What i don't understand is how people can be so ruthless about how people play the game, a no idling rule just seems nothing more then stupid to me, but thats just me though, I think the game should be for the players not for the imms to push rules down people's throats.

I did something like what you're asking about in my own game. Each 'PC' in a group adds to the exp yield when they get experience. I did think about putting a check to see if the sockets matched and have it not add the additional person, but then again… I rethought about it and realized that mudconnector/mud-dev/colleges… etc.

So in the end, I have +10% exp bonus per PC in the group (once you hit 2 PC's, so 2 is 20% bonus etc). It caps at 100% bonus, so with a group of 10 or more you have double exp gaining. This is purely to encourage grouping and running around together; for me that is what really makes a game a 'multi-user' and fun time (although I'll also go solo and pk the crap out of someone at times, other aspect heh).

Basically, I have color-coded 'sockets' command which shows matching sockets highlighted in color, that's about it. Check email's vs emails if someone is multi-playing, tell them it's not allowed etc. I've found the problem as most have, you put in checks to stop d00dism, and it just stops the regular players and the d00ds get around it. (If you haven't seen the article on d00dism, it's a must read).

No argument there, the only rules I have on 'anti-idling' is that it's your neck, you bot/idle and die… it's all on you.
I really believe in making things that you don't want to happen, simply not able to happen. Like we didn't want OOL (out of level range, pk range is 7) spell-ups and assistance… so if you attack someone and have spells beyond that level range, it pulls those spells (and while violent, you can't be spelled by OOL castors etc). No one gripes, things just work as they were intended.

one more thing i would like to add though, in my mud it's not 100% hack and slash, we have crafting classes and such, so combat is not the only thing to do, plenty of other things so multiplaying might work on my mud better then others where it's all about kill kill kill

I can picture it already: a slew of multiplaying botted characters all crafting equipment for the main one. :lol:

That would likely depend on what your crafting system consists of. If it's like typing "mine" over and over all night to get minerals from a room called "The Mine" then yes, a player would be an idiot not to bot it or they like a lot of punishment. ;)

My approach would be to first isolate the problem - why are people multiplaying? The answer, presumably, is that playing multiple characters is more effective than playing one. So that's the problem I'd address.

I would set a hard limit on group sizes. Perhaps a fixed limit, perhaps quest-specific, or possibly even based on a leadership skill. I would then introduce a range of NPC hirelings that could cover the necessary group roles.

What does this achieve?

1. If there aren't enough players online to group with, you can still play and have fun. This also addresses a major stumbling block encountered by newer muds - you need players to attract players, and if people can't play solo, then the first players to connect aren't going to hang around waiting for more players to turn up.

2. If you really don't want to play with other players, you don't have to. Some players actually prefer playing on their own (or at least, prefer playing against other players rather than with them). Some might only play for short spurts, and not want to spend all their time waiting for other players to get ready.

3. You can multiplay, but you don't actually gain any advantage from doing so. You no longer have a numerical advantage - you might as well just recruit NPCs, it would be less effort for the same result.

Obviously this is only one aspect of the design, and will likely raise other questions (eg if it's a PK mud, you'll also want to deal with multiplayers creating multiple groups). But then nobody said mud design was easy ;)

I think another suggestion I would make to this end is that systems (combat, crafting, whatever) require decisions and that without these decisions it simply would be counter productive.
I'm not talking about random events to see if the player is at keyboard. I'm talking about removing the benefit to bots and multi-playing through systems that not only make it ineffective to do so, but without an attentive human mind could actually be detrimental.

The problem with systems that encourage grouping (or roleplaying, or PKing or any other kind of play) is that they often do so by rewarding that style of play more than others. When you give rewards for an activity you are primarily appealing to players who enjoy rewards, not simply those who enjoy the activity. In a typical HnS MUD many of your players are going to be achiever types who enjoy rewards (levels, loot, etc). The natural consequence of this is that many of these players will take a shortcut (like multiplaying or botting) to get that reward rather than play the game in the way you are trying to encourage them to do.

I don't believe that we should be trying to encourage players to play in any particular way at all, rather we should design games which facilitate different styles of play and allow the players to choose that which they enjoy the most.

To take the grouping example, rather than offering enhanced rewards for grouping you could ensure your game has tools to make grouping easier. These could be mechanics to find other players to group with, organise and manage group members, communication, stat monitoring, etc. If you then balance your content so that solo and group play are equally viable (this is the hard part of course!) then players can choose to group or solo depending on which they prefer rather than which will give them the greatest reward. One solution to balancing content is to scale the difficulty of encounters based on the group size so that the same content can be played solo or in a group, hopefully with equal challenge and equal reward.

That's a whole new can of worms!

I guess. :)
I stopped playing chess after even everyday PC's with a 19.99 dollar software can beat the top masters.
I started playing Go. Computers are still a good ways from that there.

Not even close to what i've got, but thanks for making it sound lame, lol, no I don't believe in mindless things like that, gotta keep the players active, is my system bot-able yes, but not that easily, I've got many diffrent classes medic, smuggler ect. and will have lots of quests to do, fighting is not even close to the only thing on this mud.

Sorry. :P

Heh no reason to appoligize, some people just have a bad idea of what I believe a crafting system or the likes is from so many hacked up versions that people have done in the past :P

Well, technically, it took much more powerful computers and systems than that to beat the world champions, but ok.

Details. :)