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

[Trump]

On Thursday 26 July 2001 07:11 am, Freeman, Jeff wrote:

> 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.

It's all too common for people to use the recent MMORPGS to
fallaciously argue how one idea or another did or did not work.

Taking the fact that 90+% of the EQ population plays on a non-PvP
server to mean that 90+% of RPG players want nothing to do with PvP,
for example.  This is as rediculous as taking the popularity of
Quake3 to mean that all gamers want to PvP all the time.

The sheer complexity of the systems we are dealing with can make
ideas that are really, really bad work out, and ideas that are good
fail miserably.

The ability to hide in the middle of combat sounds like a really BAD
idea, but in UO it added a whole slew of new tactical options and
concerns to combat, significantly enhancing it.  But the idea of
learning by observation, worked out to be a horrable mess.

This doesnt mean that learning by observation was a bad idea.  On
the contrary, it was an excellent one, but the massively complex
system that surrounded it just made it totally unworkable.

So if someone says "UO tried learning by observation.  It didnt
work."  That's true, but the impication that it CANT work is most
certainly false.


-Azeraab
azeraab at dies-irae.org
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