[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Vincent Archer]

According to shren:

>> With a PD world going to have a lot of pain out there :-)
 
> Yes, but it's a constant pleasure to still be alive.  Do they
> balance?

According to the quote above, in many cases, they don't. The pleasure
you derived creating the character in the first place is less than the
pain you feel when you lose it.

> When you succeed in something that could cause your character
> permanent irreprable but didn't, you feel happy.  On my current
> online

The real question, the one most people don't ask, is, what happen when
it did? Will the player stay?

For commercial games, keeping a player subscribed is more important
than providing an adrenaline rush at times. It's, in purely economic
terms, the same as the grief player dilemma: if you make the griefer
happy, but lose 10 paying customers for it, it's a losing
proposition. If you provide a possibility of a big rush for a player,
but 9 out of 10 players who attempt it end up losing *and*
unsubscribing, then it's not a desirable feature.

The trick is thus to retain players who lose their life in the
attempt.

> Last night I soloed a Titan on Ackadia.  In a non-pd world, nobody
> would care, because you can do anything if you try enough times.  In
> this pd world, a significant number of the current online players
> actually came out to look at the corpse.  Why is it more exciting
> when death is always hanging over your head?  I lack the words to
> explain.

You are a gambler. Double or nothing. And many people (including me)
do NOT understand how gamblers think.

The same problem occurs with people who take severe physical risks for
the rush of it. Such a personality is about incomprehensible to me. I
recently saw a documentary in which studies showed a common genetic
trend in a large majority of the people who do extreme things (jumping
from buildings or cliffs with a parachute, that kind of severe risk),
and that the propention to risk taking might very well be an ingrained
trait, and not something you may acquire.

(of course, it's a TV documentary, and a short one, so take it with a
grain of salt)

--
Vincent Archer                                         Email: archer at nevrax.com

Nevrax France.                              Off on the yellow brick road we go!
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