[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 26th February, 2001, Dave Rickey wrote:

> As in "simple, elegant, and wrong".

OK, what was simple, elegant and wrong about it?

>> Consequently, when they die, they tend to hate it, as they've
>> demonstrated the complete opposite.

> In many cases, but by no means all.

I didn't say in all cases.

> That doesn't account, for example, for the Oasis wars in UO (or any
> of several other "wars" surrounding the death of various player-made
> towns), where the "bad guys" kept up an offensive for weeks, in
> spite of fierce opposition and many deaths.

I don't know enough about this to be sure, but if the bad guys were
able to get back to the point at which they were killed fairly easily,
and if they were expecting to die, they wouldn't necessarily care. The
game would seem to them more like a FPS, where you play, you take out
a few of the opposition, then you get creamed and have to start
again. Before long, you're just where you were before.

> So the "bad guy" just has to figure out how to PD by proxy?  That may
> take him a while, maybe five whole minutes.
	
At most. But the bad guy doesn't get any reward for it, especially in
the "gosh, you're a kick-ass killer dreamboat, can I have your
babies?"  variety that they crave. It's one thing to take someone on
in single combat, but another thing entirely to run unarmoured through
a town pursued by a mob of skeletons who can't catch you but can catch
people who DO have armour. People may be impressed by your ingenuity,
but it's not ingenious any more if you already did it. Also, it's
usually fairly easy to program out "no win" deaths once they occur,
and reinstate anyone who dies that way (I've done it quite a number of
times for my MUD over the years).

>>  2) Only allow PD (whether by PKing or not) only to be possible in
>>  locations that players have to elect to visit.

> And get the worst of both worlds?

The best of both worlds. Explain why you think it's the worst?

		Richard
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