[MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the Ugly.

[AR Schleicher]

From: F. Randall Farmer <randy at communities.com>
> Perhaps we should open a new thread about RL social conciousness in
> multiuser system design:
>  "Should our software periodically tell Timmy that he should go out and
play
> for awhile?" :-)

One of the recent changes to UO actually suggests that now.  For those not
familiar with it, UO now has a feature called a burst hour.  During the
first hour of each real life day (the reset occurs at midnight, server local
time), your skills advance at a faster (some might say normal) rate.  After
that time has passed, your advancement drops to a slower rate, in some
cases, to the point where it stops.

While it's not quite as strong as the above statement (as UO accounts have 5
characters per server/shard, each of which get their own burst hour), it's a
start.  If minimizing the amount of time players spend on the game, while
maintaining account activation & renewal numbers is one of our goals (in
order to spend less money on bandwidth & server CPU power), strategies like
this might not be a bad thing.  This has been commented on in the past I
recall, though I don't have an archive link handy. :)

Looking at the social conciousness aspects, I think that there's a limit as
to how much a game and the designers can and should do.  Too much of
anything is bad, and my opinion is that while games should not go out of
their way to discourage (penalize?) people who play for long amounts of
time, they should decrease the rewards, or perhaps scale them based on the
amount of time played.  People (or in the case of children, their parents)
need to take responsibility for what they spend their time on, and balancing
it wisely between various things.

AR Schleicher (Jerrith)
ars at iag.net





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