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

[J. Coleman]

John Buehler wrote:
> Matt Mihaly writes:

>> Is it appealing to the roleplayer (this is about roleplaying after
>> all) when characters can't even free-form roleplay with each other,
>> due to an inability to communicate?

> I guess roleplayers would like it, but I'm not overly worried about
> them.  I'm simply pursuing what I believe to be a normal and natural
> expectation of cause and effect in the game world that any
> conventional player would want.  If I'm going to call something a
> secret, it must operate like a secret.  If the way the game
> environment functions doesn't support it being treated like a secret
> (such as players being able to publish 'secrets'), then I'm just
> causing grief for my players.  Especially the more casual ones who
> just want the game world to 'work'.

Exactly my point. I seem to have inadvertently started something of a
holy war here - I just want a world that is self-consistent. If the
game calls something a secret, then a million people *shouldn't* know
that "secret" - i.e. it shouldn't be something that can be put on a
message board. If you use an actual word, one that the players can
see, then you have no guarantee it will remain as secret as
intended. Indeed, one could almost posit that you are, in fact,
guaranteed just the opposite - that players *will* spread the word
around and remove the "secret" part of the "secret password".

>>> If players wouldn't game the game, I'd just let the players know
>>> the passwords and communicate them to each other through their
>>> characters.  As I've said, that isn't what happens.  The downside
>>> to that fact results in effects that I want to remove from the
>>> player's experience in the game world.

>> Well, ok, but you can't ever do it. As has been discussed here many
>> many times you can't stop players from applying their own
>> intelligence, rhetorical skills, logical methodology, etc.

> I don't want to eliminate that stuff.  Part of the entertainment of
> the game is to tickle people's brains.  But those are things that
> players bring to the operation of their character.  The discussion
> of in-game secrets has to do with keeping in-game knowledge in the
> game world.  The players are no obligated to use their brains to
> solve in-game problems such as 'who knows the password'?  The
> challenge that I've eliminated is finding the web site that lists
> the password and how to use it.  You have to solve those problems in
> the game world.

The whole point of supplying a game world, in my opinion, is to
provide a world *other than the "real" world*, where players can apply
those same attributes of intelligence, logic, problem-solving, etc. In
this we all agree, I think.

The difference of opinion comes in when we attempt to define where the
game world ends and the "real" world begins. Are player message
boards, web sites, and hint books part of the game world? I don't
believe so. So when the player looks outside of the game world to
solve a problem inside the game world, then we have the metagame
phenomenon.

I *intensely* dislike metagaming / powergaming in this
form. (Min-maxing I can somewhat justify - a character would know what
he needed to get better at in order to become a better whatever he
is.) If the quest is in the game world, then the answer should (only)
be in the game world. To put this more in perspective, imagine
yourself as a character in a MMORPG we'll call "The Universe". If you
have a quest to, say, retrieve a lost wedding ring, how do you go
about doing that? You talk to the owner, find out where they might
have been when it was lost, and attempt to find it.

You can't look on some cosmic internet to magically find out where the
ring is. Sure, you might have this little voice in your head telling
you "it's in the fountain in Smalltown", but every other person
playing the game (us) would think you insane. Why? Because it breaks
this magical "suspension of disbelief".

To claim that (to apply the previous example) you can find a ring
because a voice in your head magically told you where it was is just
ludicrous, from our (the characters') point of view. In comics, this
is known (IIRC) as "breaking the fourth wall" and is strongly frowned
upon in most cases.

Powergaming may not be a concern to some of the people on this list,
indeed, some people relish it. But even on a RP-light mud, powergaming
has no place. Casual gamers may well be a little behind, in terms of
character ability, the people thay can afford to play 12 hours or more
every day, but there is no reason whatsoever to allow knowledge
crossover.

If powergaming can occur, if cheating can occur, if player knowledge
can influence character knowledge, then the world is broken. A game
world cannot truly be self-consistent and still allow manipulation of
the game system.

The day is coming, and I don't think it's far off, when MMORPGs have
to be logically consistent in order to attract the player numbers they
will need to survive in the face of competition. Thus far, players
have tolerated broken gameworlds, simply because there is no (or very
slim) alternative. EQ (as a game I played 6+ hours a day for 4 months
or so) is a horrendous example of what an online game *should*
be. However, despite all its shortcomings (that we've all seen too
many times to repeat) EQ did have a couple of major strong points. (as
did UO and M59)

  1. It was graphical. Graphics are the opiate of the online masses. A
  game (online or not) with bad graphics in this day and age, has
  virtually no chance of popular acclaim, simply because most people
  look no deeper than the pretty pictures on the box to determine
  whether or not to buy the game (and subsequently whether or not to
  play).

  2. It was well-publicised. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of
  high-quality MUDs online now. Aside from the fact that they're not
  graphical, their most common shortcoming is that they generally
  don't advertise [enough/well enough/often enough] to get the player
  numbers that EQ has. There were hundreds or thousands of people
  online at any time, and therefore it was fairly easy to have some
  sort of interaction between players, making it worthwhile to play
  even if you didn't necessarily like the game itself.

It's just a matter if time before these wonderful text muds and these
(relatively) awful graphical muds get together and have little
multiplayer online babies. It's up to us, on this list and elsewhere,
to ensure that what comes out has the best features of both, and not
the worst.

   -Justin

PS - Just out of curiosity, what do you guys (and gals) consider the
more newbie-friendly approach: game that can't be (easily) gamed, and
therefore any achievement should mean more to the player, or a game
that can be gamed, and therefore any achievement means less, but is
much easier to do?

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