[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Michael Tresca]

Dave Rickey posted on Thursday, January 03, 2002 6:32 PM

>  1) We just opened our 3rd "Roleplay Server", the essential
>  difference is a prohibition on OOC names and public chat enforced
>  by CSR's.  Over 30k of our players play on "RP" designated
>  servers as their primary characters, and we opened the third
>  because the other two were consistently #1 and #2 on the server
>  count.  This does beg the question of how you define RP.

Yes it does.  So how do you define RP?

>  2) The (tens of?) thousands of 3+ year veterans on UO would seem
>  to refute that.  In fact, once you've held them for 3 months, you
>  usually keep them for 18 months or longer.

Is that UO?  Or is that a social group in place separate from UO
that merely is "staying" on that game.  How many UO players,
Everquest players, AC players left en masse to DAoC?  And if they
did leave, does that mean you should take credit for attracting that
social group?

Because if the next, "best thing" comes around, that social group
may move on.  In which case you weren't retaining them in the first
place.

>  3) The hundreds of guilds in the various games, not to mention
>  such oddities as the Reagent Cartels, would seem to be at odds.
>  Not to mention the many, *many* fan sites.

In the game?  Or outside of it?  In my experience, it's very easy to
assume that the incredibly diverse social groups that arise out of
MMORPGs are actually because the MMORPG generated it.  But when you
realize that many of said games don't actually have a support
structure to cultivate or even express that social group, it's basic
human dynamics.  People get together to identify themselves.  I
could put a million people in a chat room and get the same thing
after a couple of weeks.  That's not a cultivated social group.

>  4) Griefers are actually a rarity in DAoC.  Of all the things
>  people might complain about, very few would even put grief play
>  on their list.

Good.  I wouldn't give DAoC all the credit though.  It's entirely
possible the MMORPG population is maturing.  Of course, I'm not sure
what your measures of griefers are.

>  5) This presumes that you can only discourage griefing by
>  rewarding the opposite.  In fact, limiting their options and
>  kicking them out promptly works very well.  If you don't have a
>  significant population of griefers, and atavistic impulses are
>  put to constructive ends, grief play is a non-starter.

To elaborate, griefing has a few proponents that encourage it:

  1) anonymity

  2) a reward system not tied to social structure (i.e., killing
  something independent of any other character)

  3) a means of expressing a contrary behavior (violence to other
  players, cursing on channels, etc.)

  4) lack of accountability to a particular body (multiple accounts)

So how does DAoC discourage any of the above points?  It sounds like
by "limiting their options" your discouraging #3.  How?  Do you have
code that scans for inappropriate names and kicks them out?

I do agree that less griefers discourages less griefers.  That is, a
population that is not being dominated by griefers is hopefully less
likely to have them going forward.  But here's the caveat: there
must be another strong social group in place.

Did DAoC just start with great players, or did you cultivate them in
some way?

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


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