[MUD-Dev] banning the sale of items

[Timothy Dang]

Just as in the discussion of multiple characters per player, the
absoluteness of the arguments on selling items troubles me. Yes, in
any environment where players care enough about items, and they are
tradeable there will be exchange. However, just as in the real world,
putting up some road blocks will decrease the amount of trade. And this
diminishment (or even perceived diminishment) of trade will effect the
environment.

Someone (Matt?) brought up an example of nightclubs and who might be given
preferential service. To extend the example: At some nightclubs, an onsite
drug dealer is part of the implicit service offered. They can't make it
explicit for legal reasons, but it's worth it to the management to make
the drug dealer comfortable, and let the clientelle know the extra service
is available.

At other clubs, drug dealers are most distinctly not welcome, because the
management doesn't want to attract the same clientelle, not to mention
risking the police raiding the club and spoiling everyone's good time.

In the latter case, there's no way to gaurantee that drug deals don't take
place, and some almost certainly do. But they don't set the club's
atmosphere. Both approaches are arguably valid business decisions, but
with different goals.

It is reasonably argued that the game can be designed so that inter-world
trade doesn't matter much, and so won't either attract much demand, nor
heavily offend those who are offended by such. However, you gotta wonder
whether such designs change the nature of the games offered, and possibly
limit design choices more than desired.

As it relates to Achaea (which I'm sorry to say I haven't managed to find
the time to check out), as I understand it from discussion here,
it's unusually heavily weighted towards RL skills being important. In
other words, advantages acquired through native skill of the player, or
skill the player (not the PC) acquires through practice dominate in-game
advantages of equipment, or character skills?

I may be wrong about Achea, but this sort of environment would make a lot
of sense if one wants to minimize the troubles raised by inter-world
trade. It's also counter to the standard of RPGs which often put an
enormous importance on PC stats. A heavily RP-oriented environment would
also be less vulnerable to alteration by inter-world trade, because one
can't buy RP skill.

I'm less concerned about the admins offering sale of items than about
players trading between worlds. With admin-generated items, there are many
things which can be done to minimize the impact. One can make sure that
the items sold are ones which are "appropriate". Also, items can be made
readily identifiable as purchased versus "won" items, so to maintain the
prestige associated with acquiring items in-game.

But this doesn't address concerns about players trading items amongst
themselves for otherworldly resources (RL money). If it is possible, and
openly acceptable for players to do this, that could seriously alter a
game's atmosphere and dynamics (for better or worse).

If trying to design a game where inter-world trading doesn't change things
much, it seems that much of what's standard design would have to be
abandoned. One way to avoid this is to disallow intercharacter exchange of
items. This is done with certain items in some games, but prevents
intraworld trade as well as interworld trade. Alternatively, one can make
tradeable items of smaller consequence. But (particularly when tradeable
items include characters themselves), this seems to lean towards a game
system where player skills heavily dominate PC capabilities in importance.

There's in-betweens also, such as level limits on items. These don't
explicitly prevent trade, but limit the demand for items to those who may
reasonably be expected to have ingame resources to acquire the items.

I do wonder about the overall effect on the game's environment of rampant
interworld trading. Whether one thinks of MUDs as isolated from the real
world or not, I would expect that many players get into MUDs as an axis of
acheivement separate from those apparent in RL. If measures of acheivement
for PCs in a MUD closely mirror those of their RL players, this could turn
a lot of folks off.

Or not; while the effect of item sales seems apparent in EQ, I don't know
if it has had much effect on UO (except for housing).

------------------------------
Timothy O'Neill Dang / Cretog8
520-321-4015
One monkey don't stop no show.





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