[MUD-Dev] characters per account

[Kristen L. Koster]

on 4/7/2000 1:48 PM, Paul Schwanz - Enterprise Services wrote:

> Randy Said:
> 
>> Actually, I'd like to see a set of reasons for even _attempting_ the goal of
>> one character per player.
> 
> I see only one reason for _encouraging_ one character per player, whether
> through game design or otherwise.  You alluded to it in your post: increasing
> character investment.

In one sense, having multiple characters per account is a valuable thing
because it increases the "social density" of the game. Each character is an
economic participant. And it seems to be the number of economic participants
in a society which drives the level of political, social, and community
development: more advanced tribal/social/governmental structures form when a
higher efficiency is required in order for basic subsistence for the
population as a whole to be eked out from the environment. When played as
separate characters--even mules--each of these characters acts as a producer
and consumer of goods and services, thus increasing social interdependence.
(Obviously, there's fertile ground here for investigation as to what basic
subsistence means in mud terms, etc).

In another way, however, playing multiple characters literally
simultaneously (what I am used to as the definition of multiplay) makes of
those separate characters a single economic participant, since they are
operating in tandem, at a higher pitch of efficiency, consuming more
resources. It is as if they suddenly acquired an opposable thumb in a world
where previously there had been no thumbs. It's of course a desirable state
because it follows a logical evolutionary trend, so it is not suprising that
GoP players adopt it.

The problems arise with the issues of "fairness." It is of course NOT fair
for there to be a single guy with an opposable thumb running around in your
game when everyone else lacks the thumb. They'll consume all the available
resources, driving the other types of players out of their habitat (eg, your
game). This is why many admins despise people with triggers, bots, etc,
though they can rarely articulate it beyond "it's cheating." What they mean
is that they want a roughly equal apportionment of resource *availability*
to the various participants in their game, and having a notably more
efficient consumer means that this cannot happen. Of course, cheating itself
fits this explanation as well, which is why they label this as "cheating"
even though it may not technically be the case. In UO we termed many of
these sorts of situations "exploits" rather than "bugs" or "cheats."

The truly pernicious part is the fact that the game is likely to be
operating with limited resources--limited connections at a time, limited
space for playerfiles, limited cpu load, etc. If you get a mud that supports
250 characters simultaneously, but 4 out of 5 are trigger-based bots run as
support tanks, mules, and healers for a "main" character that is manually
controlled, then obviously your fixed server resources are not being used
efficiently in a social sense--you could support more players and more
social interaction by removing the opposable thumbs. :) The math is pretty
simple--don't forget that each new player adds n social relationships where
n is 0 < n < x where x is the lesser of total mud population or ~150. So if
your goal or interests relate to player-player interaction of ANY sort, it
serves your goals to disallow simultaneous multiplaying.

Interestingly, non-simultaneous multiplaying (eg running mules), cannot push
the number larger than x. But if there is sufficient economic
differentiation between the characters (different classes, or even starting
one character well after another so that it is obliged to group with a new
set of people more appropriate to the new character's level) they may move
in different social spheres, resulting in n being a higher number than it
otherwise would have been. You could attempt to maximize this by  variety of
tactics, if this was a goal of yours. I alluded to one tactic in another
post, but I'll repeat it here:

- allow as many characters as there are genders in your game and force each
slot to be of each gender.
- allow as many characters as there are races in your game, each slot locked
to a race.
- allow as many characters as there are classes in your game, each slot
locked to a class.
- allow another character only once the first has moved beyond whatever
point on your advancement ladder that makes it pointless to associate with
newbies: eg, each slot locked to a level range.

All of these are designed to push n to the theoretical maximum of x.

> The _currencies_ of an MMORPG are health, wealth, information, and power.

Time, time, time, and time, to translate. :) Jonathan Baron calls these
games "cumulative character" games because the persistent players ALWAYS
wins. It's just a matter of how efficiently they go about acquiring all of
the above.

> Are there any others who have thoughts on this?

I have many. Er, make that more than many. But this post is long enough. :)

-Raph




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