[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Michael Tresca]

Freeman, Jeff posted on Tuesday, December 17, 2002 12:17 PM

> There are two distinct, incompatible playstyles at odds here:

>   -- The first group are the players who roleplay a variety of
>   characters depending on their mood.  This is also the camp into
>   which powergamers fall: Who don't *want* a character who is good
>   with a blaster, great with a chef's apron and handy with a whip.
>   They want three distinct characters that they level-up from
>   awful to deific: The Blaster Guy, The Chef Guy, The Whip Guy.  I
>   think the more hardcore a gamer is, the more likely they are to
>   fall into this group, prefering Multi-Char Servers.

>   -- The second group are the players who pretty much just play
>   themselves.  Every game they play, every character they play, is
>   always the same guy, and probably uses the same handle that they
>   post to message boards and newsgroups with.  They don't want
>   three distinct characters, they just want the one guy, with a
>   variety of skills to suit their one and only personality.  I
>   think the more casual a gamer is, the more likely they are to
>   fall into this group, prefering Single-Char Servers.

To tweak this slightly, the second group isn't necessarily always
just playing themselves.  That implies they're playing RL personas.
I'd say, "they invest heavily in a character" which means it could
be a role-player or Bob who calls his character Bob and talks about
his real life.

> Mixing the two mostly sucks for the second group.  Their one
> character has a third the total skills as the guy playing three
> characters.  Using a skill system: Their one character isn't as
> good at Anything as the guy playing three characters.  The MCS
> players enjoy more "diversity" as individual players, but at the
> expense of seeing as much diversity in-game: Because their
> min-maxing boils your skill system down to what is essentially a
> class-system.

BINGO.  Design flaws certainly account for some of the problem.

> Allowing multi-char doesn't disallow single-char, but it
> definitely penalizes the single-char playstyle, for the reasons
> listed above.

Right.  Multi-char style harms single-char style.

> Raph listed lots of the developer/business-side arguments for one
> vs. the other, but the players don't care about that stuff so
> much, I don't think.  I think as far as the players are concerned,
> they just flat prefer one playstyle or the other: they're arguing
> the benefits of their playstyle over the other (which mostly boil
> down to "I prefer my playstyle, thx").

As a designer, can you say "your playstyle isn't valid on my game?"
I think you HAVE to, or the playstyles will always follow the same
GOP (i.e., multi-char) path every time.

Mike "Talien" Tresca
RetroMUD Administrator
http://www.retromud.org/talien



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