[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 2 May 1998 16:33:24 -0500 (CDT) 
Cat <cat at bga.com> wrote:

> Raph Koster wrote:

>> On Friday, May 01, 1998 2:30 PM Dr. Cat [SMTP:cat at bga.com] said: 

>> >The "influence trees" mechanism I plan to put in later >should do
>> a lot in service of this.
>> 
>> I'd be curious to hear more of this. Is it akin to the setup that
>> Asheron's Call intends to use?

> I really don't know.  I haven't read very much about the game and
> their plans for it.  (quick peek) I don't see anything about it on
> their web site, either.  Our mechanism is basically going to be that
> everyone has the ability to "assign" their influence to another
> person, be it the head of their household, a guildmaster, baron,
> king, etc.  We'd expect a tree to develop, where the head of a
> particular dukes might be worth 137 "influence points" because of
> all the people pledging to him (or to one of his followers), and
> he'd in turn pledge to a king, who'd have several other nobles also
> in his court.  Influence can be reassigned at any time, so the
> defection of a major noble to a different kingdom could be a pretty
> big deal - giving the king some incentive to listen to the duke's
> opinions before making decisions, and take them seriously!  There
> will likely be some kind of "voting" mechanism that can be invoked
> to decide things in the game, also.  Apart from any game-global
> votes there might be, any group within the game could call a local
> vote for any issue of interest or concern to their members.  My
> current thinking is that there'd be a set date/time at which the
> influence totals would be counted, but you could probably view the
> running totals of "yea/nay/undecided" prior to that to add some
> interest to the lobbying and debating.  And that if someone high-up
> on the tree votes, that sets the voting choice for anyone below them
> that doesn't cast any vote of their own, but if an individual (or a
> sub-leader) casts a contrary vote, then that takes precedence.

This sounds interestingly similar to what I understand of UOL's guild
fealty system, and in turn the Rank Points system I proposed here last 
year:

<URL:http://www.kanga.nu/~petidomo/lists/mud-dev/1997Q2/msg01504.html>

--<cut>--

A simple model:

  Player characters can award each other "rank points" (RP).

  Each player character is given (free) 1RP per day.

  A player character with sufficient RPs can be automagically 
  promoted to a high status position.

  Maintaining a high status position costs a player character 
  XXX RPs per day (automatic debit).

  A player caharacter can promote other player characters to other
  (lower) status positions.  

  Such a promotion costs the appointing player a one time cost of 
  YYY RPs.

  The promoted player has his own daily RP cost for his position.

  Should the high ranking player lose his position thru lack of 
  RP's, all appointees will also lose their position as it they 
  had failed to acquire enough RPs to maintain their own position.

  A junior ranked player can still appoint sub-juniours with the 
  same mapping as above.

Ergo: To survive a high ranking player must persaude many many other
players to give him their daily RPs so he can keep his position.  A
high ranking player may appoint juniours who are then also in the same
position, but can be required to funnel some portion of their
collections to their appointer.  

--<cut>--

This sort of system becomes especially interesting with player defined 
and run political systems where the internal costings are either
player defined or player mediated.  (Abject cronyism?)

--------------------

Gawds I love the search fetures on the archives.  However there are
problems:

  Some have observed to me that they were unable to search the
archives.  Apparently this is because they (quite understandably) did
not notice that there are two search mechanisms in place for the
site.  

  WebGlimpse is the little dialog box found at the bottom of almost
all pages.  Its *VERY* fast but only searches non-message pages.  ie
you can search the other (few) pages on the site, and the various
message indexes, but NOT the messages themselves with WebGlimpse (this
will change).  While not terribly useful yet, WebGlimpse also has the
concept of restricting a search to only those pages in the
"neighborhood" of the page where the search started (see the online
docs) -- something that will become extremely useful once WebGlimpse
finds the message pages.  

  Marc-Search is the search page found by clicking on any of the blue
"search" icons, or selecting a "Search Archive" link.  It links to the 
page:

  <URL:http://www.kanga.nu/~petidomo/lists/mud-dev/search.html>

  Marc-Search allows searching of ONLY the message pages.  The
down-side is that Marc-Search is slow.  The upside is that the search
criteria are extensively configurable.

  I also just noticed that many of the search-links on the message and
message index pages that should head to Marc-Search are broken.  Will
fix.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.