason I say the latter deserves some expansion.
>
> Yes, there is considerable demand for a "safe" virtual environment. I
> just don't think it is feasible. As we all know, "playerkilling"
> exists on servers that don't even support combat. There's only two
> ways I know of to handle this. One is to try to empower players to
> handle it. The other is to ban it, attempt to handle the problem via
> administration, and suffer the PR hit of not being able to do so.
> (Yes, I am cynical about this).
>
> I regard it as axiomatic that the more sophisticated the environment,
> the more ways players will find to screw each other over. And the less
> possible it is to actually block said methods. A glance at most all
> the projects of listmembers reveals an environment which is malleable
> enough by players that they can cause harm to others via extremely
> indirect means. Your choice is to either constrain your feature set,
> or accept that you can't possibly trap all the indirect means of doing
> harm. And we don't want to constrain our feature set to prevent Bubba
> from taming a dragon and then releasing it near Buffy, whom he hates,
> and letting nature take over.
I'd contend a lack of willingness to make drastic changes or take radical
solutions, like seriously constraining your feature set, or adding some
"weird and unrealistic" rules modifications. Taking the serious
constraints approach, one could dig into the code and find where damage
is applied to players, and just disable it, so everyone is effectively
immortal all the time. Most players would find this game to suck, but
they could easily be reminded "nine out of ten shards work the way you
prefer" and people could see what happens. If you want to spend a little
more time and effort you could define regions where all players are
immortal, and regions where they're not. "All non-dungeons are 100%
safe", or "all places not within X distance of a monster spawn point", or
"all towns and roads are safe and noplace else", or "towns only" or whatever.
Frankly, even the flawed approach of "a direct attack by one player on
another player doesn't work anywhere, buy every other trick in the book
does, dragon-taming or anything else" has some level of value, in my
opinion. The frequency of players killing other players wouldn't go to
zero, but it would change. Players of the game might find the new,
presumably lower frequency of being killed by players to be preferable.
And most importantly, I think it would be a really positive PR move.
Origin is faced with the problem that if (to pick some random, made up
numbers out of the air) the staff has enough manpower and other resources
to do 5,000 things to the game that players want in a given period, the
players will request 500,000 things. The staff can't even read through
all the requests in all the public forums, much less respond to them,
much less address them all with actions. And many, many players will see
none of their personal gripes or suggestions addressed, won't have
personal experience with some friend getting theirs addressed, and will
assume that the changes they do see are made not because of the requests
of strangers that they didn't hear about, but because of the whims of the
staff, who are "busy ignoring my suggestions and doing whatever they want".
Taking something very dramatic, which a lot of players have talked about,
and making a big, bold, obvious change and slathering "this is here
because players asked us for it" all over the thing, that would be a very
helpful PR move in my opinion, even if the gameplay of it didn't work as
well as the people asking for it had hoped for. The gameplay of the
regular, PK-allowed Ultima Online is not necessarily as good as many of
them had built up their hopes for before they played it, but that doesn't
necessarily mean they aren't out there spending large numbers of hours
getting everything they can out of it.
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions || Free alpha test:
*-------------------------------------------** <A HREF="http://www.bga.com/furcadia">http://www.bga.com/furcadia</A>
Furcadia - a new graphic mud for PCs! || Let your imagination soar!
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.
</PRE>
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<li><strong><A NAME="00434" HREF="msg00434.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>
<ul compact><li><em>From:</em> J C Lawrence <claw#under,engr.sgi.com></li></ul>
<li><strong><A NAME="00349" HREF="msg00349.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>
<ul compact><li><em>From:</em> "Jon A. Lambert" <jlsysinc#ix,netcom.com></li></ul>
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<LI><STRONG><A NAME="00307" HREF="msg00307.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></STRONG>
<UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> "Koster, Raph" <rkoster#origin,ea.com></LI></UL></LI>
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<ul><li>Thread context:
<BLOCKQUOTE><UL>
<LI><STRONG>[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</STRONG>, <EM>(continued)</EM>
<ul compact>
<ul compact>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00305" HREF="msg00305.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Fri 01 May 1998, 21:39 GMT
</LI>
</ul>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00229" HREF="msg00229.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
John Bertoglio <a href="mailto:alexb#internetcds,com">alexb#internetcds,com</a>, Wed 29 Apr 1998, 05:27 GMT
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00232" HREF="msg00232.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
Chris Gray <a href="mailto:cg#ami-cg,GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA">cg#ami-cg,GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA</a>, Wed 29 Apr 1998, 06:02 GMT
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00307" HREF="msg00307.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
Koster, Raph <a href="mailto:rkoster#origin,ea.com">rkoster#origin,ea.com</a>, Fri 01 May 1998, 22:13 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00332" HREF="msg00332.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
Dr. Cat <a href="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</a>, Sat 02 May 1998, 21:34 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00349" HREF="msg00349.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
Jon A. Lambert <a href="mailto:jlsysinc#ix,netcom.com">jlsysinc#ix,netcom.com</a>, Sun 03 May 1998, 23:14 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00350" HREF="msg00350.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
Dr. Cat <a href="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</a>, Mon 04 May 1998, 00:34 GMT
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00448" HREF="msg00448.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>,
J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Wed 06 May 1998, 23:19 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00452" HREF="msg00452.html">[MUD-Dev] quickie CGDC report</A></strong>,
Mike Sellers <a href="mailto:mike#bignetwork,com">mike#bignetwork,com</a>, Thu 07 May 1998, 02:44 GMT
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