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

[Russ Whiteman]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>

> I'm be interested in knowing your thoughts on how Simutronics
> dealt (apparently successfully given they're still around with a
> lot of customers) with this kind of explosive growth. It's one
> thing to create a graphical MUD where you are aiming for a ton of
> users, and entirely another to take a MUD (text in this case, but
> that's irrelevant really) that was designed for small number and
> ramp it up suddenly.

> I'd assume they added more world content to lower the player
> density, but do you remember what systems were added or modified
> to deal with the sudden increase? Which ones worked? Which ones
> didn't?  Any speculation as to why?

As to how they dealt with it, it often felt like we were running an
emergency room during a major urban military operation.  <g> I don't
think -anyone- expected the kind of growth we saw.  We hired new
staff as fast as we could get them trained...we implemented a
"GameHost" position when we realized just how much GM time was being
taken up with "How do I get my sword out of my backpack" type
issues...our primary task as GM's was to build new areas, and expand
the existing ones (in order to give the players a chance to spread
out a bit), with a strong secondary priority put on controlling the
ferals (which was the term used for griefers at that time and
place).  GemStone was fairly large when we first entered that period
(4-5000 rooms, I think), but over the next year, we tripled the
available space, while also extending the upper end of the supported
levels from 60-something to 90+.  We also added one new high-level
town about a year after we opened on AOL, and used that experiment
(until then, we only -had- one town) as the basis for building the
systems necessary to support such additions.  We added another
low-level town not too long after that, and several others since
then (we have 6-7 nowadays, I think, three of which are drop-zones
for new characters).  Building that high-level town was something of
a new experience, being that it was a huge project involving every
single staff member, whether they were coders, room-painters, or rp
event specialists (I think we numbered around 30 at that time).  We
were -all- drafted into the building of it...and it was probably the
most fun I've ever had.  I'd never worked with such a number of such
highly devoted and creative people.  <g> Oddly enough, when we
finally reached the point that -we- thought we had enough room for
the players, we found that 80% of them couldn't be bothered to move
from the overcrowded first town to someplace with a bit more elbow
room.  To this day, the newer towns aren't much more crowded than
the entire game was in the Genie-only days, while the Landing is
comparatively a major metropolis.

On the downside, we did suffer a pretty heavy backlash of burnout
among the staff...which was only kept as low as it was by the
presence of the Hosts.  After spending a few months dealing with the
newbies, I for one, was virtually worshipping those who'd
volunteered to filter out the questions that were really just a
complete lack of familiarity with text games, and let us deal with
the "real" problems and issues that affected the game.  That first
year and a half was one of constantly feeling like we were running
as fast as we could only to keep losing ground (particularly in
terms of overcrowding).  AOL's complete lack of support in terms of
controlling the griefers didn't help...we could only block a
screenname if it hadn't been deleted already (they wouldn't give us
any way to tie a screen name to an actual account).  The "clubs" of
griefers would, in some cases have deleted their entire set of
accounts and hacked new ones before we could even -try- to block the
first ones.  That AOL didn't seem to be overly concerned about the
fact that they had people playing on accounts that -they- couldn't
even find in their billing system, just boggled my mind.

Things could, no doubt, have been handled better, if anyone had
-ever- thought we'd see a 10-fold increase in population...but
overall, I think we came out of it in pretty good shape.

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