[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Travis Nixon [mailto:tnixon at avalanchesoftware.com] 
> From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at verant.com>
>>> From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock
>>> On Fri, 15 Jun 2001 22:33:34 -0700, "Sean Kelly" 
>>> <sean at ffwd.cx> wrote:
 
>>>> One thing that's kind of surprised me is that none of the
>>>> MMORPGs I've played had any facility for sending messages to
>>>> players who aren't currently online (mail).
 
>>> I'm shocked. NONE of them have this? Why not? It's one of the
>>> primary wish-list features for my own system. Has been for
>>> years.
 
>> The logic against it goes like this:
 
>>   * Yeesh! HOW much storage per player again? That's (takes out *
>>   calculator) WAAAY too much money!
 
> Ok, let me get this straight.  You find it objectionable to spend
> storage for something useful, yet storage for somebody to have
> thousands of identical tailored shirts is ok? :) (don't remember
> the number from that story...hehe) Actually, though, this is the
> only objection that holds any weight in my eyes.  Storage is
> cheap, to a point.  Then it gets fairly expensive.  Of course,
> there are ways to work around this, too.  For example, once a
> piece of mail is recieved, don't store it on the server anymore.
> Store it on the recipient's machine.  Make them figure out where
> to put it all. :)

There is a very appreciable difference between you or I slamming a
hard drive in our PCs, and the cost of 'managed storage' as would be
required by a large MMORPG. Data centre space allowances, RAID
redundancy, backups (one of the more major costs) - all these things
conspire to make it cost many many times more than you might
expect. I was surprised when I saw some figures for it!

>>   * Won't they use email anyway? We can't possibly make a nice *
>>   enough email system to match Outlook!

> Well, that depends.  Is your game full-screen?  Now that you're
> with Verant, are you going to follow the "We will controll all
> that you see and hear" stance that they've taken with EQ?  If so,
> then Outlook really isn't an option.  Besides, I don't really want
> to be giving out my email address to everybody I meet in a game,
> even people that I hang out with in-game more than once or twice.
> But I'd be more than happy to give them an in-game address.  Of
> course, I suppose I could create a yahoo mail or something along
> those lines, but then we're not using outlook, are we.  And I
> despise every web-based mail interface I've ever tried.
 
> Besides, it's just cooler to have it be an actual part of the
> game, something that isn't a stretch to keep in character.

Actually, I disagree about having email, ICQ and other such systems
in game.  Allow people to switch tasks sure, but to actually have
people doing that when playing just strikes me as odd. Can't imagine
anything worse than getting a work email thats immediately drawn to
my attention whilst playing an MMORPG!

If you are going to go down this road why not chuck in an IRC client
too?

I think this thread arose from some discussion about buffering
messages to a player whilst they were offline, the hound them to
make sure its delivered idea is just a hideous mutation! Is it
really important that I get an SMS message on my phone when someone
wants to talk to me in game? Hell, if I log out a game, I don't want
my guild able to contact me and demand that I come teleport them to
a raid or whatever.

Preventing task switching is just nasty however. It doesn't stop
people hacking, it just cripples ones PC.

Dan

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