[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[Ling]

On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, J C Lawrence wrote:
> 
> Mike "Lorry" Lawrie (or was it Bartle) argues strenuously on this area
> in his general argument on the advantages of perma-death.  Simply put:
> given a perma-death system (with suitable political backdrops -- see
> Lorry's article) competant high level players can generally ensure
> that the members of their ranks are sufficiently competent, and have a
> vested interest in doing so to prevent the Imm/Imp from purging their
> player records.  Lorry of course argues this from the viewpoint that
> non-permadeath systems allow players to "win" thru mere persistence
> rather than any particular skill or ability at the game.

Agreed, any chance of pointing me in the direction of the article?  Sorry
for making noise but I have to say that one of the reasons my interest in
muds skydived was that you don't need skill for muds such as those.  You
just need far too much time on your hands and the ability to withstand
RSI.  What was the point in playing?  I see it similar to playing one of
those point 'n click adventure games where you can't die, just be
persistent.  Except non-permadeath muds had this penalty that once you did
die, you had to waste a few days getting back to where you were. Social
side?  Not interested, I'm a tinker/gamer, the social aspects are frills.

Perhaps taking tips from the early arcade games of limited lives in some
form might be a nice touch to give people a 'chance', after all, one
chance is just harsh, I'm experiencing a game with one chance to live
right now, thankyou very much. Perhaps the ability to gain more lives.
Like DartMUD, except there once the 'continue bonus' was discovered,
almost everyone carried one.  But that's a separate technical issue. 

Taking the above Lorry's (or Bartle's) theme further, the competent
players could be rewarded with more 'lives' (in whatever form) if they
help out newbies...  Enforced newbie helping.

Personally, I'm lazy.  I wanna play a mud where I don't need to waste a
year to get to medium-level.  I take a "lurve 'em and leave 'em" approach
to games: play them constantly for a day; find out all the 'kewl' features
then get bored.  I want to be able to do almost all the things the more
experienced players can, except less well.  The long term lastability is
provided by being able to interact with everyone else on their level.  The
game itself should have an elegant design that is played often because it
is fun, not because it demands you to play it often so you can have fun.
Alternatively, the process to get to that a decent level should be fun
too.  There's no fun in repetitively killing similar monsters the same way
a zillion times to achieve something (refer to that "OGR: Ion Storm's
Witchboy talks about the functionality of enemy AI" for how Defender and
PacMan made things interesting.)  I dislike being in a mud that has strong
gamist classes between newbies, old-timers and everyone else inbetween
based on active play time logged. (And that's also why I dreamt up that
weird idea of a mud where you didn't have skills, you had contacts to do
things for you.  Would contacts make mules redundant?) 

Oops, I'm ranting.  Anyway, good thing the subject is entitled as it is,
coz it makes this entire post on topic. :) 

  |    Ling Lo (aka Lethargic Lad)
_O_O_  kllo at iee.org




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