[MUD-Dev] Request for ideas

[Christopher Allen]

Ian Collyer wrote:

>   Scenario 1. Players cannot interact in a meaningful way with the
>   ecosystem

>     This basically a closed simulation with the players as mere
>     passive observers, great if that is what your players like but
>     it reduces the significance of the ecosystem to little more
>     than eye candy.

>   Scenario 2. The players' characters are part of the ecosystem

>     Much more interesting but inherently unstable.  The root
>     problem here is that your ecosystem is no longer closed,
>     players login and logout and new players join the MUD.  The
>     fluctuating number of concurrent characters in the game make
>     it impossible for any sort of equilibrium to be reached.

I keep hearing variations of the above as the two choices, but why
not between? The players are part of the ecosystem, however, the
ecosystem is much larger then what is visible to the players, maybe
on average 10x in size. Thus when you kill the UO bunny rabbit,
there might actually be 9 more out there that you haven't seen that
are breeding, etc. You affect the population slightly (there are 9
breeding instead of 10) but essentially it is difficult to eradicate
the bunnies. Combined with as the population declines, they get
better at hiding -- i.e. maybe the percentage of hidden bunnies to
visible bunnies goes up as they population declines to 20x.
Eventually there might be so few bunnies that no one sees them, but
they are out there, hidden and breeding and prepared to become
visible again.

-- Christopher Allen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..


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