[MUD-Dev] Are eBay sales more than just a fad?

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Koster, Raph wrote:

> I wrote: 
> > We don't allow the transfer of items bought from 
> > us with real
> > money, because we don't really see any reason to cannibalize our own
> > magical-artifact-selling business by allowing other people to 
> > get in on
> > it.
> 
> Do you flag the item with the character's id somehow so that it is literally
> unusable by anyone else? If not, how do you prevent people from transferring
> the items?

Yes. The items also reset into the owner's inventory every hour or so
automatically. You CAN loan out the items, which I don't mind, as it gives
people a taste of what the item can do, but as it's going to reset within
an hour anyway, you can't loan it out for long.


> > Boy, I can't wait for the rest of the industry to start adopting our
> > model. You can fight it, but our model is the future, like it or not.
> 
> Every time it's come up, the gamers on the dev staff have recoiled in
> horror. :)

Yeah, I can fully appreciate why. It sounds horrid on the surface of
things, but it's not as long as you design your game to expect that. If
success in your game is defined by what items you own, then yeah, it's a
stupid thing to do. I've never liked games that focus on item accumulation
(or xp accumulation for that matter) so I didn't do one. It really
requires a total break in the way you think about game design, because you
can't just adapt the standard one-player rpg model (which is about
accumulation of xp and items generally) to the multiplayer model. You've
gotta start over completely and ask yourself "What can really motivate
people, and how else can they define themselves as successful." The answer
is, in my opinion, that what people want more than anything is the respect
of other players, and you have to give your players ways of 'showing off'
that respect (via politics and your personal ability to fight well in
Achaea's case).

Even in terms of the way that buying items affects the balance of power
for our rather complicated PvP combat system, think of it like this: I'm a
pretty good skiier. I'm good enough that the type of ski I ski on makes a
difference. If I'm racing on some newbie's all mountain super-soft ski, I
am going to perform less well than I would on a proper slalom or downhill
ski. However, if you put me up against someone who is really good (say, an
Alberta Tomba type of guy), then it's really not going to matter what type
of ski I have on. It's also not going to matter what type of ski HE has
on, provided it meets some basic level of performance (ie it isn't going
to break when he's blowing past me at 80 mph.) At the end of the day, he's
simply a better skiier than I am, because (leaving aside any issue of
genetic suitability) he is far more experienced at it, and he trains much
harder for it. Thus, he's going to win. Better equipment will improve my
chances some, but a truly good skiier is going to trash me no matter how
much I spend on equipment. Similarly, I could go out and buy the bestest
golf clubs in the world and still have not a chance in hell against Tiger
Woods, even if he was using only a putter.(I am one heck of an
inexperienced, bad golfer.)

I was also just being a bit flippant about our model being the future. It
is A future, no question about it, but I don't see any reason at all why,
in the future, every big mud is going to have the same charging model. 

--matt




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