[MUD-Dev] Are gratification-based (online) societies doomed to being immatu re?

[Derek Licciardi]

From: Matt Mihaly
> On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Derek Licciardi wrote:

>> In my mind there has to be a way to empower the players to create
>> stronger societies such that the threshold for accepting loss is
>> raised high enough to support higher forms of cultural and
>> societal interaction.  We can't have every city war/trade
>> war/political war resulting in 50% of participants canceling
>> subscriptions because they lost.

> This doesn't happen though. We'd be out of business if it
> did. Granted, we're not subscription-based, but still, there's not
> much of the "I lost, I quit." phenomenon that I've noticed.

I am glad to hear that someone in the MUD community has seen this.
The only question I have is that if you take your experience and
scale it by a factor of 100 or 1000 subscribers, will it still hold
true.  The threads in the article seemed to not think so and I think
we have a law about the maturity of players as scale increases or
something like that.

>> If the threads assessment of players holds true over time, then
>> it is nearly impossible to build communities in game that thrive
>> from politics, tradewars, and other emotionally deeper PvP types.

> Those assessments are flat-out wrong. These are not new idea and
> Achaea is not revolutionary in focusing on these aspects of the
> player experience.  These sort of communities have existed in MUDs
> for over a decade. I'm not sure what the fuss is about.

I think the assessment becomes more valid with scale.  Perhaps you
are sitting on the ceiling of that scale with a fairly large
successful MUD.  Perhaps not.  I'd wonder if the experience would
hold true with scale.

Derek

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