[MUD-Dev] Text Muds vs Graphical Muds

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Dave Rickey wrote:
> From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>

>> You seem to be implying that it's player interactions that cause
>> the problems, in which case choosing a number of participants
>> doesn't seem appropriate as a measurement. 100 players stuck in a
>> single room is a lot different from 100 players spread out among
>> a million rooms.
 
> Yeah, and if they can kill each other both would be different in
> yet other ways.  I over-simplified, I'm trying to find a general
> set of rules that works, and that might be applicable to
> situations we've never seen (such as TSO's essentially one-world
> setup).  Interaction levels definitely have something to do with
> it, and absolute numbers do play a part, but so many influences
> act in the same ways at an observable level it's difficult to
> isolate just one and figure out how it is working.

>> I think a huge part of it comes down to the design of the game.
 
> But which part(s)?

Sorry to make such a useless post, but frankly, I don't know, though
I can throw out some ideas. For instance, how cleanly your in-game
communities are separated from other in-game communities. In the
existing market, you have community models ranging from DAoC's
extreme of community separation (can't even talk to 2/3 of the other
players in the game) to Achaea's tightly grouped communities that
nevertheless have heavy interaction with enemies of that community
(ie other communities), and you can go all the way down to the
DIKU/Everquest model in which you just kind of toss everybody into
one big community, and let them completely voluntarily organize
themselves (guild system), and maybe even down to some games where
there are no tools whatsoever for formally generating separate
in-game sub-communities.

I think you can also point to factors such as population density, or
the level of interaction allowed (going a little more fundamental
than just PK or non-PK), or, in a world like Achaea where players
are dependant on other players for some of their advancement (you
can't gain a class permanently in Achaea without joining a guild as
a novice, meeting the guild's requirements for advancement to
apprentice, and then meeting their requirements for advancement to
full member. Quit/get kicked out before then, and you lose the
class-related skills, which are the majority of your important
skills), one might look at situations where you reach a pouplation
limit that is very difficult to solve without increasing the width
of the pipeline by adding more guilds, for example (which is what we
have slowly down over time).

Anyway, in pure speculation, I'm

--matt

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