[MUD-Dev] "Doing a dungeon" (was: Permadeath or Not?)

[Vincent Archer]

According to Brian Hook:

> To me, obfuscation of game mechanics is basically a thinly disguised
> way of saying "We're not comfortable having our mechanics put under
> scrutiny because we know they're kind of ad hoc and ill designed".

Besides, the players (well, some of them) will figure them out anyway,
and then use them (specially if there's a form of goal in your game)
to get an advantage over the one who don't.

Witness wednesday's patch in EQ, which some people have already termed
"The Fires of Heaven patch" (for those unfamiliar, Fires of Heaven is
one of the most known "uberguild", which tend to do everything first,
and faster than anybody else).

Basically, over the course of two years, the Fires of Heaven have so
carefully managed to analyse the exact way EQ mobs do threat
assignment (the so-called 'hate list'), they were able to manage
everything in the most challenging situations.

This broke down a month ago, when FoH entered one of the highest level
zones, and did several encounters that were designed for "epic raids"
with a single group, because they were manipulating the critters AI.

Even EQ's designer had to discuss with FoH to understand exactly how
they were achieving this. :)

> Published mechanics, like published crypto algorithms, are open to
> analysis and criticism from a lot of people that, collectively, are
> much smarter and thorough than the person designing the original
> system.  This makes the system far more robust than one that relies
> on obfuscation.

It's a well known paradigm in computer security. Security thru
obscurity is the weakest form of security there is.

> While I don't think that a game should always consist of "You rolled
> a 16, critical hit!  You did 14.82 points of damage!", specifically
> hiding what's going on behind the scenes has always alarmed me as a

Hiding what's going on behind the scenes is good, but only if what's
going on behind the scenes is NOT important to the gameplay.

--
Vincent Archer                                         Email: archer at nevrax.com

Nevrax France.                              Off on the yellow brick road we go!
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