[MUD-Dev] Commercial value of RP

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

Sometime at or around 09:10 AM 1/8/98 +0000, I personally witnessed The
Eternal
City jumping up to shout:
>

[In response to the question, how do you fairly automate an RP based award
system?]

>Players also accumulate something we call 'role-points' for simply being 
>on-line. However, the rate at which they accumulate depends on the
>player's demonstrated role-playing interest/ability. If a player engages in 
>role-playing sessions and make an effort to stay in character, we reward 
>himm with an increase in the rate of role-point accumulation. If he isn't 
>interested in role-playing, and spends all of his time fighting, the rate 
>of accumulation won't change. Some players pursue both 'interests' quite 
>avidly.

Yes, the infamous time-based reward -- I see one major problem with this,
really. The effort has to be noted by a staff member... and staff members
naturally tend (as the MUD grows) to hang out with a smaller and smaller
number
of players. When you have some twelve hundred players (not all online at once,
of course!), and four hundred of them are actively roleplaying -- how many of
them can realistically be recognised for that? How difficult is it for someone
to note that Bob is roleplaying most of the time, and provide an increase in
his accumulation rate? How likely is it? I envision this working more or less
as follows, correct me if I'm wrong:

1. Bob walks into a room and roleplays.
2. An imp in the room determines he should get a ratio increase.
3. The imp types something like 'set Bob ratio 1.25' or whatever.
4. Bob gets a tell or something from the imp congratulating him.

The big problem with this is the determination part. Bob can walk in and
roleplay with fantastic skill in front of a staffer, then walk in and do it in
front of another staffer, and so on and so forth playing tag-team with
staff in
order to get a high ratio. And by the same token, Bob can walk in and roleplay
fantastically, but staff may go "Oh, I'm *sure* he gets ratio increases from
other staff". The problem this creates is diminishing returns -- after a
certain point, usually one reached fairly soon, your ratio just plain doesn't
move. At that time, it becomes more productive to just log in and idle for
hours than it is to go out and roleplay, because the effort won't pay off; you
can log in and run around killing things, but that gets awful boring awful
quick, so people end up idling. The easy solution, of course, is for staff to
check the ratios and have some sort of timestamp -- "Last increased on
XX/XX/XX" for example. If it's been long enough, bump it up. 

Or, alternately: decay. Every time you earn a role point, *decrease* the ratio
slightly -- so if you want to keep advancing, you need to keep a steady
flow of
increases, or your ratio will return to normal. This prohibits mass idling
rather elegantly. If ratio increases are in 25 point blocks and every role
point decreases it by 1, then I have to exceed a rate of one increase for
every
25 points. You could conceivably even let it decay all the way to zero.

A potential addition would be the ability of players to vote that person X
should get an increase; there is the associated problem of cliques, but this
can be dealt with using the standard history and loop-detection methods which
most MUDs already have in place to prevent Bob from sitting in the same place
for days killing the fuzzy white rabbit and maxing his level. Maybe permit ten
votes to raise the ratio, but keep a twenty-vote history -- so the player has
to have an entirely different ten people vote for him next time. I think
twenty
people is a good wide circle of friends, provided they aren't the same
player's
alts. Yes, I do know people with that many alts on the same place.

Major problem with staff being the only ones that pass out role point ratio
increases: the perception of favoritism. There *will* be favoritism, of
course,
since the players will want to hang around the staff that gives them the
goodies, and the staff who are giving out the goodies will want to hang around
the people they consider the best roleplayers. The two groups will eventually
become relatively close online friends, and at that point -- even though
everything was impartial up front -- it sure looks an awful lot like staff
reward their closest friends with stat increases. It does indeed end up
becoming the case, since it's a self fulfilling prophecy. People will get
incensed and go melodramatically roleplaying in front of the group and then
say
"I RP'd with them for a half hour and I didn't get a single increase. In fact,
they asked me to go away!" That sets a precedent, and other people verify the
results either by trying similar things themselves or by just flat out lying
about it. (I've seen players claim some pretty outrageous things just to be
part of the crowd that has an axe to grind. The righteously indignant
victim is
a prime role these days; class action lawsuits are pretty similar -- I never
knew I was unsatisfied until Joe here told me his story, but now I think your
company owes me millions of dollars.) I think we're all familiar enough with
classic movies like Frankenstein and the Hunchback of Notre Dame to realise
that an angry mob is a Bad Thing.

A thought I've been having, since I not only want to reward roleplaying but
encourage it... how about gaining experience from listening to others? Every
time someone emotes or speaks in your area, you gain some minor benefit like
(say) 2 XP. This would encourage people to talk to each other -- since tells,
chat, and the like wouldn't do this. Hopefully they would talk to each other
and discover that, lo and behold, roleplaying isn't that hard. Problem one: I
log onto two separate shell accounts and log into the MUD, then set up the
clients to trigger 'smile' when they see '* smiles *' and type 'smile' at one
client. Immediately I have a screen full of "Bob smiles shyly. Bill smiles
shyly. Bob smiles shyly. Bill smiles shyly." etc., and the XP just mount right
up. This is also tough on the MUD's command queue, if it has one or at least
some similar sort of construct. (I wish we could just agree that most of the
time at least one person on the list will have some weirdo architecture that
any given example doesn't apply to, so I wouldn't have to keep qualifying
EVERY
architectural statement I make with some sort of caveat.)

>Players can 'cash in' role-points on various things, including luck rolls, 
>credit to start another character at higher-than-beginning level, the 
>'privelege' to play a noble character (and work their way into the
>political realm), an in-game dwelling or inheritance, etc. 

This strikes me as being similar to 'Quest Points', which bothers me. Quest
points never seemed that decent, from my perspective, the only worse thing
being a 'scroll worth one rename' which could be cashed in on something
that in
all likelihood would get broken or stolen later. Quest points were further
complicated by the inability (or unwillingness) of most imps to create a
decent
low-level quest. Roleplay, I expect, is a little different; you can roleplay
with a 43rd level character even at 2nd level, but combat is pretty much
out of
the question. (Please spare me the "my system doesn't have levels so your
example is irrelevant" comments. We all know what this means, no matter how
it's represented in server X.)

>This is not automated given the fact that our staff has to actively make
>awards to players at various times. It is, in that once a player has 
>demonstrated her role-playing ability/interest, she gets a higher 
>accumulation of role-points per hour for hanging out in the baths talking 
>to her friends.

Agreed; I don't think you can entirely take the staff out of the loop, but
I do
have a general sense that the closer you can *get* to taking them out of the
loop, the better off you'll be in the long run. You can find people you trust
to be players a lot faster than you'll find people you trust to be staff,
after
all, so the former is always growing faster than the latter.
+-[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-[caliban at darklock.com]-+
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