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

[Russ Whiteman]

From: "Christopher Allen" <ChristopherA at skotos.com>
> "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.

> 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?

I started playing Simutronics (GemStone III) while they were only
available on GEnie, with a peak in-game population of 60-80, and I
started working for them a few weeks after they became available
through AOL, where population peaked at about 600, and on through
AOL's flat-rate, when the population ran around 2000 and
occasionally approached 2500.  So I've got observations from a
fairly wide range of sizes.  I could not say that I saw any
particular behavioral changes at the ranges stated above.  The
overall behavioral changes we saw seemed to be more related to the
explosive growth-rates that were caused by other factors (the
increased exposure we got when we first moved to AOL, and the same
again when AOL went flat-rate).  The flood of new arrivals simply
overwhelmed the existing culture, leading to something like anarchy.
It didn't help that we were chronicly undersized for both of those
periods, it was rather like the "overcrowded rat" experiments so
apochrophal during the 70's...

So, in short, my experience doesn't support the hypothesis, but I'm
not sure it can legitimately be used to refute it, either.

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