[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard A. Bartle <richard at mud.co.uk>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Sunday, August 27, 2000 11:47 AM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] UO rants


>Dave Rickey [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu] writes:
>
>>It should be possible (but slower) to level all the way up to
>>max level without entering the frontier region.
> Why?
>
    Because there has to be a limit to how badly a team can lose, some
minimum amount of territory that cannot be taken from them, that allows them
to continue to pursue PvE.  Since PvE is how you get levels, a team that
lost the ability to level up to max would be at an obvious disadvantage.
People would look at the situation and perceive it as no-win.

    Once people get the perception that a given team *can't* win and they
aren't having any fun, they quit.  If allowed, a disturbing number will
change to the side that is winning, if not they'll look for another server
where they can join the winning side.  You see this in FPS games all the
time, but it's not as big a deal because everything is reset every 30
minutes or so.  This is a "worst case" fallback for us, we hope never to see
a scenario where a Realm is driven back to the bottleneck and held there for
more than a few hours, but if it does get that far at least the team can
recover.  The "Nightmare" scenario involves newbies being slaughtered
wholesale in view of their home cities.

    Yes, it means there's no such thing as complete victory, things are
going to always be at one level or another of stalemate.  It's that, or a
mature state where one realm completely owns a server.

--Dave Rickey




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