Nomenclature (was: RE: [MUD-Dev] MUD Coding Staff Structure)

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian 'Psychochild' Green <brian at psychochild.org>
>
>This is a cop out.  Scale has nothing to do with balance, IMNSHO.  Flaws
>in a system can be found and exploited if there are 20 players or
>20,000.  Good design has everything to do with it.  Paper RPGs have had
>balanced systems for quite a while. [1]  Wanna talk about dynamic
>interaction? :)
>
    Two big things *do* change, sheerly because of scale.  One is the
"million monkeys" problem, 100,000 players banging on your system are going
to expose flaws (for example, ridiculously complex dupe bugs) far more often
than 100.  The second is that the number of layers between the players and
the people who make decisions about the game is going to increase, with all
the associated problems.

    It's harder to define how this works in practice, basicly it's a matter
of *pacing*.  A small MUD may have 1 "crisis" a month, where a large
percentage of players are upset about something for a few days.  With
100,000+, at any given time there are several groupings of thousands of
players demanding something (and even a few hundred can make a *lot* of
noise).  Some are justified, some aren't, but the people with
decision-making authority don't even have time to evaluate the situations,
much less debate them.

--Dave Rickey




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