[MUD-Dev] DGN: shard growth patterns?

[rayzam]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Cuadro" <cuadro at earthlink.net>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] DGN: shard growth patterns?


On May 18, Ray Cuadro said

> A RL example will help illustrate my question:...

> The post would make more sense if I were to add in the original
> subject which was:

>  Are there any generalizable shard growth patterns that you've seen
>  among the big MMORPGs that could affect its online economy?

Population growth is based on birth rate, death rate, immigration, and
emigration. PCs are born fully adult, they don't produce offspring [in
general], and 'death' is mostly the loss of the account.

In this sense, PCs are more like immigration & emigration than birth
rate and death rate.

Therefore, a new game opens, and it's like settling a new land, lots
of colonists. The growth spurt slows after the place becomes more
populated, then you get more directed immigration, based on qualities
of the game, or irl like coming to the Americas to escape persecution
because the environment here doesn't have that [just as one example
possible quality/reason for immigration]. Or in the case of shards,
different shards gain different cultures. This model so far describes
a logarithmic function, which heads towards asymptote.

However, the bigger perturbation in shard growth may be determined by
new games opening up, or emigration.  How resilient is the shard/game
to 'new lands' and thus large scale emigration due to colonizing the
next unconquered land...

This is all theoretical, as I have no data on actual shard
populations.  But my point is that it really isn't like birth/death
rates, more likely like the colonization of the 13 colonies, and then
the large emigration Westward!

    -rayzam
    www.retromud.org


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