[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Mon, 22 Sep 1997 08:17:59 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins
<nightfall at user1.inficad.com> wrote:

>One of the main 'goals' for our game is to find teachers that can
>teach you the things you want to know.  This is the side effect of a skill
>system, and some muds have basically made this their entire focus.  See
>Raph's mud, Legend.  I like this aspect quite a bit.  Questing to find the
>ancient teacher of X is a lot more interesting to me than questing just
>for loot and glory.  Then again, I've always considered character advancement
>to be the funnest part of an RPG, so it's no surprise I've made it the
>focus of my own.

This sounds really great, but unfortunately you combine this with some
of the other factors in the game you're describing... and it's sort of
like creating the world's greatest basketball code and making the
world's major races dwarves, gnomes, and halflings. Character
development is a lot of fun when you're *developing*, but after a few
run-throughs you get tired of it. It really doesn't matter how detailed
I can make my character when someone else can walk up and destroy all my
work for no real reason.

>> suspicious of languages if it was possible to converse with creatures in
>> their native tongue -- in a P&P game, when you come up to the orc
>> stronghold, you can speak to the orcish guard in his own language and
>> possibly get through the door without a fight. In online games, no such
>> thing is generally possible. For a weak fighter, this would be a great
>> asset, but online? Nope... you just have to go get someone to beat the
>> orc's head in.
>
>I don't see why you couldn't do this.  

Nor do I, which is why I sort of turn my nose up at languages. Nobody
ever does... of course, this also comes down to another problem I see in
a lot of MUDs, which is that a lot of really cool things are overlooked
in favor of easier things. You *could* 

>Have the orc only allow people through
>who he's seen speak a phrase of at least n words in orc.  You could even
>take it further and require some knowledge of orc culture.

Yeah, those are fun... 

	>speak orcish
	You now speak Orcish.
	>say Hey, you stupid moron, open the #$!%&ing gate or I'll stick

	my shield up your butt sideways.
	The orc smiles and opens the gate.

Seriously, things like that amuse me for much, much longer than they
ought to. ;)

>> I've had the best success *teaching* people to play without the
>> rulebooks. Those big books are intimidating. ;)
>
>Hrm, the thing that intrigued me about it in the first place was the massive
>amount of literature availible.  When some aquitences of mine first told
>me how it was played I thought it sounded silly, but I was impressed by
>the incredible detail into which the books went.  I actually read through
>most of a couple of the monster manuals, the player's handbook, and a
>few other assorted companion books before I ever actually played it.

Well, when I first started playing, there *wasn't* a vast amount of
literature available. For the majority of my gaming career, there were
less than a half dozen major D&D rulebooks.

>> Actually, it was. ;)
>
>There's nothing vague about the saving throw tables, thac0, AC, the
>character sheet, statistics, classes, races, money, damage dice, spell
>lists, or anything else in there.  But again these are all just details
>which lead towards a less rigid purpose, which is my point.

There didn't used to be that much stuff, actually. The face of D&D
changed drastically around the late eighties and early nineties.

>Right.  Well, since we don't have any such well defined states as 'fighting',
>this would be very difficult for us to implement.  Also, invisibilty is
>a very powerful and difficult to obtain spell, and it is far from perfect -
>others can still smell, hear, and sense you through other means.

Why does every game developer I ever try to talk to keep insisting that
HIS game is one hundred percent immune from every example I give because
'my game has no such concept'? Skill-based 'classless' systems have been
around a long time, and they're by no means immune to game balance
problems. In fact, just about every game system suffers from game
balance problems, and rather serious ones in many cases. Does anyone
recall 'Man, Myth, and Magic' which allowed anyone miserly enough to
save up 3000 or so gold to instantly become SuperCharacter?

>So it's about who you want to cater to.  I'd much rather have an interface
>which is more difficult to learn at the begining but turns out to be more
>flexibile and powerful for those that know how to use it.  Really I'm
>catering to the long-term players, not the newbies.  

Everyone on a completely new server is by definition a newbie.
Particularly when the server is a radical change from established MUDs.

>but I certainly won't sacrifice long-term usability in the name of simplifying
>the learning process.

You don't have to, actually; long-term usability and ease of use can be
quite well dovetailed into a finished project.

>There's two things here, for me: you need some sense of RP and
>mood to let you know that you're actually doing it *for* something, and
>not just 'because it was there'.  Secondly is game mechanics; pure RP
>muds leave this out, because there are no mechanics, which leaves me
>feeling a bit like everything that happens is just whatever I happened
>to make up instead of my character existing in and manipulating a functioning
>world.

I have that problem on occasion myself. I mean, really, you can emote
about anything, and I see people who pose such ludicrous things you feel
like demanding to see their character sheets. Building a house of cards,
no problem. Balancing a dagger on the top? Hold on a second here,
Houdini! Make a roll for that one...

>I was about to say 'I don't see what's so anti-social about sticking an
>axe in someone's head', but I think possibly that's going a bit far.
>I'll instead say that I enjoy all sorts of character interaction, hostile
>or not.  Hostile actions just tend to be counterproductive for both parties.

I mainly dislike hostility between players because it's too easy for one
player to force such activity on another. If I'm walking along with my
character, which I've invested some four months in developing, and some
multi-year veteran of the server who happens to be bored sees me walking
along and decides to squot me like a pumpkin -- well, I just lost four
months for his momentary giggle at watching the MUD's 'huhuhuhuhuh, you
killed somebody, he's DEAD, huhuh that was cool' message. On a
permadeath MUD, I don't get any of it back, either. Even when death
*isn't* permanent, when I've worked for a week at making the next
stepping stone in my character's development and suddenly lose it all...
I tend to be pissed. I don't like games that piss me off. I like games
to be fun. Challenging, yes, definitely. Occasionally frustrating, yeah,
great. But binary? Would you play a game like Dungeon Keeper if every
time you were defeated on level 11 (like most of us were, repeatedly)
you had to start over on level 1? All or nothing? Jesus, man, starting a
new character is a tremendous pain; you put in all that work, and then
you're Joe Wimp for at least a week. During that week, of course, you
have to wander around hoping nobody decides he's bored enough to whap
you for the heck of it. If you're lucky, or you have 'connections', then
someone can hook you up with some equipment and start you off with a
decent amount of money. The rest of us, of course, just end up going
somewhere else.

>I should also say that my views are slanted from having spent most of my
>time on muds which were set up this way (unrestricted character action).
[...]
>So, not only do I think all this stuff is fun, but I have no trouble imagining
>you can have a game which allows these actions but for which it is not
>the focus of the game, since I know of such a game, and it's been running
>successfully now for far longer than I have been mudding.

I could point out that there are other such places out there that a lot
of people really hate. Dark Metal, in the MUSH world, routinely has
large numbers of people logged on; a lot of people there really like it.
It's also known as 'Twink Metal', a rather pejorative term as a 'twink'
is the MUSH world equivalent of an asshole, and the founders have long
since moved on -- and consider it a failed experiment. While there
certainly is sufficient interest to keep it running, it's still not
exactly 'running successfully' when the creators have abandoned it. 

I'm not saying this is the case with Arctic, but I *am* saying that you
can certainly have a game that has completely failed, generally sucks,
and everyone rags on -- but still has over a hundred players logged in
at a time. 

>Okay.  Well, we don't have experience, so there you go.  Like I said, it's
>just hard for me to comment on something like this; I consider it already
>solved for us, and I have a hard time envisioning why anyone would desire
>to wrestle with all the problems brought about by that kludgey device
>known as 'experience'.

It's an example. I used something everyone would understand, since we
all have experience with experience, so to speak. It would certainly be
unwieldy to say 'hey, why doesn't everyone tell me all about what
they're building so I can show you all exactly why X would be a
problem', and I expect the majority of people would tell me where I
could stick it. ;)

>The example, as I recall, was a 'low level' (which I will take to mean
>unskilled in combat) character fighting against a 'high level' (by which I
>will assume you mean skilled in combat) mobile.  This is useless for the
>low-level player, because you only learn by fighting someone whose skill level
>is roughly equivilent to that of your own.  

I take serious issue with that statement, but it's useless to debate the
matter.

>(This, of course, is why teachers
>are ideal, as they can tailor their own fighting to be at a 'virtual'
>skill level equivilent to that of the student.)

My unarmed combat instructor most definitely did NOT do this, and I have
the scars to prove it.

>I might also point out that millions of people
>enjoy blowing each other away multiple times with shotguns on such
>popular games as Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, yet no one seems to question
>their sanity.

It's a little different when you have a game where any player can whip
himself up to full power in less than 60 seconds and 'death' basically
means 'hit the space bar'. Given that set of circumstances, as opposed
to a game in which you potentially spend months developing a character,
PK becomes a good deal more acceptable in my eyes. There's a tradeoff; I
don't want to trade even a *day* for some dork to have a cheap thrill.
But I'll certainly trade a couple minutes. (Owner and operator, Clan
Hellrazor.)

>I enjoy strife, chaos, disention, conflict, and peril.  I find it much
>*more* enjoyable when there is real human reason and emotion behind
>such things instead of the flag MOB_AGGRESSIVE or a piece of script
>code that tells it to attack all players whose race is not equal to their
>own.



>I sometimes worry about myself, in fact...there have been
>periods in my life where I've more readily replied to my character's name
>than my own given name.

Hell, I go by 'Caliban Tiresias Darklock', and have for almost twenty
years -- it was the name of my first 'successful' D&D character in the
mid 70's. If anyone's sanity is truly in doubt here... ;>

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 You see me now, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I've been 
 living on the edge so long, where the winds of limbo roar. And 
 I'm young enough to get involved, too old to see, all the scars 
 are on the inside; I'm not sure that there's anything left of me
               -- Blue Oyster Cult, "Veteran of the Psychic Wars"
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