[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[bradley newton haug]

Raph Wrote:

> At MMORPG scales, it is. Harder than 4-16 players games,
> certainly. Harder than 250-player games too.

Again with the arm-waving declaration about how hard a MMOG server
is.  Are you trying to warn people off, or are you really under the
impression this is some holy grail.  If you still think this is a
'difficult new thing', I suggest you hire some more network
engineers and fewer designers.  Now I'm not saying this is the case,
but whenever I see marketing or sales personnel in the retail
shrink-wrap industry waving their hands and saying how hard
something is, there is usually a team of 'engineers' in some dark
room somewhere that are regarded as 'beyond reproach', and
'unfathomably brilliant' doing work no one could have possibly come
up with or done better than.  When in truth, it's just because they
are having a hard go of it.  I ran into a lot of this when I worked
at Microsoft.

It's code, it's network, it's a state sync machine, I'd wager a
guess every single algo I've used in my engine has been used before.

> Yep, and that only leaves persistent economies, customer service,
> ongoing content addition, ongoing forms of narrative, and multiple
> playstyle support as tough nuts they haven't cracked.

Agreed, none of these have been done correctly, on either the code,
or design level.

> Trust me, to developers used to single-player or even hybrid
> retail-and-Net-play games, creating and running a persistent world
> game is a whole new ballgame, easily ten times harder.

Now here I'm getting confused, is it hard to design, or is it hard
to code.  There is a big difference.  Example of hard to design,
easy to code: " in game language".  Example of hard to code, easy to
design, "Player Economy System".  What is your definition of
'developer' is that a guy that writes documents that engineers have
to turn into reality or is that a code-slinger?

-brad

"Anyone that opens a statement with trust me is trying to control you"
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