[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Jeff Freeman wrote:

> At 12:23 AM 8/24/00 +0000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> >It's a matter of whether they are running out and killing each other out
> >of sheer boredom or out of a proactive desire to nail their enemies. If
> >they have no real enemies, then it just boils down to random chaos with
> >people whacking each other out of a lack of anything better to do.
> >
> >You have to enable group hatred of each other to make it constructive, in
> >my opinion.
> 
> I've been working under the assumption that I need to give them a reason
> NOT to kill each other.  Of course I'll try to make the game fun,
> non-boring, and give them things to do other than kill each other, but I
> was thinking that if there's not a compelling reason to not kill each
> other, we'll have a Quakefest.

I don't really find this to be a problem. Achaea is a violent place but as
has been mentioned by Tess Lowe, if you aren't violent yourself, people
pretty much leave you alone. 

 
> In general, the game system is structured so that they have to be members
> of a small group in order to advance, and the small groups have to
> cooperate with all the other small groups in order to thrive.  I'm assuming
> that some groups just won't cooperate, people being the way they are, and
> by not cooperating (because the other groups need for them to cooperate),
> they'll be placing themselves in the role of "the enemy" (the other groups
> will try to force them to cooperate).

Good. Now let the small groups band together to form a larger group that
compete against other amalgamations of players.

> 
> How do you enable group hatred on your MUD?  Competition for limited
> resources, territory, etc, or is there more to it than that?

Well, initially it was mainly via a set of skills that members of the
Church (the Paladins and Priests guilds) had that involved setting up
shrines (which had areas of influence around them that increasd as the
shrine was sacrificed to..starts at wood goes up to gold). These could be
destroyed, with some work, by other people, but the Church could work to
strengthen them too. The 'fuel' that powered one of the Church's set of
skills was derived from how many shrines there were in the land, and what
power they were. Not only that, but many of the Devotion abilities could
only be used at a shrine, and some had area effects like the Rite of
Demons, which would nail your enemies who were standing in that shrine's
zone of influence (which can extend a maximum of 5 locations away from the
shrine itself). 

So basically, the 'evil' players (and, in practice, a lot of other players
too, as they all viewed the shrines as weapons waiting to be used against
them) really wanted the shrines gone, whereas the Church really wanted
them there. 

Now, shrines are being changed completely and they will be attached to
Divine Orders instead, so that every player who officially worships a God
may participate in a 'war' where the 'score' is mainly kept by looking at
how much of the land your Order controls via shrines.

City-state military systems work the same way (or did before we took the
military system out awhile ago for some revamping). 

Players really only need slight nudges to compete as groups. Once they
start competing, they start hating each other, and by now, the various
city-states have such different cultures that, just like in real life,
they will fight over whatever they can come up with.

--matt
"He that is wounded in the testicles, or have his penis cut off, shall not
enter into the congregation of the Lord." Deuteronomy 23:1




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