[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[the_logos at www.achaea.com]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Daniel James wrote:
 
> 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.

I view running an intensive political game based on player conflict
(like Avalon or Achaea) to be akin to directing an orchestra. It's not
a skillset that most mud admins have or are required to have, as it's
not applicable to their games. Scaling it would require taking
advantage of the natural tendency of oligarchies to start in-fighting,
thus weakening themselves and leave themselves open to challenges from
other groups.

>> 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').

But wasn't Sierra's LOTR 'permadeath' really not permadeath? Didn't
most of the work and time invested in the character go to amember of
that character's family, who the player then took over?

--matt

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