[MUD-Dev] Geometric content generation

[Eli Stevens]

<Note to Editor: if you get many similar replies to this, feel free to
reject this post.  I won't mind ;) >


----- Original Message -----
From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com>
> Ian Collyer writes:

>>   ContentCreationRate * NoOfDevelopers >= ContentConsumptionRate

>> Rearranging gives:

>>   NoOfDevelopers >= ContentConsumptionRate / ContentCreationRate

>> An interesting point to note is that this is _independent_ of the
>> number of users, which prompts me to question why everyone is
>> discarding option 1 above so quickly. Surely with a sufficiently
>> large paying user base simply increasing the number of developers
>> is a viable option.

> Your units are messed up.  Rate * Number = RateNumber, which is
> not comparable with a Rate.  The number of users is significant.

> ContentCreationRate * NumberOfDevelopers >= ContentConsumptionRate
> * NumberOfUsers

How is that true?  What one developer creates can be experienced by
(possibly) many users.  If what you say is true, then Everquest
would have been a failure by _everyone's_ standards (I don't want to
get into whether it is or not, let's just say it's debatable and
leave it at that ;).

Although, I think I may see what you are getting at:

    ContentCreationRate * NumberOfDevelopers >=
    ContentConsumptionRate / AvgPercentOfContentExperiencedPerPlayer

A game with a linear leveling treadmill, static quests that everyone
does, etc. would have an A%oCEPP (above) close to 1.0, while a game
with one shot quests, areas exclusive to a group or guild,
etc. might have one much lower, perhaps 0.2 or so (every player
consumes about 1/5 of the total content before running out).

Note that players who quit early don't count all the stuff they
didn't get access to, only the stuff they skipped and will never go
back to.

Or something like that.  Anyways, Eli

--
Never use brute force in fighting an exponential.
      -- Andrei Alexandrescu, "Modern C++ Design"


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