[MUD-Dev] Law of Resource Congestion

[Josh Rollyson]

On Sun, Aug 06, 2000 at 01:00:43PM +0200, Christian Loth wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
>   Browsing through the "Laws of Online World Design" which is
-snip- 
> Christian Loth's Law of Resource Congestion
> -------------------------------------------
> 
>   If your gameworld provides a resource that is limited by an absolute
> number, it will become rare with a growing player base, hence leading
> to resource congestion. Ultimately such resources might be never ever
> again seen in the game. And again ultimately this might lead to a uniform
> playerbase where all players just use the common goods.
-snip-

One partial solution is not to have resource limits for any items not meant
to be unique. Special items which need to be limited can be limited by
random loading with very low load percentages on very difficult or hard to
find mobiles, or by complicated quests. Random loading is employed on one
mud I play frequently (Aturion Dynasty aturion.com 4000)
>From what I've seen it makes already hard to get items even more difficult
to obtain, because you may have to kill a mob 10,50,100, or even 1000 times
before it loads the item you want (and you may not know that that mob even
loads a particular item)
Of course this has obvoious drawbacks: the frustration involved in trying to
pop rare items, but it seems like a fair compromise.
Another approach to it is to load the items in isolated areas which make
escape difficult (and playerkilling easy) Of course that only works for PK
muds. 


--
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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