[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface

[Matt Chatterley]

On Wed, 1 Oct 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

> Nahh, even for games that have no real concept of levels, the term
> itself still has real value.  How else would you, say, simply compare
> two characters on a skill-web based game, each with vastly different
> skill webs, but with almost comparable fighting ability?  Uhh, Bubba
> has a bit better short sword skill, but Boffo's thumb wrestling skill
> outclasses him...?  Does it really matter in a generalist discussion?

This is the problem I'm running into at the moment! For purposes of
centralising game balance, we want to produce a set of generalised tables
(for instance, how much we would expect certain players to have available
by ways of financial resources, and how to gauge the difficulty of a
section of the map). We used to use level to this end, but now we don't
have it! I've been pondering upon various statistical measurements of
skills themselves (expectation, variance, correlation coefficients, and so
forth).

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics." -?