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

[Matt Mihaly]

On Sun, 21 Jul 2002, Derek Licciardi wrote:
> From: Matt Mihaly

>> 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.

Well, it's really more like a factor of 10, because you're dealing
with things on the scope of an individual game world. (Achaea peaks
260 online right now, so that works out to roughly the daily peak on
graphical 'shards.') Granted, you have to ensure there's enough of
an audience to support multiple worlds.
 
>> 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.

I can't remember the names, but don't some of the larger Korean
graphical MUDs have group PvP wars? I don't think it's really been
tried to a significant extent in the large American market yet, but
it does work on a smaller scale. I guess from my point of view, the
"It won't work." perspective is based on fairly off-the-cuff
speculation, and I'd prefer to believe it can be scaled (and maybe
has. Can anyone talk knowledgeably about how the Korean games handle
this at a larger scale? Jake? David?) and someone will manage to
implement it at some point on a larger scale in the American market.

--matt

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