[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[Dave Trump]

At 02:13 PM 8/28/02 -0400, John Buehler  wrote:

> Certainly players will come up with every possible political
> construct possible within the confines of whatever the game
> designers have created.  But in the end, the game designers set
> the limits.

This really couldnt be farther from the truth.  While the designers
can nudge players in one direction or another, in the end the
players will either find what you have given them useful in doing
what they want to do or reject it completely and do thier own thing.
Today's designers have to deal with player guilds that have existed
for as much as 10 years, that's quite a bit of intertia to overcome.
A group that spans that many years as well as a half dozen different
games cannot possibly only exist within the confines of what you
have created.

DaoC deserves much credit for having a guild system that worked well
for nearly all of the 100's of guilds that rolled into that game on
day one.  Early UO saw alot of players going off and doing thier own
thing playing Orcish clans, Undead and when there was no support for
standard guilds dying everyone's shirt the same color had to
suffice.  (http://www.trumps.net/war/BlueTeam.jpg)

Designers trying to set limits and force artificial political
systems on the players has always failed miserably.  While UO's
Order/Chaos idea saw some use, it was mostly ignored, as was oDSO's
Templar/Veilled Alliance structure.  Already I've seen more
Templar/VA action in NWN DSO (http://www.dies-irae.org/DSO.html)
than I ever did in the original.  Why?  Because we went out of our
way to build the structure around things they players were
interested in.

In the end it's the designer's job to build tools for the players to
do what they would normally do, and to try to funnel those player
efforts into making the game world more compelling.


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