[MUD-Dev] Re: Introduction (Marian)

[Miroslav Silovic]

> > As such I should acknowledge that RPing
> > holds a near and dear place to many MUDders and influences if not
> > forms much of the game structure.
> 
> There's an article in the journal of mud research (a web based magazine)
> about the variety of playing styles and how they interact. A very good
> read if you're thinking about balancing your game.

I read that article, and I think now is both the right place and the
right time to drop the comment on it (even if I doubt that the author
will read it here). My problem with the article is that it neglects
one *VERY* important distiction, that could be used orthogonally
to the other two categories he introduced (if you have no idea
what I'm talking about at this point, read the article - and I'm
sorry I don't remember the URL). The distinction is between the players
who are affected by social and VR conventions as opposed to the players that
heed *coded* conventions. The difference is easy to illustrate: suppose
that a band of orcs come into a city, and suppose, furthermore, that
the city has a guard. Now suppose that guard is not fighting the orcs.
First class of the players would file in bug report, while the second
class would happily jump in for more monsters to slash.

Now each of the player classes splits into two:

Socializers split into code socializers (those that hang out on the channels,
use tells/pages, etc) and reality socializers (known for hanging up in
inns, bars, and other public rooms) - the latter class, with some
achiever or explorer spirit has potential to turn into 'True Roleplayers',
if MUD environment is supportive of those.

Achievers split into munchkins (those that use numbers to become
superpowerful) and workers (those that do whatever is needed, but
withing the world VR, and report all the bugs in hope that they'll
pick rewards for bug reporting).

Explorers are split into mappers (those that like to study the world),
and builders (these study the /code/, and are primarily seen on the
MUDs on which player-building is relatively common).

Finally killers split into crackers (they don't necessarily exploit
security bugs - game imbalances are quite fine with them),
and social engineers (ever heard of the famous rape case on LambdaMOO?)

The big difference here is that socializers and workers get along quite
fine, but socializers *hate* munchkins. I think we could adjust the
other ratios in the similar manner.

Another thing, there could be different stable states on a MUD to those
presented in the article.

	Miro