[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 9 Jul 1998 10:47:23 -0700 
Till Eulenspiegel<choke at sirius.com> wrote:

> Systems with generic classless skill systems find they must curtail
> the effectiveness of skills in general since their players will
> min/max each skill and be overwhelmingly effective in combat.

A more typical approach is to use accellerated skill decay along with
balance limits to ensure the "jack of all trades, master of none".
One standard variation of which is that XP translates to skill points
which are then spent on a selected balance of kills, with the costings
and gain rates set to encourage universal mediocrity or specialised
excellance (eg have the curves asymptotic to infinity).  There are
many translations of this model, from the very simple one above, to
explicit practice/train/use techniques which hide or virtualise the
skill points while maintaining the curves.

> The second curtailment is of course non-anonymity and 'newbie
> gantlet' which both lead to the building of community.  'Newbie
> gantlet' is the effort that it takes to bring a newbie to average
> playing effectiveness.  This should be large and long enough to
> discourage making trashcharacters.  The restriction on making new
> characters should be also curtailed by a review process or time
> delay.

> The goal here is that the player should feel the cost of exclusion
> from the _player community_.

You have just institutionalised politics.  

A point which is often concentrated on with great thought and planning
is ensuring that MUDs and other social venues allow social contexts
for players to be very easily and quickly created.  Find friends, make
friends, keep track of friends, talk to friends, help friends, be a
buddy.  This maps directly to and supports Cat's assertion on
attention economies.  The aspect which is little dealt with outside of
astracism mechanics (GAT, @TOAD et al) are the negative controls: how
to avoid or escape an already defined or created social context, how
to attack or subvert a existant social context, how to define and
maintain a closed social context (ie support for exclusion), etc.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...