[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[ceo at grexengine.com]

on Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 12:18:59AM -0700, Acius wrote:

> Very much agreed.
 
> I'm working on my MUD as a hobby, so the financial aspect of this
> is not as compelling for me, though I do want player
> retention. OTOH, I have a serious problem with being a factor in
> someone else's addictive behavior on a game I wrote. Yes, it's
> their own choice, blame the parents, etc., but if there's
> something I can do to help that, I'm interested.
 
> The only desired behavior is regularity -- I want someone to log
> into my MUD regularly. That way, they're participating in the
> world, and I have an active player. What I *don't* want is for
> them to stay logged in for hours and hours. This, I feel, is a
> direct consequence of the reward structure of MUDs. The MUD
> provides you with something

In that case, I suggest you take a look at L.O.R.D. -genre games.

(Legend Of the Red Dragon, classic BBS doorgame:)

Bear in mind that BBS door games in general had two aims:

 1. Make the player NOT play for long each day (need to keep the
  phone line free for other people to login each day!)

 2. Encourage the player to come back EVERY day (similar reasons of
 wanting particpant BBS-members, who take part in the other
 BBS-functions (forums etc) whilst they're logged on).

Also, number 2 was often very desirable because your popularity as a
BBS was in a way proportional to your number of members - with
plenty to choose from, and high access costs (at least in Europe)
the primary factor in the user's choice was often how many other
people used the board (being an approximate measure of how good a
community it was, how ell maintained, how much funky new stuff,
etc).

Basic idea: each day, you have 20 "Actions" available. If you don't
use them, you lose them. Each Action is something like "Wander
around the forest", whicjhh generates random encounters, including
NPC's, "special locations", but mainly just wandering monsters from
an encounter list.

There were also actions for e.g. "Spend the night with a tavern maid"
or other in-town activities which could reap positive rewards (I can't
remember any particular scenarios, but in you might e.g. "increase your
stamina for tHe rest of the day, after your night of vigorous exercise").

We're pitching agame based on a similar gameplay at the moment to
interested hosts, for release Q2 2003. It's a non-core ctivity, so
might not go ahead, but if it does, I can let you know if you're
interested.

The game we're pitching is a massively-multiplayer variant of that
style of gameplay, which brings up lots of interesting challenges
:).

adam M

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