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

[Travis Nixon]

Brian Green wrote:

> The abilities of a handful of really smart people hold no candle to
> the force offered by a throng of average people.  This is a
> universal truth in online games.

> Players will find a way to reverse engineer any system you come up
> with if it's important enough to them.  Larger games tend to have
> more people poking at the systems, and therefore have their systems
> reverse engineered more.

> Again, where there's a will, there's a way.

Lets not even mention the fact that the more "top secret" the system
is supposed to be, the more likely it is that people working for you
will share details with close friends, who will share details with
other close friends, etc etc.

Lets also not forget that some of the people poking at your system are
invariably a whole hell of a lot smarter than you are.  :) Some people
do things like that just for fun.  I'm embarrassed to admit this, but
when I was in college, a bunch of friends and I played Star Fleet
Battles regularly.  When we got to a point where we wanted to start
making our own ships and modifactions, I spent quite a lot of time
trying to figure out the formula used for a ship's "point value", so
that we could assign the appropriate points to ships we made.  At one
point, I was working with a 40 or 50 variable matrix, and that was
just "for fun".  I never did figure it out, by the way, and I'm almost
convinced that they don't actually have a formula, but base the point
values purely on approximation and playtesting.  Then again, I'm not
one of those people who's a whole lot smarter than you are, either. :)

Any system that only "works" as long as the internals remain unknown
is destined for a short lifetime.  Add human error into the design and
implementation phases, and all you do is convince me that the details
need to be public.  They don't necessarily need to show up in the
interface to the game, but they should be known.  For example,
Everquest does not anywhere show you how much mana you currently have.
But that value can be derived from a formula based on things the game
does tell you, (intelligence and level) a formula which the players
were able to derive based on known information.  Anybody that cares
can go to one of the many websites that sports a "mana calculator" and
figure out just how much mana they have.  My point is that this
formula should have, in my opinion, been provided by the developers in
the first place.

Secrets will be discovered.  Players WILL figure out how your system
works.  If you're relying on secrecy, you've already failed.

Besides, if you publish how your system is intended to work, you have
all those people who will immediately point out that it's not working
the way you think it is.  If you don't, they just think you're stupid
for intending it to work the way it does (even if its not working
correctly).  :)

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