[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Paul Schwanz wrote:
> Matt Mihaly wrote:

>> So I think it probably would scale quite well, but would need
>> some tweaking to get rid of the human-playing-a-God
>> role. Managing the number of Gods that would be required in a
>> large game would be daunting to say the least.
 
> Functionally, would there need to be much difference between a
> human-playing-a-god role and a human-playing-a-mayor role?  What
> kind of powers would you need to give the mayor role to let it
> perform the same kind of oversight function?  Do you think that
> mayors being managed through citizen election would be sufficient,
> or must there be direct developer involvement?

Well, there's quite a big difference. Our humans-playing-gods have
enormous power at their disposal. They can create items at will,
alter the existing world at will (aside from a few exceptions), turn
a player to smoking ash, and far more. I'd never give that kind of
power to someone who wasn't personally picked by the
developers. That's not to say that the city leaders might not
sometimes be just as responsible, but what they won't have is
hundreds of hours of training as a Celani. (Celani and Demi-Gods are
pre-God roles played by hand-picked volunteers hoping to become Gods
someday. One of the current ones, for instance, who is the closest
to being promoted to full God now has over 800 hours of experience
as a Celani/Demi-God. That's invaluable in terms of learning not
only how to use their power, but in terms of absorbing the culture
of the Gods and internalizing what is and isn't proper as a God.

As I said though, I don't think you NEED Gods, but they are quite
nice. I'd also say one developer-appointed person could perform
oversight on 10 of our city-states if he or she didn't have to get
involved role-wise on a daily basis.

--matt

Ashcroft needs a beating.



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