[MUD-Dev] Persistent Worlds

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 17 Feb 2001 20:04:05 -0800 
John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:

> J C Lawrence writes:
>> > I'd rather fight the good fight there than accept that
>> spontaneous > generation is the way to go.
>> 
>> I think you're targetting a symptom (spontaneous generation)
>> rather than a cause.  Spontaneous generation is just a short
>> circuited form of world instantiation, and environment shorthand
>> if you wish that the players and the designers both tacitly
>> understand.  It generally works under the assumption that "how
>> the NPC got here" is much less interesting than the fact that he
>> is here.

> It all depends on the focus of the experience that you're
> offering.  I like the idea of having just a few systems that are
> very much in depth and inherently entertaining.  

This would seem to be self-conflicting.  Systems that are inherently
interesting tend to be (I'd actually define this as necessarily, but
I know of people for whom this isn't true) participatory which
implies that the participants (players) have the ability to alter
the system they are participating in, which futher explictity
implies that they are able to manipulate the sysrtem in manners you
didn't explicitly design for (think about ecological niches).  The
only way a system can be non-participatory and remain interesting is
if it is tourist phenomena: watch the pretty pictures -- and I'm not
even going to try and estimate the overhead required to maintain
that level of production quality.

Which is of course the nice thing about player-builders (ala
Kazola's Tavern) -- it is an almost endlessly extensible production
system which scales against your overheads quite cheaply.

> Along those lines, if I were to have a wilderness with animals,
> I'd prefer to permit players to witness the full lifecycle of
> animals, along with some interesting behaviors between being born
> and dying.  That gives wildlife enthusiasts (e.g. 'rangers') some
> depth to play with and it eliminates a distracting sticking point.

The problem with this, as UO found, is that the first band to march
thru that wipes out all the wildlife doesn't suffer the consequences
(moves on or simply leaves the game for another game) and yet causes
significant damage to your illusions.

This is not to say that I think that such ecological systems and
resource economies are not interesting (I find them very
interesting), but I find your expectations of their effects and
results flabbergasting given the population sizes (and therefore
world sizes you are tagetting.  Were you heading for the
mid-hundreds online at anytime along with a moderately large in-game
paid admin staff (essentially the fascist RP nazis, tho this time
enforcing your vision, not RP), then it would work.  Otherwise you
are expecting a level of complicity from your player base that is
just, umm, charming but doomed?

> This is not unlike having my weapon vanish from my hand while in
> combat for no apparent reason.  The causes of significant effects
> should be retained, generally be made realistic, and ultimately
> presented to the player.

Having your hammer disappear mid-battle is very annoying.  It
becomes less annoying if you later discover that it vanished because
it Thor's hammer and he awoke (elsewhere in the land) and called it
by name.  What was a severe pain of a sudden becomes a strong
attractant.

> The value of having an actual 'spawn' process for *monsters* isn't
> interesting for lifecycle reasons, unless you're interested in
> having players playing social anthropologists or some such thing.
> But the actual spawn process would somewhat suggest that the new
> monsters have to originate from some spawn location and then move
> out from there.  That would imply that if a monster is killed,
> then if I know where the spawn location is, I can slowly work my
> way towards it and ultimately destroy it, ending the monster
> problem.  Or I can fortify choke points between my territory and
> the spawn location, etc.

<nod>

This is one of the reasons I put Orc breeders in impossible to
access locations.  That way the cerverns will *always* be a source
of Orcs, no matter what efforts are spent on eradicating them.
Similarly, for say larger basilisks (a basilisk in my world comes in
roughly at the large hundreds of metric metric tonnes, in the small
hundreds when infant.  A human comparitively is a cockroach, and is
paid about as much mind by basilisks as we pay cockroaches in our
world).  Players are occasionally able to destroy basilisks (they do
this by taking over their bodies via spirtual possession and then
suiciding them).  It is possible that by repeatedly doing so they
could eradicate basilisks from the world.  To prevent this (the
presence of basilisks is necessary to maintain the players and every
other life-form as an endangered prey species, a dead basilisk
merely deconstructs back to an ur-basilisk which is then later
substantiated when circumstances collide enough to either require or
generate a new one.

>> Raph in particular observed the general rule of (paraphrased):
>> 
>> If I can spend time at it I must be rewarded for it.
>> 
>> Players often don't like the fact that they can spend all day
>> knitting or fishing and then not be able to sell their wares for
>> a profit (why did you implement it if it isn't rewarding?), and,
>> rather than this persuading them to establish markets etc. it
>> tends to persuade them to find another game to play run by people
>> who did make "everything rewarding".

> As with many things about these games, I believe that these
> situations would be dramatically improved by setting player
> expectations.  The earlier the better.  

Players have a nasty tendencies to set their own expectations and
not to listen much to you at all in doing so.

> As for being rewarded, the reward is enjoying the experience of
> the game.  If the game experience of fishing is not enjoyable to
> people who enjoy fishing (or would, if they had the money and time
> for it in the real world), then it's probably not a very
> well-implemented fishing experience.

The phrase, "means to an end" comes to mind.

--
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--
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