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

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael.Willey at abnamro.com [mailto:Michael.Willey at abnamro.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 1998 10:04 AM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun 
>      ____________________Reply Separator____________________
>      Subject:  [MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun
>      Author:   mud-dev at kanga.nu (J C Lawrence 
> <claw at under.engr.sgi.com>)
>      Date:          9/1/98 8:02 PM
> 
> >On Fri, 24 Jul 1998 16:08:25 -0500
> >Michael Willey<Michael.Willey at abnamro.com> wrote:
> >
> >>   Theoretically, the point of a 'reputation system' is to
> >> simulate people acquiring a reputation from the news and
> >> rumors spread about their actions, right?  It makes sense
> >> to track information regarding their actions somehow in
> >> order to simulate reactions from NPC characters, but why
> >> do players need that crutch?  Unlike NPCs, they have the
> >> ability to listen to the rumor mill and make up their own
> >> opinions.
> >
> >There are two reasons:
> >
> >  1) Players are not connected 24/7 and so don't have available
> >the constant social feedback that defines a social context as
> >well as "the word on the street".  Tracking and publishing
> >this sort of data doesn't solve this problem, but does lessen
> >aspects of it.
> 
> That's only partially true - Joe Player is not connected 24/7,
> but, given a large enough playerbase, *players* are.  The
> social feedback from the playerbase is not as omnipresent as
> in RL, but it does exist.  Tracking and publishing *data* may
> increase it's effects, but creating *opinion* from data should
> be the job of the player, not the computer.  This seems to me
> to be the primary failing of "reputation", "alignment", or
> other behavior tracking systems.

The problem is that once you get enough players on your game to
accomplish this, you've reached the point where anonymity in the crowd
is possible again. In other words, "opinion" is only generated when the
playerbase is *small* enough to communicate information to itself
effectively.

It's been said (dunno where, it was somewhere in reading on
anthropology) that the ideal community formation size can never exceed
around 250 individuals. Larger than that and it starts to fragment. And
as soon as it fragments, having "opinion" serve to track bad guys stops
working--there's always a substantial group of potential victims for him
who have never heard of him.

-Raph