[MUD-Dev] Re: Revenants (Re: Marion's Tailor Problem)

[Damion Schubert]

-----Original Message-----
From: Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad <olag at ifi.uio.no>
>I think you mentioned in another thread that the red names above your he=
ad
>made pk'ers life tough in M59. That was certainly not the case in the be=
ta,
>the Revenants made life tough though when they started to work.  In fact=
,
>being "red" was some kind of statussymbol, it was part of my and other
>player's identity. "I am red again! BWAHAHAHA..." (It was kinda fun to
watch
>scared newbies run away when I entered a room though...)


The Revenants, for those who aren't M59 heads, are invisible ghosts that
have a chance of appearing when you PK someone.  The odds of one appearin=
g
and the power of it are directly related to the number of 'innocent kills=
'
by
your hand - which is to say, every time you kill a non-redname person, th=
is
count
is incremented, and it is slowly diffused over time (i.e. one a day).  On=
ce
you
kill ten people, the Revenant is of superMonster proportions, and has pre=
tty
much
a 100% chance of appearing.  if anyone helps you, they get a revenant of
their
own. If you log off, your account is flagged, and a fresh Revenant will
greet you
when you log on.  The idea was largely Mike Sellers', and the plan was
primarily
to allow PKing (even to some extend random PK), but to prevent rashes of =
PK.

Problem we encountered was that the die-hard players knew how to work
around revenants.  For one thing, any monster in Meridian can be killed w=
ith
enough heal potions.  We fixed that.  Also, while your friend can't attac=
k
the
revenant, he can cast booster spells on you.  Revenants, being monsters,
had the same AI problems that other monsters had, such as getting stuck
on building corners until we wrote code which allowed them to walk in
no-walk parts of the map (which in turn introduced a new batch of bugs).
They kept finding work arounds, we kept patching the system.

I guess the overall lessoned I learned from revenants was that a combat-
based solution for anything has serious balance issues, because the playe=
r
who has the highest stats, the best skills, the most powerful spells, the
coolest stuff and (most importantly) the best game knowledge, and the
most mischievousness, will almost always be able to evade your
attempts to make the game difficult for them.  In the case of Meridian,
we kept jacking up revenant strength until they reached a point where
we had effectively removed PK as a viable game option for most of the
players - but advanced players were still able to take them down with
minimal foresight.

All that being said, once we found a balance, revenants did tremendous
good at slowing down rashes of random PKs.  Sure, they didn't stop
the advanced players, but we did severely reduce undesirable behavior
by beginner and medium level players, and that's good, too.

--damion