[MUD-Dev] Commercial value of RP

[The Eternal City]

On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

> 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

This is obviously an issue with this sort of scheme, but I don't see any
way around it. I think we are a long way from being able to automatically
and accurately reward players for role-playing. I wouldn't even consider
attempting to create role-play rewards that were "judged" by the system.

These rewards are not intended to be a constant thing. We are not
trying to go around and catch everyone as they role-play 24/7. They are
granted irregularly. They still, however, greatly contribute to the
overall role-playing atmosphere, imo.
 
One way to partially address this problem is to run scheduled role-playing 
sessions (We call 'Events'), some of which are limited to members of a 
particular group or organization. This gives smaller groups of players a 
chance to interact and 'be noticed' in this context.
 
Events also serve as the building blocks for ongoing stories and plots 
(sort of like episodes in a good television series). They represent an
investment of both the staff's time and that of the players' and there 
is a tendency for players (through their characters) to become 
emotionally involved and invested, as well. This sort of investment 
also reinforces the overall role-playing culture in the game.


> 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.


There are several assumptions in all of the above that I'm not quite sure
how to respond to. Let me start by addressing a couple of things that
might clarify, to some extent, how we try to do things:
 
1) Our staff doesn't hang out with the players. We do interact with them
   as NPCs, but we discourage any sort of exclusivity.
2) We don't grant role-playing rewards for one or two sentences uttered by 
   the player. We _generally_ grant them at the conclusion of events, but 
   also at random times when we pop in (hidden to the players) to watch 
   some role-playing (i.e., bouncing back and forth between staff wouldn't
   do much good, unless we're talking in terms of hours, in which case, 
   more power to them.)
3) Staff favoritism is probably ultimately unavoidable. _I_ prefer being 
   around and watching quality role-playing, rather than someone who'd say 
   "Yeah, whatever, dude." (to quote Mike's example). However, I also feel
   that rewarding and attracting these types of players strengthens the 
   game overall and helps build a role-playing community and culture.
4) We do everything we can to discourage scripting in the game. We also 
   disconnect idlers after about 15 minutes.
 
As an example of something I was particularly impressed with and enojyed:
I had a player recently whose character had been arrested and thrown in 
jail, with no chance of release. This guy came on-line and role-played 
being in jail, screaming at guards, complaining about not being fed, 
communicating with other players in the game via an IC broadcast channel.
There was nothing for him to do but role-play and he did it for at least
an hour or two on several occasions.
 
This kind of scheme isn't an ultimate solution, but it is a step in the right 
direction. It's better in my mind than _only_ rewarding the "powergamers"
or those who spend all their time getting better at combat and magic (or 
whatever the 'personal' power standard is in the game). 


> 
> 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.)
> 

This is the kind of thing I'd never try to do. Even if it were set up to 
be abuse-proof (which I'm not sure is possible), I don't think it
accurately reflects or rewards role-playing.


> >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.)
> 

I guess I'm not sure what you're saying here. I'm not familiar with quest 
points and can't quite understand what they do from the context.


> >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.

I agree that it is not easy to find and keep good staff, but I don't agree 
that getting them out of the loop is better. I don't think there is any 
substitution for human story-telling. In Mike Sellers' Beowulf example, 
he was talking basically about the 'emotional' element of role-play as the 
missing ingredient in games. This is something our staff takes prides in, 
and something I think our players appreciate. 
 
Even in the face of a 1,200 player game, I think that the storytelling 
aspect (while hopefully supplemented by the vibrant interactions of the 
community you've built) would still be an integral part of the whole 
experience.

Scott Martins 
Worlds Apart Productions