[MUD-Dev] UO Virtues

[Schubert]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wes Connell [mailto:wconnell at skotos.net]
> 
> I've always thought that a simple alignment/title system that is not
> constant would do the trick. Start off as slightly good since everyone
> is 'born innocent'. If they do something bad then their alignment gets
> smashed and it will be hard for them to regain the trust of 
> the community.

> Even though its easy to be Evil it is still difficult to gain a Good
> status. Increasingly difficult as the status grows.

So the problem is two-fold.

First off, it's easy to track murderers and thieves.  Trivially.  
And we'll certainly have a system that does that.  However, the 
players need more information than that - they need to know about
the twinks who will say they're going to fix your armor and then
log, or the jerks who will say they're taking you to a newbie
killing ground and instead take you to the dragon's lair to die.
The game can't track this behavior, because by definition it 
squeezes in between the code.  If we did track it, players would
find new cracks to squeeze into.

Second, it is nearly impossible to track acts of good automatically.
How does the game know if you're being Honest?  What in-game piece 
of code is triggered which will up that Honesty value?  No matter 
what it is, players will find it and jack their stat.

Combine those two things, and you have players jacking their 
Honesty stat, getting the 'Honest' title, and then go and running
cons on new players that the game can't track.  At this point, it
becomes obvious that having no 'virtue' system based on the original
Ultima virtues is better than having this one, and to back up this
point, the Ultima team, when they finally added a notoriety system
after launch, were very careful to avoid using Ultima terms for 
that very reason.

Damion Schubert
Lead Designer, Ultima Worlds Online: Origin



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