[MUD-Dev] Re: Methods to Reduce Ecological Wipeout

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Koster, Raph wrote:
> Well, we had the deer and rabbits and birds and the like which weren't
> competing for food with players, just with each other. But their
> habitats were indeed being encroached. Not that it mattered--they were
> dead as soon as they appeared, because of the mass demand for hides
> (from which to make armor) and feathers (for fletching arrows) and meat
> (usually for sale to innkeepers).
> ...
> 
> It boiled down to supplying enough for all the newbies who just want to
> kill, plus the craftspeople making a living off of them. Plus the
> adventurers demanding that the resources taken up by deer be spent on
> orcs instead...

Is there any way we can look at some numbers?  Like how many animals of a
given species there are relative to the player population?  The number of
different animal species, the percentage of non-player populated area in
the world...

It is probably Very Hard to come up with a "natural" balance between
creature repopulation and player growth.  Players at the frontier are
trying to tame the wilderness, but that means there won't be any
wilderness left for those that come after them.  (It serves the newbies
right if they just want to kill and can't even find a rabbit - unless
newbies are required to seek out things to kill in order to advance, which
from what I understand is not the case here.)  Were you trying to model a
stable ecological system, where there would always be plenty of wild
animals to beat up on?

I've always imagined that, given the various distorions of time and scale
in most every mud, trying to simulate enough active creatures to maintain
a natural state would require more resources than are available.  But,
typically, I'm thinking about hundreds of creatures per player.

[distortions of time: although player characters rarely "age", for the
sake of game play most everything heals at an accelerated rate, even when
combat or other transactions effectively occur in real time.  So even when
creatures reproduce once per season the entire population can be killed
off in a few days.]

[distortions of scale: even with 1000x1000 locations, the world is a lot
smaller than it should be if someone can cross 100 locations in less than
a day of game time.  Since there are few areas inaccessible to a player on 
a casual stroll outside of town there aren't enough places to hide all
that nature.]


And what about natural defenses?

Animals are timid/will try to avoid people.

Prey animals usually hang out in groups, with strong male (whatever) 
leaders for protection.

Small furry animals can burrow and hide.

And of course predators will starve if they outnumber the prey.

- Brandon