[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #255 - 27 msgs

[Dr. Cat]

Traffic on Mud-dev is way too high for me to keep up with right now.
Don't think I can spare the time to comment on the whole "JB
vs. everyone" debate other than to say I think aiming a game at casual
gamers will almost automatically give you a much lower percentage of
grief players, the hardcore gamer and player-combat-oriented games
being an almost ideal breeding ground for same, to say that I think if
you have combat and monsters and getting gold and that kind of stuff
it's going to be really hard to get a lot of the casual gamers in
there, as they're likely to see "that game has fighting", lump it
together with Everquest and Quake 3 because of that, and never try it.
And lastly to say that while some of your goals sound laudable, a lot
of what you say sounds like "biting off more than you (or anyone) can
chew".  Having a large several-tiered staff taking on more
responsibilities and providing higher quality service and having them
all adequately paid.  Making lots of activities like blacksmithing
that are exquisitely detailed and game-designed and balanced well
enough to be lots of fun on their own, and yet also appealing to
casual gamers and not just people willing to spend hours learning the
dozens of blacksmithing-related commands and activities and how to use
them effectively...  All in all, a game as good as you envision might
come about many years from now, though perhaps different in some of
the particulars.  I don't personally think computer games are going to
get that good any time in the next few years.

I know that Furcadia has goals as ambitious or more so than most of
the games out there.  But I'm always focused on a very specific, very
acheivable subset of my long-term plans, one that I think will be fun
by itself and competitive with the best of what else is out there.  So
far I'm relatively pleased with the results.

I also can't let that Richard Bartle article on perma-death pass by
without making the obvious comment, even though it's a little unfair
since the article was meant to provoke a very specific kind of thought
and debate in a very specific forum.  But still I have to make my
knee-jerk response, which is that most of the lines of reasoning in
the article are based on the assumption that all the games being
discussed, past present and future, have some form of combat in them.
This is, of course, not the case.  :X)

> Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 00:23:33 -0800
> From: J C Lawrence <claw at kanga.nu>
> Reply-To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> 
> This is certainly part of the approach that Dr Cat is taking with
> Furcadia.  Tools are not present, strong adminstrative control, and
> a strong presentation of a "cute" milleua (tho not teletubbies) that
> simply fails to begin to interest many classical grief players.
>
> Cat: Would you mind commenting here a bit on how Furcadia has been
> going?

It's been going pretty well.  We're working on moving it to
Playnet.com right now, where we'll finally have some web page banner
ads (though I don't expect to make much money from those, not at first
anyway).  Our number of connect hours logged per month has been about
tripling every year for the 4+ years we've been running it, mostly
just by word of mouth.  This year I hope to more than triple it.
Right now I'm busy recoding the last temporary solution in the code
that's a major obstacle to scalability.  (I'm pretty confident some of
the code I'm doing now will have to be revisited or re-architected
when we get 50,000 to 100,000 simultaneous players.  But everybody
should have such problems (I fully intend to!))

The game is making enough money at the moment that we're hoping we can
squeak by living on the income until we can boost it to a more
comfortable level.  This money comes primarily from the sale of wings
in the game for a year plus a signed and numbered limited edition art
print for 20 bucks, or being a dragon (with a command to breathe
rainbow colored pixie dust with little hearts in it) for 50 bucks,
plus a high quality Furcadia t-shirt.  We have a couple other projects
in the works that'll use the engine for a different style of gaming
for a different audience with a different revenue model.  We've also
been talking to a fellow in Singapore and one in Korea about licensing
the engine to the former and the game to the latter.  Sure would like
to talk to some other people in Korea besides just the one, but I
don't have the time to spare to go hunt contacts down and try to
initiate that kind of thing.  (By the way, does anyone know how many
Unicode characters you need to be able to display to support the
Korean language? :X)

The game currently peaks at a little over 800 users online, which is
the limit in the current code until I finish distributing out some
tasks a little better (that work is mostly done now).  We're also
moving to our third machine.  We started on a P-90 with 48 megs of RAM
and a 4 gig hard drive, which valiantly handled up to 350 players near
the end of its life (I write very efficient code).  Our current
machine is a P2-400 with 256 megs of RAM and two 9 gig IDE drives,
mirrored.  The new machine is a dual CPU P3-800 system with 512 megs
RAM, two 36 gig SCSI drives mirrored, and two network cards for better
throughput I guess.  I told them I'll probably be asking for more RAM
before too long.  :X)

The most recent major new feature came last summer/fall (I have a
vague and fuzzy sense of time), with the ability to attach "patches"
to a dream which replace old art/sound/music or add new stuff.
There've been patches of a Japanese Dojo, Legoland (which was a hoot),
one that looks like a six year old kid doodled all the art (even more
of a hoot), player art patches that have players wearing bikinis, or
turning everyone into a kiwi or a pillow or a little blob with eyes.

My basic vision (not the same as Talzhemir's of course, which places a
higher priority on MUSH style roleplaying) is "the Geocities of online
communities".  You make neat stuff, everybody can make neat stuff,
tons of it is uploaded, lots of people check it out and enjoy it, and
we have a huge thriving and popular place.  (I won't sell it all out
for huge amounts of money to a big web company though.  I always
intend to keep a controlling stake in it.)  One of my near term goals
is to add dozens of new commands to the scripting language (it's not a
program language, it is an will remain easy enough and
non-intimidating enough to be used by the 99% of mankind who aren't
programmers and never will be.)  Generally speaking, I think
staff-created content doesn't scale well as a paradigm, and
algorithmically generated content is always so inferior to human
created content and so dissapointing by comparison, that this is the
way to go.

We do have a number of thriving guilds, the separate areas for
"roleplay here, chat there, adult stuff over there" have mostly but
not entirely divided up the people with differing tastes to keep them
out of each other's hair - we need to continue working on that to
improve it, and adding more areas (maybe one for anime fans, a teens
area, etc.)  Grief players I think are relatively few compared to
games like UO or IRC.  But that's just a gut impression.  Our "police
force", the Owsla, is fairly small and their powers deliberately very
weak (except for the head guy, and even him much weaker than on most
games).  And our number of rules for things you can't do that you'd
actually get punished for is pretty small.

We are working on recruiting a lot of volunteer welcomers and helpers.
I'll probably have to try and write an article for Slashdot someday
about the AOL and Origin lawsuits for not paying volunteers, and say
"You'll stop me from letting people volunteer for free when you pry
them from my cold dead fingers" or something like that.  Then we can
be flooded with Linux-obsessed people who'll all tell me that we have
to have a Linux client for that game.  :X) Anyway we try to be good
about not demanding anything from volunteers that you shouldn't be
demanding from someone unless they're a paid employee.  I'd rather not
do that anyway, as I don't think it's fair.

We'll probably get more grief players and more cheating, hacking and
stealing when we put in some kind of economy, currency and/or other
limited resources.  There was some commotion when the new cached
downloads system made it easy to make a copy of someone else's dream,
which some people didn't like because another person could upload it
and claim it was theirs, or look through their scripts and find out
how to get into secret areas, or just generally feeling violated.
Telling people the web was like that from day one doesn't help much,
since we were hard to copy stuff in for a few years and people got
used to expecting that.  Putting in an "upload encrypted" option took
care of most of the complainers, and it defaults to off so most people
don't use it (it also slows down uploads and downloads, since
encrypted data won't compress).  Then there was a round of complaining
about art patches being copied, and an option to encrypt those went
in.  We do have people occasionally getting the password of a player
who has wings or a dragon, and transferring it to their own character.
For stealing something that cost real money to buy, our standard
penalty is to delete the character of the thief, as well as
transferring back the property.

Anyway as I said, when there's more that has scarcity and value in the
game, there'll probably me more strife and conflict.  Though much of
it may be between people who are really members of society, not people
who're full-time grief players.  It may be better to limit the extent
to which we do this kind of stuff.  Our new Community Manager who
comes to us after several years managing DreamScape for Avaterra,
using the Worlds Away technology, was initially saying you have to
have an economy to have a thriving community, based on his experiences
there.  But after experiencing Furcadia, he's turned around 180
degrees and thinks you get a better community without one, because the
in-game money makes people greedy.  Anyway I'll have plenty to think
about when I design our economic system, I just know it'll be
attention-based to match the underlying reality of what's actually
important and has value.

*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* 
   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
*-------------------------------------------**   http://www.furcadia.com
    Furcadia - a graphic mud for PCs!       ||  Let your imagination soar!
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*
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