[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Adam Martin]

From: "Mike Caruso" <caruso at treyarch.com>

> Personally not only do I hate quest spoilers being posted I also
> hate items, spells, armor, maps etc.. being posted.  The bad thing
> is if people keep doing all this spreading of information the
> companies that develop these games are going to come to rely on
> that as their form of 'documentation' for the game, even though
> they will say they do not endorse those sites at all.  Why should
> players have to guess at what certain attributes or pluses to
> skills actually benefit you when it should be the developer's job
> to tell you that stuff?

> I just wish there were a way to prevent all this information being
> posted about games, but there never will be.  And it really ruins
> all the games and you cannot just avoid the web sites because
> everyone else uses them which then makes it a competitive thing
> and you almost have to use the sites just to keep up with the
> other players.

Fair enough, except bear in mind that there *is* a way - look at
Blizzard.  They adopted the relatively simple tactic of "almost full
disclosure". By making 90% of the stats available, free, online, on
their *own* website, they effectively castrated 99% of the fan sites
that would have sprung up.  If you go looking for Diablo2 fansites,
it can be quite an arduous trek, for the simple reason that most
players don't bother - they have an "official" source for (nearly
all) the stats hosted on a high-bandwidth, reliable website.

On the few occassions when someone wants some of the remaining 10%
of information, it is often near-impossible to find - the amount of
traffic that these infrequent searches would generate for a fansite
is too little to keep them going. IME, the only sites I've found
either duplicate the Blizzard info word-for-word, adding a little
extra commentary (generally uninteresting and useless) or are
completely off the wall and funky - e.g.  one site devoted to
"Hacked characters PvP" :). They run a ladder of Open (i.e. stored
on people's home PC's) characters, with the top 10 listings filled
with players with 999999 hitpoints, etc. Apparently, the need to get
seriously tactical - when you can assume your opponent has maxed
*everything* including all skills/magic (but not items) - means the
game is still good fun, albeit in a very different way.

Adam M
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