[MUD-Dev] No bots allowed

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2002 14:20:00 +0800 
Alex Kay <yak at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> From: "J C Lawrence" <claw at kanga.nu>

> Now I rarely buy games, and when I do, it's most likely
> going to be a MMOG.

I've been playing a modicum of BZFLag of late.  Despite the near
total lack of communication facilities, I find the fact that the
other players are not NPCs absurdly critical, even more so for their
near utter silence.  It gets to the point that I can spot/name
players by their movement habits/patterns on the radar and thus
derive a sense of community from that...

> I recall the first thing that attracted me to EQ, besides the
> graphics, was the fact there were thousands of people from around
> the world playing at the same time, in the same 3D world.

Basic advertisement for parties:

  Everybody will be there!

Works for MUDs too.  People are inherently attractive.  

An empty bar is not attractive.  The same bar with a minor crowd of
people and the buzz of conversation is almost implicity attractive
(in comparison (well, asides from the fact that I don't like bars)).

> But at the moment I'm a little disillusioned, primarily with the
> lack of progress I feel is being made in furthering the level of
> interaction between the player and the environment, and the
> current, and apparently obligatory, levelling treadmill.

My largest single complaint about the commercial offerings is that
they provide very little if anything in the way of ability for
players to create original world content.  I enjoy creating fiddly
neat brutal bits (as previously discussed) and then watching players
assault them, than I do actually playing.

  Its the engineer in me.  The only valid purpose for a working item
  is to be taken apart, analysed and to then attempt to put it back
  together again in a some-way-improved fashion.

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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