[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Michael Tresca]

Matt Mihaly posted on Saturday, June 16, 2001 12:51 AM

> Yeah, 6 is a lot for that size player base. I was going to give
> you some advice, but I think your goals are different from
> mine. You don't seem to object to people from different worlds
> mixing with each other freely?

"Object" is probably a strong word.

My original MUD roots are from Ivory Tower, and I liked the separate
(and opposing) cities.  I also found, much to my amusement, that the
PKers lived in the city of Law because there were more restrictions
that they could abuse, and they stayed out of the city of Chaos (and
thematically, the haven of evil).  So the evil folks didn't act much
like evil folks because if you acted too evil someone PKed your ass
-- while the Law (and presumably good) folks were rather vicious
once outside the haven of their lovely little city.

We want to reproduce that feeling, where a world is genuinely a
world.  The problem is, with a limited player base, six worlds
really requires more than 60 players to make it a legitimate "MUD
within a MUD" -- while we grow by about 10 players per year, we're
still not at a point where isolating the planets from each other
would be productive.  If we were to do that, we'd end up with my
experience on that Cybermahwhatsis MUD -- newbie logs in, newbie
wonders where the hell everybody is, newbie logs off.

Socialization, at least in my experience, is a powerful motivating
factor to make players continue playing on a game -- they can hate
the game and even keep playing it because their social group plays
there.  We're not eager to violate that just for the sake of
isolating those six worlds.

Mike "Talien" Tresca
RetroMUD Administrator
http://www.retromud.org

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