[MUD-Dev] thoughts on game economies

[Travis S. Casey]

On Sun, 13 Jun 1999, Ling wrote:

> There are two kinds of people.  People who spend lots of time saving money
> and people who spend lots of money to save time.
> 
> You don't get much of the latter in muds because time is not a scarce
> resource for the more committed players and there aren't any devices to
> help players save time anyway.

Sure there are -- what are weapons and armor, if not devices to make it
easier and faster to kill monsters?  Many muds have devices like
speedwalkers (to make it easier/faster to get around), teleport booths
(same), healing potions (make healing up faster), etc.  Players gladly
spend their character's money on these things.

On SWmud, we had taxi service (getting around -- don't have to buy a ship
or hitch a ride with a pilot), repair droids (make it easier/faster to get
things repaired), medical droids (easier/faster healing), and cargo droids
(combat -- higher encumbrance made you more likely to be hit).  I hear
that they've added combat droids and probe droids since I've been gone.

The trick is to make sure that the convenience given is worth the price.  
If using some item simply switches inconveniences, not many people will
use it.  If it costs too much in proportion to what it does for you,
again, not many will use it.

One of the most popular items that anyone came up with were some droids
that were useful for PK -- you could set them in a room, and they would
try to keep anyone who came into the room in there *except* you.  This
gave PKers a chance to block exits.

R2 droids were popular for their repair abilities.  Any droid could be
used to draw the fire of hostiles (making them use ammo), or be made to
do something for you while you were at a safe distance (e.g., open a door,
flip a switch, pick something up).

Stormtrooper helmets were popular, because of their inbuilt radios -- the
radio didn't do much, since there were plenty of chat lines, but the
"radio network" had a daemon with several little canned sketches it would
go through.  Everyone with a helmet would hear them at the same time,
which allowed people to do MST3K or Rocky Horror-style comments on them.
There were two "channels", so that if you got tired of the sketches, you
could switch to the channel that didn't get them.

I experimented with stormtrooper armor that would change the wearer's
description to "a stormtrooper" and make other stormtroopers non-hostile
to you, but it was vetoed.  Tons of people requested it, though, so I have
no doubt it would have been popular if implemented.

Players *love* getting little special abilities like that, even if they
don't mean much in game terms.  On MudDog, there were a couple of items
that almost everyone in the game wanted -- even though all they did was
give you another chat line and some extra emotes.  I thought it was kind
of silly, since every player already had at least one chat line available
to them, and you could duplicate most of the emotes with the "emote"
command.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) 




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