[MUD-Dev] CGDC dinner

[Joe Andrieu]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu
> [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of J C Lawrence
>
> From my vantage in the middle of the table with Chris Allen from
> Skotos, Richard bartle, Raph Koster, Mathew Mihaley, Bruce (forget
> last name) once of Cold and now doing a TOM project, a chap from
> Skotos (sorry, forget your name), and one of the guys from EQ (my
> memory is getting really bad), some of the interesting topics raised
> encluded:

[snip]

Many thanks JC for putting the dinner together. It really was a
blast.  Very cool to meet many of the folks on this list.

>   -- The various levels of bandwidth consumption among the
> commercial games, and what trade-offs were made to get 
> there (mostly 
> in terms of what is dynamically streamed from the server, and what
> is stored statically on the client-side).  

Wow. I missed that. What are the levels of bandwidth on these
systems?  I've always wondered...

Btw, I'm thinking the "EQ guy" you are referring to was me, sitting
between Shannon Appel from Skotos and the guy from Smaug (Derek?)
and the economist academic/grad student whose name escapes me but
had really cool things to say.

Actually, I'm with a start-up named RTD (more details to be released
soon) and my bus. partner Jeff Rawlings (formerly of AOL) was also
at that end of the table, sitting next to Scott Martins from Worlds
Apart Productions, producers of The Eternal City, and a chap from
Skotos to his left, which I think rounds out that end of the table.


One thread that spun off the "deflationary economic model" of EQ was
whether or not it might be useful to model the economic systems for
managing durable goods in using a different model from the one for
consumable goods.  It was mentioned in the EQ talk at the conference
that to balance hording, they would create consumables that were
very expensive, but really desirable. So folks would convert their
horded piles of stuff into cash and buy, for example, potions or
whatever that go away with use.  This seemed like a hack.  Instead,
what about managing/designing how people build their durable net
worth with one model, and design the system for consumables with
another. Tune the wealth building separately from the "flow" of
goods that make up the consumer economy.

As we've discovered in our wonderfully capitalistic world, the
consumer economy is a great motivator; seems like such a system
would drive both game motivation *and* provide tools for managing
hording of non-consumable goods.

And if we have a consumer economy, why not create a debt mechanism
so players could buy gear on credit and go adventure to pay for
it--very motivational and more challenging than the endless hack to
scrape a few coins together to upgrade my dagger to a short sword.
And if they can't pay back the credit when credit is due, when, just
think Loan Shark and some very interesting in-game solutions pop up.
This of course also creates a direct mechanism for managing the
money supply, a la Greenspan and the Federal Reserve.

Maybe a little crazy, but seems a bit more interesting than what I
got from EQ's "deflationary" model.

It'd be great to hear what other MUD-DEVers think of this.

-j

Joe Andrieu
RTD
(more details coming)
joe at andrieu.net


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