[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: shren <shren at io.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Wednesday, March 07, 2001 1:54 AM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)


>On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Dan Shiovitz wrote:

>> On Wed, 28 Feb 2001 Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:
>> [..]

>>> I have to back you up on this. Asheron's Call has a magic system
>>> based upon research where the more commonly used a spell in the
>>> world, the less effective it is. This was intended to foster some
>>> secrecy over the magic and to make spell reagent knowledge a
>>> valued commodity. It didn't take more than 2 month for it all to
>>> appear on the web.

>> A couple people have mentioned this, but nobody has explained why
>> it happened.  Anybody know?  I can think of two possible
>> hypotheses: one is that people told a few friends who told a few
>> more and so on (ie, not purposely intending to spread the data),
>> and the other that people purposely set out to work out and explain
>> how all the spells work.  These are fairly different situations and
>> would need to be dealt with differently by the admins.

The first was what the admins actually had envisioned, what they got
was the second in the most virulent form: Split Pea.

> So maybe 10% understood the ramifications of the AC spell system in
> time to realize that sharing spells might not be a good idea.  The
> other 90% wrote hint books online, because that's what you do with
> computer games, after all.

And in an effort to curb it, they set up the "Taper" system, where
certain components varied from player to player.  This led to someone
creating a specilized macro program, "Split Pea", which automatically
ran through all the possibilities and noted the ones that worked (and
became the seed for the more sophisticated bots in use now).  The rest
of the formula was fixed, but there were web-pages being built
detailing *all* of them in *beta*.

Now, Split Pea could have worked just as well (and arguably have been
even more neccessary) even if *every* part of the spell had been
randomized.  But the system was doomed from the start, even if active
players had felt they needed to keep secrets, the first master mage
who quit AC would have the keys to undermine the whole "spell
economy".  Hope you didn't ban him.

--Dave Rickey

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