[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Dave Rickey]

From: Vincent Archer <archer at frmug.org>

> The same usual obnoxious behaviours appear (kill-stealing,
> chiefly), but the chief difference is that people, on the average,
> are more polite, and more helpful on these servers. You see less
> occurences of "grief healing" (an artefact of the DAoC XP system,
> in which somebody healing someone in a fight gets some share of
> the XP in the end), for instance.

I laughed until I cried when I first heard about this.  Don't get me
wrong, it's an issue, and soaks up inordinate amount of CSR time,
but when I realized that the worst thing our system allowed you to
do to someone was *heal* them without permission....

> I'm not sure this *attracted* people. From the population curves,
> the two existing servers were that popular from day 1, when the
> only thing people had to guide their choice was the "RP server"
> tag (and most probably didn't even see the RP ruleset at the
> time). The population since launch has remained about
> constant. That's where Dave could bring us some stats, but I don't
> think the RP servers have gained more than 5-10% population in the
> three months since launch.

Overall the server populations have been pretty much the same range
since shortly after launch.  We hit the 25K peak mark very early on,
when we had only 50,000 subscribers.  As subscriber/peak ratios
declined total subscriber numbers went up just a little faster,
we're now at weekend peaks of 30-35K.  The RP servers were
consistently in the top 5 (out of 15 until Nimue) all through that
process, frequently they were #1 and 2.  All three are now solidly
mid-list, so I'd say we've hit equilibrium.
 
> The newly launched "RP server", while not yet in the top 5, is
> already more popular than some of the established ones, so I guess
> there is an attraction to the kind of environment fostered by the
> (small) ruleset.

Some argue that Nimue attracted a lot of "re-rolling" by players who
wanted to start on a brand-new server, and had no particular
attraction to the RP tag.  It's hard to say, the only way to judge a
lot of these questions would be either comprehensive pollig (which
we are not set up to do yet) or extensive observation.  I do a lot
of observation on live servers, but I'm focused on playability and
balance issues, I tend to look for large player PvE concentrations
and big RvR battles.

--Dave

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