[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Michael Tresca]

Adam Martin posted on  Monday, June 18, 2001 9:43 AM

> I don't understand. What is wrong with that? It sounds perfect to
> me - you have a game which has generated its own natural
> tavern-equivalent. I would have thought you would be celebrating
> the fact that your game was flexible enough to allow the players
> to create the "Chat Tower" in the appropriate place.

> Why are you so desperate to force people to use taverns as meeting
> places?  By allusion to realism, I'd point out that historically
> any tavern not cited in a position where it was required
> (e.g. like the Chat Tower being created because that was the
> location where the players needed a meeting place) would very soon
> go bust from lack of custom.

No desperation from this end. However, the taverns existed in some
capacity prior to the creation of the Chat Tower -- and since there
are six worlds, one tower should not be catering to all of them.  In
other words, the previously coded social gathering places were
unsuccessful.  The code we had created didn't cause the effect they
were intended for.  This obviously indicated that the code was not
catering to players' needs.

Although Chat Tower has its plusses, it also has some downsides:
During one of our events, demons attack players.  One of the players
decided to walk into the Chat Tower, leading the demon in with him.
Idling (supposedly "safely") there were a good 20 people.  They all
died.

I didn't think we were "forcing" anybody either.  We provided
incentives to use taverns as an alternative.  If we were to force
them, we could simply make it so the Chat Tower was an
impossibility.

> It seems to me that the only situation where you need to encourage
> people into taverns is where there is no such socializing already
> going on in the game; but then I'm of the school of thought that
> you shouldn't be forcing people to play the game "your" way all
> the time.

I'm of the school of thought that it's the coding staff's job to
notice patterns and trends in their player base and code to their
needs.

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

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev