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

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Freeman, Jeff
>> 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.

[snip]

> 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.

Yep.

I still believe that an AL virtual ecology is going to become a de
rigueur feature on muds on certain kinds. Whether it's closed or not
is a whole other issue.

The place where it WAS scale that was problematic was in making the
sim scaleable enough for a world that size. That's just another kind
of design flaw, though.

> 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.

Here, I disagree; plenty of muds exist where peer pressure alone
(occasionally with some admin step-in) handles the policing. And the
size of the playerbase does seem to matter a lot, in terms of the
effectiveness of peer pressure.

> 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 think the main things that felt scale-impacted to me were social
dynamics.  Over and over I found that groups of players behaved as I
expected, but that the playerbase as a whole didn't. A lot of older
problems were exacerbated, sometimes turning a minor problem into a
big problem--like what happened with camping in EQ.

-Raph
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