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

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu 
> [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Brian 'Psychochild' Green
> Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2001 1:05 AM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] "Doing a dungeon" (was: Permadeath or Not?)

> John Buehler wrote:
 
>> Consider that if the developers are far more qualified and
>> insightful and have put far more work into getting a complex
>> behavior nailed down, that players will have far less hope of
>> reverse engineering it.
 
> 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.

Ben Hanson, formerly of Simutronics and Origin, told me a story about
working on the combat system for DragonRealms. He knew that players
reverse-engineered everything, and he was into interesting math, so he
decided to use chaos theory to build the DR combat system. He used
every variable he could think of--slope of the terrain, prevailing
winds, reflectivity of the weapon causing distraction, whatever. Threw
it all into an extraordinarily complex formula to try to get
unpredictable results.

In the end, though, he had to have a single constant in there
somewhere. He knew players would assume it would be a power of two or
a multiple of five, so he intentionally picked a number like 253.

A few months later, he finds a spoiler site that purports to explain
how to win any fight in DragonRealms. There, laid out completely, is
his entire system--slope, wind, reflectivity, everything. And it all
came down to one number. Said the author of the webpage, "Well, based
on programmer proclivities, I'd guess that the number is either 250 or
256, since they will always think in powers of two or multiples of
five--but my math shows that it's 253. So take that with a grain of
salt."

-Raph
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