[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 11:17 PM 6/10/99 +0100, I personally witnessed Greg Munt jumping up to say:
>
>Do pay-mud administrators feel that they *have* to stay 'mainstream', to
>only have what is deemed popular? And, if this is the case, how can pay-muds
>be involved in any way, with extending the 'state of the art'?

Free MUDs can try something, fail miserably, and keep going. Eventually
they may hit on something ingenious.

Pay MUDs can take a good idea from some little, teeny free MUD and put it
in front of eighty million people. 

Both pay and free MUD people read and contribute to forums like this, where
the two industries -- are we two industries? I kind of like to consider us
as just one -- can cross-pollinate. The free MUD, by virtue of its
playerbase largely being more forgiving of errors, can try the more wacko
ideas. The pay MUD, by virtue of using paychecks to attract developers who
are (theoretically) "better" at game development, can take the wacko ideas
that a free MUD gets to work and refine it. Sometimes a very, very simple
idea that doesn't work too well can work a whole hell of a lot better when
you just tweak a couple things about it. 

Without getting too holier-than-thou, I'd like to note that in order for
this to work, the pay MUDs shouldn't be patenting and hoarding their work
to quite the extent their marketing and legal departments would probably
like. Sometimes the innovation flows the *other* way. It's a give and take:
the pay community takes from the free community and makes it better; the
free community takes it back and pushes it in some new direction; and then
you start over. Lather, rinse, repeat.

>Endnote: from reading Raph's posts about UO - specifically 'what we planned
>on doing' vs 'what we actually did' - UO seems to be a lot closer to the
>'state of the art' than most free muds. Yet a lot (apparently) of the
>original plans either remain unimplemented, or have been disabled. Now, we
>all know that UO has no problem clearing its costs - so how are these fears
>of Mihaly's justified?

I would hazard the guess that Origin, by virtue of having more
income-generating products, can afford to take more risks. If UO loses
money for a little while, they can suck it up and take the time to fix it.
A smaller company which has fewer and smaller sources of income is more
likely to go under. 

I don't know anything about Achaea, really, so the next is all supposition.
However, since I haven't seen big ads for it all over the place, chances
are they don't have the level of financial backing UO has. If Achaea did
something really really wrong and chased all its players away, there is a
very real possibility it might never recover, and this part of the MUD
community could be lost forever. Even worse, Matt might be so dejected and
discouraged that he'd never write another MUD, and that would really suck
donkey balls. ;)

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H       -=CABAL::3146=- 


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