Player count threshholds (was: Re: [MUD-Dev] Text Muds vs Graphical Muds)

[Christopher Allen]

From: "Anderson, David" <david.anderson at tfp.com>

> Any other ideas why text muds seem to stop growing at some point?
> The servers aren't slowing down, it's not like the box can't
> handle another few hundred people.

"Dave Rickey" <daver at mythicentertainment.com> replied:

> Threshold problem.  Each new player who joins the server is one
> more player to interact with.  At around the 500-1000 mark
> (100-200 peak population), each player that joins the server does
> more to increase the number of bad interactions than good ones,
> and effectively "crowds" someone else off the server.  Past 2500
> (500 peak), this turns around, the bad effects of additional
> people have gotten as bad as they are going to and now each
> additional person is a net gain for interactions.  You can hit
> other thresholds, your world may have a "carrying capacity", and
> certain rulesets (especially "agressive" PK+ rules) can push that
> capacity down.  But I think the next social scaling problem would
> set in around 50,000 players per world, and I don't know where
> stability would set in again (which makes TSO especially
> interesting to me, since its population will be in one world for
> social purposes).  The next one down is around 250 population
> *total*, or 50 peak.

> Basicly, 500-750 players have many stable formations, as do
> 2500-15000+ (probably as high as 25K), but in between there are no
> stable social structures (this is handwaving, I don't know *why*
> there are no stable structures in those ranges, I've just observed
> it).  You need a *major* influx of population to carry you past
> the unstable population levels into the next stable regime.
> There's no reason you couldn't have a 2500+ player free MUD,
> except that drawing that many players requires promotional
> resources a free game isn't likely to have.  Social instability is
> interesting to observe, but usually not a lot of fun for the
> participants.

Wow, this is very interesting. I've heard of a number of other
thresholds or plateaus at smaller values, and a number of ideas
about causes of these thresholds, but this is the first time I've
heard this one or a threshold at this size.

In my two years commercial experience (Castle Marrach is almost 2
years old!)  and 5 games, we certainly have experienced some
thresholds.

One of the first is critical mass of players -- you need at least
50-80 active players before you have sufficient critical mass so
that the place doesn't often feel 'empty' for US customers. We have
figured out how to jumpstart that with our latest game because all
of our users can play all of our games, so when we opened the
'internal' beta we had critical mass from our own user base almost
immediately. There is another larger threshold, I'm not sure where
exactly, when there are sufficient people to attract from all
english speaking time zones so that the game is truly international.

Besides player thresholds, there are also staffing thresholds. You
need a critical mass of admins, builders, and coders. We had many
one or two person teams take our tools to develop games (the
original Skotos-Seven) but they were unable to sustain
development. I also think at >7-9 staff other issues come up (not
that different than when a small business grows.)

We have yet to cross the threshold where any single commercial game
is larger then 1000 users (though I've seen some free games with
slightly larger numbers, so maybe this threshold might be slighly
larger for a free game).  However, nothing in my experience can
refute the idea that there might be a threshold there as Dave
describes, and it might explain some things that are going on with
games that we already have released.

Dave, how did you come up with this hypothesis? Can you describe
some examples of this type of behavior in your personal experience?

Does anyone else have any evidence or anecdotes that support or
refute this hypothesis? Anyone familiar with the early history of
Simutronics, Kesmai, or other early commercial games?

-- Christopher Allen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..



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