[MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

[Christopher Allen]

adam at treyarch.com wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Schubert, Damion wrote:
...
> > QED: Pairing up a newbie with a high level character is a good thing.
> > The trick is to make the high level character want to have the newbie
> > around.
>
> Which seems to suggest implementing gameplay to make the newbie useful,
> even if as nothing more than dead weight.

Three of the best way's I've seen this done is in Asheron's Call, with the
patronage system, in Simutronics Dragon's Realm, and in DartMud.

The Asheron's Call patronage system has been discussed here before.

Dragon's Realm has levels that require practicing multiple skills to a certain
point before leveling -- one of the skills is teaching, and you can't meet the
requirements of a number of levels unless you've been teaching others. Thus
there are usually plenty of people around that are willing to teach you skills.

DartMud has a level-less skill based system, i.e. practicing a skill makes you
better at it -- this is similar to the UO model. There is a skill called
'teaching' that is only learned by teaching others, the better the teacher you
are, the faster the person you are teaching learns skills through practice. It
is an important skill for high level players, as many high level skills (ambush)
or high level spells may only be learned by "trading" skills by using teaching
to teach another high level skill to someone else. To be effective in this
trading of teaching, a good teaching skill is extremely useful. As the best way
to learn the teaching skill is to teach newbies, you find a number of high level
characters hanging around places newbies hang out in order to offer to teach
them some of the basic skills of the game.

I don't feel that either of these teaching methods works quite as well as the
Asheron's Call patronage system.  I can't quite pin down why it isn't as
effective in Dragon Realms, but in DartMud you don't find many as mid-level
characters teaching because the high level skills and spells are not important
yet. Yet, on Asheron's Call I've been a patron to 1st level players as a lowly
3rd level player.

Summary -- there exist at least two methods to encourage experienced players to
assist new players (patronage and teaching), and thus make them more part of the
game. Anyone know of any other methods?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/649-4030  f510/649-4034 ..




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