[MUD-Dev] Experience System Differences

[rayzam]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hulbert, Leland" <LHulbert at czn.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 3:37 PM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Experience System Differences

<SNIP>

> What type of system do you use to give experience from exploring
> and/or running shops?  The only thing that immediately comes to my
> mind (I am ashamed to admit I never thought of doing something like
> this before) is a XP award the first time you enter a given room,
> adjusted for the difficulty in reaching that room, or difficulty in
> finding it; and a flat rate of XP for every P2P transaction.  Of
> course, that would require tracking to prevent abuse...  I'd really
> like to know how you handle this.

We give exploration experience [tho we're not the people you are
referring to under 'you']. The basic concept is experience the first
time a player enters a room, under specific instances:

    1) they need to be in verbose mode [brief mode: room title, exits,
    light, weather, monsters objects, versus verbose which has all the
    long description].

    2) they need to not be in combat. If they enter a room and are
    ambushed, they have to be in the room without combat for a
    bit. This includes winning and staying in the room [instead of
    needing to leave and reenter].

    3) they have to be able to see. This does not include mindsight,
    infravision, or other limited visual abilities. Regular sight or
    darksight, to see the details.

    4) they are not running through

    5) the room is 'static', in the sense that it isn't a dynamic room
    [such as dynamically generated mazes/layouts]

    6) not outerworld [we have worlds handled by virtual
    servers.. there are many rooms, with pretty much
    scenery/terrain/player owned castles/entrances to areas. The point
    is to place areas in context and with each other, and give a bit
    of a text-graphical view of how they interconnect. The worlds are
    also all fairly differentiated in their terrains and types. Giving
    experience for this would involve lots of mindless walking around,
    not too fun for the players].

Related to that, the amount of experience varies. There's a running
total of all the player-explored rooms [rooms that wizards or monsters
have only entered aren't tracked]. The experience gained by a player
finding a new room is specifically related to how much of the total
Retroverse he's explored. So having explored 1% of the Retroverse
gains little experience per room. Having explored 85%, the same new
room is worth a lot more experience. This gives an advantage/more
experience to the Explorers for pursuing it.

And finally, since the running total is only of player-explored rooms,
if you find a room that noone else has found, you gain the experience
for it as usual, but that also increases the total # of rooms
tracked. Which means that you lower other players' explore
percents. So there is a competition level inherent in this system for
Explorers to compete with each other for.  And incentive to not just
tell/post/set up web pages with all sorts of hidden areas.

    Rayzam
    www.retromud.org


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