[MUD-Dev] Social Networks

[Freeman]

From: Dave Rickey

> Now, that is not neccessarily an insurmountable barrier, certainly
> one could build a socializing core into many different games.  But
> without building it around such a core and keeping it constantly
> in mind, you might have difficulty preventing some equivalent of
> the "Tankmage" problem where your social engine is stalled out by
> people who find the combination of gameplay elements that make
> them independant from your social ties.  Once it is found, it will
> be widely used by players, because dependancy on others is seen at
> a gut level as a weakness.  The downside of weakness is immediate
> and visceral, the upside of social ties is delayed and cerebral,
> and people in these games overwhelmingly pursue the short-term
> payoff.  The result is a crowd of individuals with no social ties,
> who eventually reach the limit of your gameplay and leave.  What's
> worse, they will reach the limits of that limited subset of your
> gameplay that can be pursued with the "solo" templates, which will
> happen much sooner that they could exhaust the entirety.  There
> has been literally thousands of man-years of work put into
> perfecting the Tank/Nuker/Healer triad in a fantasy setting,
> millions if you count the player time spent breaking it in various
> games.

You had me, but then you lost me.

Are you sure the churn-rate of UO vs. the churn-rate of DAoC
supports this theory?

I liked OBA's comment regarding current MMO's combat systems:

  "But the bloodless chopping-wood chess fights where people turn
  off spell-effects and press "HEAL PLZ!" hotkeys while they watch
  something better on tv as they mash their assortment of buttons,
  glaring like evil hillbillies at strangers who wander near their
  fishing spot, well, I doubt I'd drop a tear if I've seen the last
  of those heh."

I'm not so sure the tank/nuker/healer combo has been "perfected" so
much as it's been run into the ground.

Not that your premise is wrong, but I'm not sure the foundation of
what's made for strong social ties in (say) EQ vs. weak social ties
in (say) an_mmo_01 is necessarily class interdependency.

Tank/Taxi/Healer could be as appropriate.

Then again, it could just be that being an evil hillbilly gives you
access to the fishing spot, vs. not being an evil hillbilly.  So
people want to join the evil hillbilly guild regardless of class -
and the evil hillbilly guilds wants at least some of them to join,
just because it takes a certain number of hillbillies to keep the
fishing hole.

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