Limiting rewards was RE: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[S. Patrick Gallaty]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Hook" <bwh at wksoftware.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2001 9:58 PM
Subject: Limiting rewards was RE: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long
quote)

> Another key reason is that it unfairly punishes someone who may have
> completed an ostensibly very difficult quest without the assistance
> of others.  Then you'll find those players that want to complete the
> quests "on their own" going to other on-line resources to figure out
> what quests HAVEN'T been solved just so that they can actually do
> something and feel like they've received a reasonable reward when
> it's done.

> In general, scaling rewards based on a macro-analysis of trends ends
> up working in general, but it does hurt those that, for whatever
> reason, don't fall within the group that the macro-analysis is
> trying to control.

I disagree strenuously.

Macro-analysis builds a false case that ignores individual experience,
and leads to gross mistakes in design.  The player population isn't a
forest, it's trees.  Treating it as a forest both devalues and
disregards the important element, the player experience.

This is the rut verant is in now, and ohboy is it a big one.  They've
so lost sight of the player in their gross adjustments for the 'big
picture' that the game -must- be exploitively played or the time
investments would be so outrageous that it would be prohibitive.  In
this way, sadly eq is comprised of two classes of players - the people
who have resource and connections to exploit the system and those who
do not.

The 'fair' players in eq are amazingly penalized by the adjustments
verant makes to the system to hinder the 'power' players.  The failing
of this, is that the power players are in fact the tiny minority.  The
truth is, for people who are peak players, none of the design
hinderances affect them. The three great hinderances in eq are - camp
time for items, downtime, death penalties.

An exploitive player knows that assistance from high level players
eliminates camp time, and can eliminate all downtime (teleporting,
healing, using high level players to heal and cast augmentation spells
on the player), and the high level player can cast spells that restore
96% of lost exp from death, making death trivial for the low level
player.  In this way, the player with high level friends, or the
secondary characters of high level people play a totally different
game than the 'fair players' who while spending 10x the time
investment, bear most of the burden from the tuning changes which fail
to penalize the peak players.

This is THE mistake I fear other designers will make.  I fear they
will follow suit, end up with a game noone wants to play and wonder
why - after all, it worked for verant, didn't it?  The truth is
there's only one ball right now.  For people who find they wanted the
venue that eq provides, there is no alternative.  When the
alternatives come, designs which do not attempt to be enjoyable at all
times are going to be competing with designs that do.


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