[MUD-Dev] To good to be TRUE, in an MMPORPG?

[Freeman]

> From: J C Lawrence [mailto:claw at 2wire.com]

> UO in its early incarnations did such ecologies.  The players
> decimated them.  Repeatedly.

With unlimited storage space, this was the the only possibly
outcome.  The solution (to limit storage space) wasn't implemented
until long after the ecology was abandoned.  Even the storage space
limitations that were implemented (finally), were pretty soft - a
limit on bankbox storage, but junk in houses still didn't decay and
you could buy as many houses as you wanted to.

If deer don't respawn until the hides from the previous deer have
been used, then a single industrious player could have wiped out the
deer population *alone*, given enough time, just by hoarding hides.
And more than one player was hoarding, and more than just hides.

I see the same response whenever the subject of player policing
comes up.  Basically, "Oh, UO tried that.  It didn't work."

But UO *didn't* try it.  Unlimited storage space is a drain, and UO
had no faucet. The end result was inevitable.  Same thing would have
happened on an itty-bitty MUD, so it's not a matter of scale.

UO didn't try player-policing, either.  UO tried anarchy, and the
results were the exact same as the results you get on a small-scale
MUD: Dead noobs all over the place.

I don't want to be too harsh (because my coworkers will beat me up),
but mostly UO discovered new ways to do old things wrong, but then
scale is blamed for the inevitable results.

I have a hard time thinking of things that would have worked
differently had UO been a small scale MUD, rather than an MMO.  That
the players' behavior on UOX shards (where the admins don't lord
over the playerbase, at any rate) pretty much exactly matches that
of the real deal, just confirms my suspicion that UO's failures had
to do with faults in the systems, rather than with the players'
behavior, scale, whatever.
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