[MUD-Dev] Quality Testing

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001 13:02:07 +0100 
Daniel Harman <Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com> wrote:

> Depth is found when a player can apply his personal skill to a
> situation, which is almost antithesis to stat based games where
> its meant to be about the character not the player. 

Precisely.  For NPC, players, game worlds, and role playing, depth
occurs in proportion to the level of personal evaluation and
judgment evidenced by the NPC, player, game world, or role player.

Which casts some interesting lights on storytelling MUShes.

> How about a spell system where you have to type into the numeric
> keypad with numbers corresponding to runes. The computer then
> measures the rythym and depression time and that corresponds to
> your intonation, affecting the spell in a multitude of ways. That
> adds some player skill, and for me thats depth. 

Trivial to macro.  Do a set of various timings, track which were
more successful, and then bot/macro that timing set.  If you add
random environmental factors then you've just added enough entropy
to the event then it truly is random, and thus infinitely shallow.

> Then when someone proclaims to be the best, its because they are
> demonstrably better at something, not just because they happened
> to camp/ebay purchase/whatever some marginally better gear.

Or, more simply, "How topical and timely are your responses?"

> I think its time to jettison 'autoattack'.

<nod>

This is the core of the reason that I split stats into physical
stats which bound to the player body, and entropy modifiers which
stored against the account (eg karma modifiers).

--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev