[MUD-Dev] defeating twinking through game mechanics

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2000 jolson at micron.net wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "S. Patrick Gallaty" <choke at sirius.com>
> > One of the design failures IMO in everquest is that it follows the 
> > old 'weaponcode' model of weapon damage.  I.e. one hits for the 
> > 'max damage' of the weapon rather than any sort of measure of 
> > player skill.  This means the weapon is tantamount.  Nothing 
> > matters except for the weapon stats, in the end.  With armor the 
> > same way, you have created a game where heavy twinking is 
> > inevitable.  
> 
> Heavy twinking seems inevitable in *any* system without hard limits 
> (even such as you've proposed below) where items have significant 
> importance to a character's abilities or identity.  "So what if I can't 
> get full effect from my Megasword - it's better than what I had, and 
> more importantly it *looks* cool."  The mechanical problems of heavy 
> twinking can be solved for the most part, but the negative social 
> effects would seem to remain.

There are other, less direct means of keeping items out of the hands of
newbies: by having the item impose some sort of responsibility, danger,
or upkeep.

Upkeep: Think rent.  Legend and Arctic both take slightly different tacks
  at this method.  Regardless of implementation, it basically means that
  a newbie can only hold onto an high-value item until it comes time to log
  off.  If it's something they can almost afford, but not quite, they may
  find themselves getting rid of other, mid- or low-value items in order
  to keep the twinked item.

Danger: On Shadowdale, the One Ring was possibly the best spellcaster item
  in the game, as it gave +50 mana.  However - it also meant that you were
  constantly hunted by the nazgul (ringwraiths), nasty mobs that drained a
  level every other round (and hit pretty hard).  They hunted you no matter
  where you went on the mud; as long as you had the Ring, you were constantly
  on your guard.  Low and mid level characters could not defend against
  this at all; strong high-level characters could, but many (most?) that
  aquired the One Ring quickly got tired of the difficulty and gave or sold
  it to someone else.  One could think of a number of ways to implement this
  same feature: making NPCs attack people with weapons that they recognize
  ("Hey!  That's my guildmaster's sword!"), vampyric weapons (they must
  be fed blood on a regular basis, and if you don't satisfy them, they turn
  on you), holy avengers (weapons that automatically attack any and all evil
  creatures in the same room as the wielder), or a simple affect like -50
  hitpoints (if most newbies have 60 hitpoints, it won't be worth it...but
  to a high level character with 500, it will).

Responsibility: By owning an item you have certain duties to fulfil.  For
  example, a town sigil could be given to whomever completes a certain
  quest, but then they are required to defend the town from all dangers.
  If the character fails in their duties too often, the item disappears, to
  be granted to a more worthy soul.  A smaller-scale version of this is
  upkeep: for example, if items have a chance to be destroyed when you are
  hit in combat, then items like "a delicate glass bracelet" should be
  difficult to keep around for long, and require constant attention from
  the player.  I have a very simple version of this in the form of weapon
  sharpness; blades that are not honed on a regular basis get dull and
  loose much of their effectiveness.  With magical weapons, there's no
  end to the posibilities.  Imagine a magical fire-sword that does extra damage
  as long as you keep a steady stream of mana (say, 1 point per second) into
  it.  If the stream stops, it becomes a normal sword.  Given to a newbie
  with 10 mana points, the sword is only powerful for 10 seconds at a time.
  A high-level character with 500 mana and a high regeneration rate would
  find it much more useful.

I don't have much trouble with twinking simply because a character's
effectiveness is based more off of their skills than their equipment;
but if you wanted a more monty haul-like effect (as EQ and most dikus seem
to), it would just take a little creativity to make powerful items
only effective in the hands of powerful characters.

Adam





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