[MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Raph Koster wrote:
> If success at a given level of ability in your mud depends more on knowledge
> of the game than on stats or items, then twinking's effects will likely be
> reduced. (And yes, I know that knowledge has its own set of problems, sicne
> it is quickly disseminated, etc...).

Once again drawing an example from Arctic MUD:

They player wipe about once a year, and have done so consistently for the
seven years they have been in existence.  (I think there's been 8 or 9
wipes.)  They never tell players ahead of time when they are going to wipe.
Most of the long-time players consider this a feature.  It starts everyone
from scratch; the world is fresh and new again.

The 'best' players are not the ones that have the best characters at any
given playerfile; they are the ones that climb to power before everyone
else immediately after a wipe.  It's their detailed knowledge of
the Arctic world (which is pretty huge, clocking in at around 25,000 rooms
these days) which gives them 'power'.  Everything else is transient, and
the players treat it that way.

I doubt you could do this on a commercial mud ("Dammit, I *paid* for that
character, and you just deleted him!!!1!11"), but it's worked great
for Arctic.  I think the playerbase is much less "twinkish" as a result of
this policy.

Adam





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