[MUD-Dev] The grass is always greener in the other field

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Charles Hughes wrote:

> When I'm playing (not UO, but other muds) I really like the exploring
> aspect.  Finding rare items (a blue rose, a spinning top, etc) is a lot of
> fun - nobody is really hunting for the item, it has no in-game purpose,
> and it's only there to add flavor.  After I get a rare item, I tend to keep
> it until I'm forced to give it up or I give it away as a present.  Sure,
> it's
> worthless crap, but it allows some roleplaying.

If you enjoy it as a player, it isn't worthless crap. The admins don't get
to decide the purpose of things anymore than a painter gets to decide what
his painting means to everyone that views it. The admins can only set up
systems that will cause most people to view things in a certain
light. They can't guarantee that everyone will see these things in that
light.


> There is, of course, another way - the group object.  This has probably
> been discussed to death here.  Just an object that claims it is "a dozen
> eggs",
> "a pile of coins", "about a hundred longswords".  Database storage
> for multiple identical items is reduced to simply storage for one item
> with a counter. Of course, the downside is that you have to be able
> to handle such objects.


This is, unfortunately, quite impossible to do in my experience unless
your items are all very generic and exactly the same. For instance, aside
from the shortsword that newbies get if they go through our newbie
introduction, all armour and weapons within the game (well, aside from a
couple of resetting quest items) are produced by players, and they all
have individual stats attached to them. Aggregating the items would
require them to lose their individuality. It's the same problem with most
items in Achaea actually. Most things decay with time (whether in your
inventory or not), and aggregating them requires losing individual decay
times.
--matt




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