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

[Dave Rickey]

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

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

It's partially empirical, partially based on anthropological theory.
The empirical part is just from watching games of various sizes and
types, they seem to show definite growth spurts from one threshold
to the next, as if there was some invisible power curve at work, on
one side of the line they are sticky, gaining players much faster
than they are shedding them, from the other they are shedding faster
than they are gaining.  Generally, they tend to rise to a certain
point, and then stop growing for no explicable reason.  Sometimes
there does seem to be an explicable reason, if players are fully
occupying all available content, or even close to it, then it will
usually be pretty clear.

But even in the absence of such issues, I've seen these thresholds.
Pre-UO, this definitely seemed to be the case for the "old school"
online games, NWN, M59, LoK, SoY, MPBT, AW, etc.  There was a
minimum critical mass, having enough people in the world to make it
seem alive, and I don't think anyone would argue about that.  But
there seemed to be an upper limit as well, around 750 players (150
peak) all kinds of social and political issues leap to the
forefront.  They take all kinds of forms, and frequently are mixed
with other, game-specific topics, but two things made me think it
was some kind of threshold issue:

  1) The game-specific stuff was always there, but had not
  previously seemed as important.  It reminded me very much of that
  phase in personal relationships where things the other person has
  always done really start to bug the shit out of you.  The problem
  isn't the thing you're focusing on, it's just where an underlying
  problem is showing up.

  2) They always seemed to show up around the same population
  numbers, regardless of the game type.

For anthropological theory, there's a school of thought (presented
best in Guns, Germs and Steel) that states that the basic form of
government is a function of population.  If you have X amount of
people, you'll have a clan, Y is a tribe, Z is a kingdom, etc.
However, at many transitions you'll have social unrest (transitions
from tribes to kingdoms are accompanied by warfare as the chiefs
sort out who gets to be king).  In the real world, people keep on
living, keep on having kids, and barring unusual circumstances the
population just keeps rising and you transition into the next
regime.  It can work the other way, too; if a population that has
been operating at one level of government establishes a colony that
is too remote to be directly governed and lacks sufficient
population of its own, it will devolve to a lower level of
governance.

However, social unrest in an online game is usually accompanied by
people quitting, so barring outside influences you approach the
threshold and stall out.  Lately, I've been playing with a theory
where every player-to-player interaction can be categorized as
negative sum, zero-sum, and positive sum.  I've got types like
"commercial", "competitive", etc., but each of these types can have
an outcome in any of the three categories.  By theory, at certain
population levels zero and negative sum transactions are more
attractive on an individual basis, even though they are detrimental
to the society as a whole.  If you cross over into the next regime,
the overall balance shifts back towards positive sum interactions.
But you may never cross over under ordinary circumstances.  I've
gotten results that show stepped thresholds, although not where
observation would put them (IOW, the models say there are
thresholds, but either my hypothetical players are too rational, or
my weightings are wrong, or the theory is so much crap).

*Definitely* the rules and conditions of the particular game can
affect this.  For example, if it easily supports multiple
populations in the sweet spot through one means or another (say by
splitting them between multiple worlds).  But which rules, which
conditions, and for what reasons?  Is my "threshold" theory correct,
and if it is can a game be designed to smooth over those rough
spots?

--Dave


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev