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

[Dr. Cat]

> On Sun, 18 Feb 2001, Dr. Cat wrote:
> 
> > That's an awful lot of money.  We'd never have had the explosion of
> > creativity we have if we restricted building to the people willing
> > to pay $100+!  Of course the economics are totally different in a
> > world where combat, gold acquisition and monster slaying are primary
> > elements.
> 
> I also might ask who yo uare talking about? Are you talking about
> Furcadia? Player combat is fairly important to many players in Achaea
> (of primary importance to a few players). Gold is important, but you
> don't get gold from going out and bashing orcs or whatnot. Monster
> slaying is of not much importance. It's just a tool, not the goal of
> the game like in EQ or whatnot.

I was kind of lumping together "most other muds" that would charge for
building, as opposed to mine or any other non-combat muds.  Achaea being
closer to the mainstream combat mud than Furcadia is.  Certainly my
impression from everything you've said about it is that the game and
its focus are very different from other combat muds, and I didn't mean
to mischaracterize it.  Still, I think there are some issues that apply
as much, and others that apply almost as much, to a game that has combat
as a minor element as to a game that has it as a primary element.  For
instance, as I've mentioned before, people who don't like "those D&D
inspired computer roleplaying games where you bash monsters and go up
levels until you kill the big bad guy at the end".  Anyway clearly
the model for what in-game things you can and can't sell in Achaea has
major differences from what we can or should do in Furcadia.  We'll never
make any money selling someone a special magic sword for instance, unless
you could use it and make a special animation of you swishing it around in
the air and leaving glowing trails behind.  It'd have to be something like
that, since we have no way to actually fight anyone with a sword and it's
just an ornament, really.

> We don't restrict building to those people. We restrict building things
> that the builder has any control over once implemented to those
> people. We can grant Orbs of Creation to players to allow them to build
> specific things (huge array of permissions can be allocated to limit what
> they can build, and nothing gets connected to the rest of the map until
> everything is approved by someone with authority).
> 
> If you want to build an area, that's great, providing you write well. But,
> you don't get to have any control over it later. It wouldn't make any
> sense in our milieu to begin with, as how a warrior (or anyone) would
> manage to become a temporary god and construct an ancient dungeon full of
> mind flayers, I dunno. You seem to get around this by using the dream
> device?

Yes, I try to map games reasonably well onto what makes for good server
architecture and distribution (and simultaneously good social
architecture), which is why we have multiple discreet maps rather than one
huge map like Ultima Online does.  It's an interesting technical
challenge, which I started thinking about how to solve about ten years
ago, and figured I wouldn't even try my first time out, for the sake of
getting something working and out there.  With more thought and
experience, I don't think there's a good reason to want to do that anyway.

Anyway the dream concept is that the whole world exists because the
collective imagination of people brings a fantasy world of talking animals
into existence that everyone can enjoy playing in.  Which is pretty much
exactly what's really happening and where the extra uploaded maps (dreams)
come from, so it all makes purrfect sense.  :X)

*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* 
   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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