[MUD-Dev] interesting article on world size and finance

[John Bertoglio]

> -----Original Message-----
> J C Lawrence
> Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2000 4:56 PM
> 
> On Thu, 20 Apr 2000 08:31:48 -0600 (MDT) 
> Fred Clift <fred at veriohosting.com> wrote:
> 
> > Due to various problems, I'm about 300 messages behind on mud-dev,
> > so I dont know if this has been mentioned or not, but I found this
> > article had some interesting views on travel in large worlds and
> > on game economy.
> 
> > http://lum.xrgaming.net/rdot.html
> 
> 
> --<cut>--

There are a lot of good idea in this essay. Many have been discussed
but bear additional comments. The article is too long too fully quote
so I have taken the section headers out of context.

> Scale

The author proposes bigger worlds. I agree. The benefits of a huge 
world can eliminate many of the problems found in online games. 
If you simulate the conditions of Europe during the age of discovery
(or for that matter, Cuba of the late 20th century), you will create
the conditions required to populate the world. The desire to obtain
wealth, power and just plain bragging rights will motivate people
to take risks. Other advantages would happen as well. Imagine if 
"Billy the Kid" (American outlaw in the 1800's for the few members
not acquainted with our lurid past) "respawned" back in Moscow, Russia
after he was killed in the American West. It would have taken him
months or years to get back to Arizona. The same thing could have
a chilling effect on bad in-game behavior because it would take a
long time to assemble the resources to get back to the area you used
to haunt. 

> Time

He is quite correct but the solutions proposed do not go far enough.
The key to time is to ignore the paradoxes! There is no way to create
a world in which you can simulate the caravans and sea journeys 
proposed in this article and maintain a single time scale. Yes, the 
world should have a regular cycle. But (in a 10:1 time scale) no one
would spend 9 days of RL waiting for a caravan to make a 3 month in
game journey. Allow characters and groups to move into a "strategic 
movement" mode which chews up large amounts of distance with each
mouse click. Think of a game like Civilization. Your tokens are 
covering across vast chunks of territory with each move. In your
cities, there is a micro economy of little computer folk moving 
about. But, in that game, they are abstracted to simple numeric
results each turn. In an online version, each city would be a 
world populated with PC and NPCs going about their business. Night
falls, time goes on. But in game terms a caravan might move 3000 
miles to somewhere and another 3000 miles back in the (RL) time 
it takes to do some shopping at the armor mart. This can not be 
reconciled. Don't try. The caravan was gone for 6 months. They used
6 months of resources and aged 6 months. But when they arrive back
in the city, a few hours of game time (and perhaps, just few minutes
of RL time, maybe longer if the RNG threw some encounters at
the caravan) may have passed. If you accept the paradox all kinds of
interesting things become possible. This is my major problem with 
graphic worlds. The requirement of one time/space scale because of
visual cues create worlds which are by their nature far to small.

> What is "Offline"?
> 

Here, the author is right on with a number of good ideas. The key
here is to "reward" people for staying away. This has important
positive consequences for commercial games which have already 
been discussed. Hammering a server with macros is a huge problem.
The way to solve the problem is to create a world in which there
is no real reason to macro. If in-game efforts were rewarded 
using a threshold model, repetitive actions would be a waste of
time. 

> 
> ...it's time to innovate again.
> 

Too right

John A. Bertoglio 
  _____  

PulsePoll.com <http://www.pulsepoll.com/>  
| 503.781.3563
| jb at pulsepoll.com 


> Delusion
> 
> --<cut>--
> 
> -- 
> J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
> ----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
> ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MUD-Dev mailing list
> MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
> http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev