[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Charles Hughes]

I'm new to the list so please pardon any unintentional faux pax...

On Friday, June 11, 1999 5:13 PM, Katrina McClelan [SMTP:kitkat at marcus.pants.nu] wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Marian Griffith wrote:
> 
> > I am not sure if this is desirable but one way to prevent extermination
> > of all wild-life in a game,  is by planting players formly at the lower
> > half of the food chain.  If there are plenty of predators  who can take
> > out a player then without a problem,  then players are less eager to go
> > out and kill indiscriminately. This may not be a solution for UO though
> > as that game seems to, to a large extent,  focus on killing in order to
> > gain.
> > 
> 
> A better way is to have a circular food chain, such that killing too much
> stuff will allow for a population of stuff dangerous to you to flourish.
> Kill off all the cats, and the rodents become quite numerous.  And while
> individually small, in numbers they carry diseases and such dangerous to
> man.  The problem with any such solution is that the cycle can't complete
> itself.  In this case scores of men would die of disease, allowing the
> cats to regain population.  However in a game, a player will just generate
> a new character.  This is the real problem with building a simulation.
> The fear of death isn't strong enough.  If a player had to be wait to be
> "reincarnated" as a youth, and mature back to adulthood after the loss of
> a character, and start over, then you could perhaps pull it off... but
> players would sour on this quickly.

I'm working on a mud (small, noncommercial, available sometime next century :)
and one of the ideas I have is to make killing A VERY BAD THING.  Beating up,
subduing, and ransoming players and monsters after stealing whatever they 
owned would be acceptable.  Outright killing them would invoke bad karma.
Obviously, there would be some monsters meant to be killed, but these would
be relatively rare and generally anti-life themselves.  The desired result
of this would be that populations wouldn't be exterminated in the normal
course of events, and players would be forced to move beyond the "safe"
civilized areas to find/accumulate more wealth OR they'd have to actually
perform a useful function - making armor/other equip, acting as a 
mercenary/bartender/town guard, etc.

This does tone down the violent aspects a bit, and hopefully will encourage 
more socializing (which tends to increase role-playing I believe).  

On a related, side note, the mud won't do periodic repops/reboots/refreshes
of objects but new objects will be created based on the population working
to create the objects.  Kill all the dwarves in a mountain and they won't
be able to mine any more gold from it. :)

I'm sure there will be many problems getting this all working properly but
I'm not in any hurry and processing power gets cheaper every month.





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