[MUD-Dev] MUD Economy

[JC Lawrence]

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998 17:01:43 PST8PDT 
Koster, Raph<rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:

> On Friday, January 09, 1998 10:43 AM, JC
> Lawrence[SMTP:claw at under.Eng.Sun.COM] wrote:

>> NPC's are simple -- [snip] Players are more difficult.

> I gotta tell you all, NOTHING is simple about this. :)

<bow>

True, but compared to players, NPC's are decidedly simple.

> In UO we actually had to take OUT realistic economy sim aspects
> because they weren't fun. :P

I'd speciously note that this is a seperate criteria than the
difficulty of implementation.

> In the real world, you can spend $5 for a block of wood and turn it
> into a great wooden foozle. And the market in foozles can be so bad
> you lose your shirt. But in a game, players will say, "labor implies
> profit! I MUST make money at this!" and they will report that as a
> bug.

I think there is a simpler underlieing expectation which is ruling
this:

  People have become trained to think that if a computer lets you do
something, then there must be some importance associated with doing
that.

For the above case the computer let you make a foozle.  Therefore
foozles must be important in some way, or otherwise they wouldn't
exist in the game.

In the game arena this goes all they way back to the early adventure
games where every single objct, no matter how trivial, (almost) always
ended up having a use somewhere.  IRL word processors and databases
teach us this all the time, and the GUI world and its concept of
interface design (such as grey-ing out inapplicable menu items)
reinforces the lesson with regularity.

I'll also accept the arguments on playability of the possible realm of
non-useful activities as compared to the realm of useful activities is
too large.  It is a poor game in general which makes the player
constantly determine which among many equally obvious, equally
applicable and equally attractive activities, as to which will advance
them more (question of relevancy of activity to problem).

> So now we have a less accurate economy, but one that satisfies
> players. And we learned (again) the lesson to never lose sight of
> the enjoyment of those who aren't as cutting edge as you are. ;)

<bow>

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...