[MUD-Dev] Mass customization in MM***s

[Paul Boyle]

From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at soe.sony.com>

> But are casual players who do not group (eg, who form no social
> ties) going to stick anyway?

EQ really bashed people over the heads with grouping.  Dragonrealms,
which many people invested years & money in, despite the much great
number of broken systems, had a better approach, in my opinion.

There, you could reasonably perform most of the activities of the
game by yourself, and all of them if you really tried hard.  Their
were just time savings involved in relying on other players.

Furthermore, in EQ, the players they tried to bring together all
fundamentally had the same goal and playstyle, that of the
achievement oriented monster killer.  Dragonrealms, on the other
hand, allowed combat characters to go off on their own if they
choose, but every so often, they would require the services of an
empath, a fundamentally non-combat character, or a thief, or cleric.
And each of those guilds had their own draw and reward that was in
some respect different from the other guilds.

The biggest disagreements I saw on Dragonrealms were those of guilds
who had the same role (combat, in the majority of cases) disagree on
which piece of the combat pie they had to share with other combat
guilds.

What's the point of this rambling then?  Not that you shouldn't
encourage player interaction.  But that a game is often more
successful when it encourages player interaction between different
types of players, rather than forcing player interaction to achieve
the same goal.

One thing in particularly I think a game should encourage is
socialization between social-type players, and players of all other
types, rather than trying to force achiever or explorer types to
socialize with each other.

Of course, Raph probably knows this, since I can see one of the
underlying dynamics to SWG is the role of the merchants/socials to
interface with crafters/achievers, surveyors/explorers, and
combat/achievers-killers.

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