[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Daniel James]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Dave Rickey wrote:

> ...  So the "good guys" can win 9 out of 10 battles, or 99 out of
> 100, and they'll lose the "war".  The "bad guys" don't mind losing,
> as long as the fight was fun, the "good guys" are fighting to defend
> something in particular, and when they lose they stop having any
> fun.  Some quit, the next fight is tilted more in favor of the "bad
> guys", more quit, and a nice vicious cycle sets in, that was broken
> in UO only by creating a mirror where the "bad guys" couldn't win
> because they couldn't fight.

This cycled back and forth periodically in Avalon. One of the big
problems with political games based on player conflict is that balance
is very tricky: it's easy for one side to start trouncing the
opposition. A small and hard to perfect thing, such as a single skill
imbalance, can make all the difference. Difficult for the
administration to manage well - because you *want* there to be swings
of victory and defeat. Often we had to intervene, digging the good
guys out from the slough of despond, for the bad guys usually won, as
Matt could testify. Likewise, at other times villainy was actively
fostered. Perhaps this will prove a bit of a service nightmare for the
'big game' that tries it.

As an aside, I find Mr Hook's thoughts on mathematical balance
analysis fascinating, I wonder how far one could take such techniques
beyond individual skills / events. Any pointers to work on the
statistical / systems analysis of MU* game systems & player behaviour?

> Now, in theory, I can agree that PD closes that circle, if the "bad
> guys" can lose their character permanently, they've got an
> investment at stake and they can lose.  This assumes, of course,
> that a combat-ready character requires a non-trivial investment of
> time.

Yes. That's more or less what we had in mind for Middle-earth: Perm
Death introduces dramatic consequences for actions. It was going to be
extremely hard to build up a 'killer', keeping her alive would get
progressively more tricky with her rising infamy.

> But if you pitch such a concept, nobody will invest.

Funnily enough, that was Sierra's opinion (after they'd spent a small
fortune, already), although I don't think that PD was the reason for
their ill-fated decision.

> If you promote it online, few will take it seriously.

Well, we had a fair old bit of coverage at the time, and perm death
was reasonably well received as an idea (without any disclosure on how
it would be controlled, save that it would). Admittedly our early
audience were mostly of the Tolkien old-school, and many were pleased
that there would be no uncanonical resurrection (don't say 'Beren').

> And if you put it on the shelves, few will buy it.  All a potential
> player sees is that the "bad guys" can permanently destroy *their*
> character.  And he's not going to accept that, in most cases.

I don't agree. As Richard mentioned, new games must reach out to new
audiences, and these new players won't have the same prejudice. A fair
few role-players have suffered through the permanent death of their
characters. Suspect that players of 'The Sims Online' would also
survive the perm-death of one of their Sims, were PD to be a feature
of that game.

I was, perhaps naively, confident that existing gamers would cope with
perm-death. Providing, of course, that it was a very rare event, one
that came almost exclusively to those who went willingly into danger.

Of course, we had the Middle-earth banner, a boon which might have
allowed us to take this risk and still gather a hearty flock. Much as
Raph does, with Star Wars. <nudge>


Daniel | d at djames.org


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev