[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Mihaly [mailto:diablo at best.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 11:44 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Game Economies 
> 
> 
> What JC is doing sounds really interesting, 
> though I have
> no idea how much fun it is for the players. I doubt I will 
> ever take the
> risk of putting a system in with the intention of allowing emergent
> properties, simply because they could be bad for business.

UO's original design used exactly that sort of artificial life system. The
issues we found:

1) It was expensive. This may have been due to implementation, of course.

2) It was not readily apparent to the players. This is a complicated
issue--the basic behaviors themselves are not earth-shattering--it's the
emergent behaviors of groups that are interesting. But it's hard for players
to notice large group activities without some sort of good overview
mechanism. The easiest route for this would be NPC conversations ("Things
aren't going so well around here--ever since the orc tribe migrated into the
local woods, our herds are getting devastated and our merchants are getting
attacked on the road...")

3) It was a lot harder to balance that it seemed, because of the tendency of
players to simply eradicate everything. Emergent behaviors don't emerge if
the average lifespan of your wofl pack is ten minutes. Players hunted
everything to extinction--but if we merely increased the numbers to try to
make populations more resistant, then the game became too
difficult/dangerous--plus too expensive CPU-wise. And extinction was all too
readily achieved.

4) It had design flaws which exacerbated many of these issues (doh).

Despite all that, I still believe it to be the way to go.

-Raph





_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev