[MUD-Dev] Turn-based MU*'s

[Sauron]

Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
	JC Lawerence wrote (a message from Cimri):
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Header is broken, I quote it - hope this helps to fix the problem

[decided just to snip it]

> > Subject: [MUD-Dev]  (fwd) Varying Time Commitment Levels: what's an admin to do?
> >
> > <<Jay/Cimri has been invited to the list, but I haven't checked yet to
> > see if he's a member yet>>
> >
> > Comments please:
> >
> > From: cimri <cimri1 at gte.net>
> > Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin
> > Subject: Varying Time Commitment Levels: what's an admin to do?
> > Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 15:27:33 -0800
> >
> > Hey all,
> >
> > What do you do, or should you do, if anything, about the people who
> > can play 10-15 hours every day vs those who can spend maybe 1-2 hours
> > a day playing your MUD?
> 
> [skipped]
> 
> > Why not have a couple of different muds with different time limits
> > on them?  I mean, the 'hour a day' mud and the '20 hour a week' mud
> > and the 'all-out frequent-flyer get a life? mudding IS life!' mud.
> > Players could play in any they wished, but would be restricted to
> > total time spent in the first two muds.  Then if you don't like the
> > idea of bonehead the mudder somehow 'getting ahead' of you by
> > playing all day and night, then you go into the hour a day or
> > other limited mud.
> >
> > Well, that's that!  Comments?

First, I think as an admin you have decide on your standpoint on the
issue of what is "dedication" to a mud and what is "addiction". I can
understand people putting the bulk of their free-time into a mud if it
is something they really enjoy doing (not that I personally would play a
mud for 10-15 hours a day). I do believe that the more time a person
puts into a MU*, the further they should advance. However, if the game
is mindless hack & slash you end up with an extremely unbalanced world.
What I am trying to do with Nighton is to create an effect similiar to
the console RPG's where you can earn the same experience spending 6
hours wandering around killing things as spending half the time
fufilling one of the story-quests. 

Then pops up the question: What if the addicts spend all their time
doing the quests? In my mind, that's perfectly all right. The whole
basis of Nighton is to try to create a blended of RP and Hack & Slash
with balance (not as easy as it seems mind you). The quests require you
to interact not only with NPC's and do the "run from here to get item
<x>, talk to person <y> and return to person <z>", but also to interact
with other players. Many quests will be organized involving particular
empires (faction-based MU) and other groups, so that you have to
confront other players to acheive your goal.

ANYWAYS, In my experience, time restriction has never worked real well
(especially on PK MU*'s). The same problems still exist (some players
maxing out their time every day while others play a few minutes) with
the added problem of the "addicts" or "dedicated players" getting
annoyed because they have to leave their computer terminal and enter the
real world (or simply log on to another mud).
 
> This immediately triggers the memories of The Rock, now deceased, which
> had the turn limit per day. The rule for the limit wasn't quite fair -
> the more you play, the higher is a limit, but the very idea I liked -
> because, as you noticed, addicts really do have an advantage.
> 
> It's difficult to determine who's addict and who's not - say, would I
> have had more time, I'd play more, probably, and it happens that, say,
> today I have just 30 minutes to spare, tomorrow it's 8 hours.
> 
> What I would suggest is to introduce something like the aging - the more
> you play, the more difficult it becomes for you to advance - and it
> looks good in-character, I believe. Of course, this is just a raw idea.
> And, other idea was to allow some free time and make the players pay for
> the rest, and there were more - here we have Sauron, who was close to
> the development team and probably will tell much more about the proposed
> solutions than I can.

One of the solutions which was partially implemented but never reached
frutation (like most of ROCK due to problems server-side) was the idea
that your TDP (turns per day) was a stat just like your strength,
dexterity, wisdom, etc. Since the skill system was open-ended (you
recieved skill points each time you advanced a level to allocate into
whichever stats you saw fit) the addicts could give themselves more time
per day instead of core skills. The idea was that a level 30 player with
12,000 tdp would be about as strong as a level 20 player with only 6,000
tdp with all the other stats built up. Due to imbalance in the player
levels, skill system, and monster experience, it turned out that there
really was no need to put points into tdp because each skill point
raised it a miniscule amount AND it raised on its own as you advanced
levels. The proposed solution was to kill the tdp advancement, and
allocate a fairly large amount to it when you started so that by the
time you reached about level 15 you needed to make decisions regarding
the tdp and other stats. 

The pay-to-play solution never really was considered as a viable
long-term fix, namely because the problems it generated would be greater
than the ones it supposedly fixed. The experience system was originally
designed to go along at an exponential curve so that the higher you got
the harder it became to advance. The exp monsters gave would start to
become less and less of the amount you needed to advance. What ended up
happening was the higher level people once they reached their limit
(point where killing monsters took too long for them to advance) they
began preying on other high level people. They all hung around the same
level because all of the experience they gained from killing other
players, they lost when they were killed. It worked decently to even the
problem out once you reached that point, but then the game becomes
reduced to a mass PK bloodbath. A couple undeveloped ideas we had
hanging around were quest solutions similiar to the ones I mentioned
above with the added effect of drawing the large players away from areas
in which the smallers ones spent their time (in fact on my hard drive I
still have extensions for ROCK which would implement some simple
quests), and there was some talk of seperating higher level people from
lower level people area wise (if you were x level to y level you could
go here but not here) though that wasn't a very well liked solution.

-Sauron
 
> > Jay // Cimri
> 
> --
> Still alive and smile stays on,
> Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
> --
> UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are