[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[s001gmu at nova.wright.edu]

On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:

[snipage]

> I have intensely disliked reputation systems for a long while now as
> being both excessively simplistic and presenting a too easily
> trivialised model for players to manipulate for something I see as
> very multi-dimensional.  Your text above gives an idea however.
> 
> Instead of having a single alignment or reputation value, or even a
> pair of such values, presumed perpendicular as UOL is doing, instead
> just keep simple counts.  "Good" actions would add to the character's
> "good" statics, evil to his "evil" stat, etc, and the discrete
> counting stats are kept seperately.  Thus using only the simple
> good/neutral/evil trio, a stat call might look as so:

[Ex. snipped]
 
> Where Bubba would be a fairly wicked chap, Boffo a kinda
> middle-of-the-road semi-decent fellow, and Bubba being more than a
> little schitzoid.  Expand this for your other behavioural scales and
> you get a character being defined as the balance of the ratios of his
> counts aross multiple scales.

[count + delta]
 
> The next problem is with players who play a lot and so get very large
> count stats, sufficiently large tha the max delta values are dwarfed
> and so bear little relevance:

[count + delta + average] 

>   The resultant communication is now quite a bit different as you can
> spot trends in his balance of actions.  Bernie does an awful lot of
> minorly evil actions, a minor number of extremely neutral actions, and
> a large number of very good.

[aging + average + delta]
 
>   This loses the extra data of indicating how long Bernie has been
> played by keeping the numbers reasonable while preserving the value of 
> the basic ratios.


The one problem I have with this idea is, well, it presents a LOT of
information to the player, and then forces them to spend time figguring
out what the heck it all means.  Yes, I do think it is better, but is
there a way to automate the interpretation of the data?  I am not much of
an on-the-fly number cruncher kind of guy.  If I am presented with even
those 6 numbers in the last example, I'll have to stare at it for quite
some time before I deduce exactly what bernie's been up to.  Something
that can analyse the averages, totals and max deltas, etc, and come up
with something like:

  Bernie appears to be a very confuesed individual,

or something, would be keen.  Heck, put both of them on the screen at
once, or allow people to toggle which ones they see.  

-Greg