[MUD-Dev] The changing nature of fun

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "Dread Quixadhal" <quixadhal at shadowlord.org>

> The mud I played on years ago made combat very difficult as the
> number of creatures on each side became more and more unbalanced.

Sounds realistic to me.

It's HARD to fight several people at once. Try it
sometime. Playgrounds are a good place; find one with about six kids
in it, offer to wrestle *all* of them at once, and see how long you
can stay standing.

That's small children playing. Now imagine it with armed adults who
want you dead.

> Actually, I treated it as a way to learn the map.  The experience
> loss was dumb (how do you learn negatively by dying?),

Because the guy who shows back up when everyone thought he was dead
*always* has amnesia. What, have you NEVER watched a soap opera? ;)

It's intended to simulate loss of the events leading up to your
demise.  Essentially, they figure you will be out earning XP and
suddenly get killed.  They take a stab in the dark of how many XP
you got recently, and if they're accurately estimating your rate of
advancement, they make a decent simulation of losing the previous
several minutes. Unfortunately, they never do a very good job at
estimating your rate of advancement.

> Also, I don't see how grouping would reduce movement cost

Try it. Go out for a walk until you get tired, and see how far you
go. Then go out for a walk with a friend, and see how far you go.

As a bit of anecdotal evidence, my wife constantly complained that
it was too far to walk the three hundred yards between the north and
south buildings on her college campus. One day, our car broke down
and we had to push it a mile and a half to a garage. While she would
have panted and whined for several minutes about going three hundred
yards by herself, she managed to quite easily set her back into a
two ton car for a few THOUSAND yards when she had company.

You can go a lot farther with a lot less effort when you have
company.

> PK's tend to be number crunchers, and for them most of your hard
> work isn't even noticed.

I see this as a good argument both for and against PK systems. If
you don't want PK, you can argue that they don't appreciate your
work on the content.  If you want PK, you can argue that they let
you build more areas with less effort because they don't care
anyway.


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