[MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Ryan Palacio
> Sent: Monday, April 17, 2000 9:24 AM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] banning the sale of items
>
>
> Raph Koster wrote:
> > I have come to believe that twinking is a
> > good thing and should be institutionalized. If anyone asks, I'll explain
at
> > length. ;)
>
> <--- asks :)  This has been a subject of eternal debate in the office and
> perhaps a fresh perspective will shed some light on unexplored aspects.
> Perhaps this warrants another thread?

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, a definition:

TWINKING: the act of assisting a lower level player to advance in the game
at a much faster rate than they would be able to achieve on their own, via
the giving of experience (often via XP split systems inherent in grouping
systems), items, goods, or money.

This is the term as it is used in the context of EverQuest and many muds,
but it is not the same as the classic definition used on social muds,
wherein a TWINK was merely a jerk or perhaps a GoP player.

There are several decision points at which a player makes a decision whether
to stick with a mud. The very first is what I'd call the "scratch 'n'
sniff." This is where text muds (and there are no hard statistics on this,
but watching a mud's connection logs or system channel if they have one will
bear this out pretty quickly) lose the majority of newbies who first try
their mud. On a free mud it lasts between 3 seconds and five minutes. On a
commercial mud where they have bought a box or prepaid a subscription fee,
it's likely to be longer merely because they have ivnested some money in it
and therefore have more incentive to stay a little longer trying to find the
fun. If you do not capture the newbie during that time period, they are
gone, and likely will never return.

There's only so much you can do to improve the scratch n sniff. It's very
audience dependent. AC has a great scratch n sniff for its character
creation, for example. Many players will log out of any mud where the
scratch n sniff has that whiff of eau d'Midgaard to it... You can work to
make the introduction to the environment as nice as possible, and try to
reduce this factor. Make your website (likely first avenue of entry these
days) nicer, make your title screen and character creation really cool, etc.

The second inflection point is after they start playing. Everyone has horror
stories about their first play session on a mud. The most frequent words
tend to be "confusing" "directionless" "boring" "monotonous" etc. It has
been empirically shown that meeting a friend in the first five minutes
results in a MUCH higher chance of getting past this inflection point. In
fact, I bet you have had this experience with a friend or colleague (I know
*I* have):

Phred: I tried that game of yours the other night...
Me: Oh yeah? How'd you like it?
Phred: Well, I couldn't tell what to do. Everybody else was busy running
around and nobody would talk to me. So I logged off.
Me: Oh. Yeah. You know, it's a lot easier if you have someone to play with.

Frieda: I tried that game of yours the other night...
Me: Oh yeah? How'd you like it?
Frieda: My friend Angus was on and he showed me all the ropes. All I did was
kill rats, but I played for eighteen hours and had a blast.
Me: Oh. Yeah. You know, it's a lot easier if you have someone to play with.

This is all exacerbated by the fact that almost all mud initial play
sessions really really suck.

Damion Schubert once said to me, "I want a newbie to see the coolest thing
the game has to offer in the first session. Imagine if they saw a dragon and
helped kill it on the first day." (Very rough paraphrase here). He's dead
right. That first play session, before they make that decision to
emotionally invest in the game, needs to be awesome.

Above all, it cannot be humiliating (cf Jonathan Baron's "Glory and Shame").
Killing rats is humiliating.

What more welcoming thing is there than to get outfitted like a hero, handed
thousands of gold pieces, and invited along to kill a [insert critter you
couldn't possibly tackle solo]? You know that if it so much at looks at you
crosseyed, you'll die. You know that your puny sword isn't even denting its
hide. But you're with a group of studly heroes, and you're whacking away at
it, and you're pretty safe because they are taking care of you (even if you
die, they'll pick you right back up again)... that's GLORY, right there.

This is important because we know that if you get past that inflection point
right there, we have you for the average lifespan of a player. On most muds,
that's up to three months. On really good ones, it's six months to a year or
more. (Remember, we are speaking of averages here... our anecdotal
perspectives on these things are colored by the extremely visible dinos...
it's very hard to gather decent data for a text mud where "departure date"
is so unclear. But a commercial mud can and should mine all of these
numbers.)

So twinking, to a point, actually extends player longevity. Now, if your
game system is such that someone being twinked basically runs through all of
your game data in a far shorter timespan, then leaves, then yes, you have a
problem. But that means that the problem lies with your game system, and not
with the very natural tendency of humans to assist friends who are less
fortunate.

It becomes an issue similar to my analysis of selling items: what is being
twinked? And the answer is, we want to get newbies past that hump of
humiliation, and get them to have friends, within two hours of logging on
for the first time (YMMV as far as the time frame, it depends on the game).

Institutionalized twinking would be a system whereby elder players are
incentivized to help newbies in this manner because they need them for their
own purposes. By all accounts, the old Kesmai Multiplayer Battletech did an
excellent job at this. The modern example to point at is Turbine's Asheron's
Call. In both cases, the institutionalized twinking is done via hierarchical
social structures. One can easily see ways to do it differently: to get to
high levels of skill, you need x apprentices, etc. Was it Castle Infinity
where you had to get another player to change your appearance for you in the
newbie areas?

Mathematically, I'm pretty sure that the number of people you get past that
inflection point leads to more revenue/lifespan than the loss that results
from the shortened lifespan of a twinked character--especially if the maxxed
out twinked character then chooses to do it over again "on their own" for
the challenge of it.

-Raph




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