[MUD-Dev] wimping/wiping and the big blind spot

[Josh Rollyson]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 12:04:56AM -0700, Tamzen Cannoy wrote:
> At 1:20 AM -0500 8/3/00, Peter wrote:
> >	For the record, my personal stance on wimping and wiping is fairly
> >simple (and enlightened, I guess).
____snip____ 
> Well I was appalled by the idea of wiping the players too, and I'm 
> not a developer, just a player. But you and most of the list 
> sometimes forget there are other types of MUDs than just LP/Diku 
> types.
> 
> Tamzen

PWipes should be saved for the most serious of situations on any mug.
Its been my observation that when there us a pwipe probably 25% of the
players won't come back.
Thats a serious loss of players.
Sometimes there is no choice. (widespread cheating for example, or a hacked
mud server).
More often then not there is a choice. Meet with players if possible. Decide
if a player file wipe really is in the best interest of your players. 

As for wimping, as one earlier post said, if you didn't catch it from the
start, then it isn't broken enough to fix.
Real bugs are another story. As one mud I play does it, players finding bugs
and reporting them before abuse don't get punished and may get a small
reward. Players attempting to abuse old fixed bugs get logged. Players
continuing to use serious unreported bugs get wiped. Thats fair, and the
only people will complain about that if fairly applied are the cheaters.

Wimping to take away from honest players only results in hard feelings.

Another option is to allow established players to trade back some of what
they have for smaller but harder to achive gains.

Some of the emlenmud implementations do this by allowing multiclassing at
great cost to the player. Thats a powerful way to both improve a character
and lower it in level.

Anyway the approach is simple. Give the players a chance to balence the game
out themselves by making trade-offs. If force is needed to ballence the game
do it in more delicate (and creative) ways.
Don't simply take away items or stats. Your players may never forgive you if
you do. And don't give in too easily to players every whims. You shouldn't
be just giving things away. At least not without signifigant game balencing
costs :)



--
Josh Rollyson	dracus at irc	dracus at virusfix.org dinodrac at magenet.com
SMS Phone - 3362395619 at message.alltel.com ICQ#31731914
Assistant System Administrator - Valley of the Mage Consulting
http://www.magenet.com/~dinodrac   http://www.virusfix.org



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