[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Sasha Hart]

[Damion Schubert]

> My suggestion would be: kick people out of their patterns.  Reward
> players for how many different monsters they kill.  Give players
> different goals.  Nudge them to go towards empty areas.  Only
> reward them for the first dragon they kill that day.
 
> There are a near infinite number of ways to fiddle with the
> rewards (advancement and loot) so that you're encouraging
> exploration and diversity of activity instead of waiting in line
> for 12 hours to kill the same thing you killed yesterday.

Bearing in mind recent comments about reinventing the wheel...

I spent a few years at school (Allen Neuringer's lab - look up his
papers if you want something official) tinkering with variability
contingencies. That is, the matter of reinforcing people, pigeons,
rats, betta splendens, octopi, etc. to vary within some set of
possibilities. There is potentially a lot to be said about how to do
this, and about how different approaches are different to actually
play with and in what effects they have. I would be glad to share
anything I know with anyone who is interested. But here I will just
say that it is tailor-made for problems like everyone going to the
same dungeon. It might be applicable in other ways to making people,
aggregately or individual, act in ways that make the game more fun
but which they wouldn't just do themselves. (I'll easily concede
that this is a much tougher nut, but a little more interesting too.)

Making work for myself like a database expert, 
Sasha


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