[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc - Combat

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <001201be38ef$fc9dece0$22066520 at k6>
             "quzah [softhome]" <quzah at softhome.net> writes:
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>
>Date: Tuesday, January 05, 1999 12:38 PM
>Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc - Combat 
>
>
>>Thought: This idea comes from MUSH. Whenever you enter a command, you get
>>charged some amount of MUD-money. The person who enters more commands pays
>>more to enter them. If this also scales with personal power and wealth, a
>>command from the powermonger costs more than the same command from the
>>newbie. What is your general reaction to this? Is this a good idea? A bad
>>idea? Where are the pitfalls and problems in it?
>
>
>What happens once you run out of money? Can you no longer type anything
>and thus obsolete your current character? Or perhaps you automatically
>gain tiny amounts of money over time, so that eventually you could get
>enough money back to type another command? (Obviously abusable if so, I
>could just log on and sit there while money slowly collects into a huge
>fortune, at which point I could blaze away with a million inputs.)

Well, in MUSH, very few commands actually cost money; such costs
were originally instituted to curb use of computationally expensive
commands in the days when MUSHes were running on borrowed machines
that were also being used for real work.  As such, running out of
money doesn't really keep you from interacting with the game...
it's just that all your nifty little coded objects stop running.
Depending on configuration, you can get more money by begging
wizards, logging into the game (paycheck limited to once every
24 hours), or just wandering around (random chance of picking up
money as you move).

The obvious pitfall to charging money non-uniformly is that people
will build clients to automate using the cheapest method for doing
something, to get around the obvious (but high-cost) method.

The obvious pitfall to charging money for things like 'say' is
that pretty soon most of your players will stop talking to each
other.  This makes for a pretty boring game, IMNSHO.

- Alex