[MUD-Dev] About Fencing (was: mass customisation)

[John Bertoglio]

From: "Christopher Allen" 

<cut to the chase: user criticism of the fencing system>

> The current limited number of maneuvers mean that the output is
> somewhat repetive. To quote one of our players, Martel: "The
> Marrach system isn't bad for the first dozen duels.  But after a
> thousand, its just the same text you've seen before.

If you do ANYTHING a thousand times, the text description of the
event will become repetitive. This is a given. Listen to any
description of any sporting event . . . after a thousand baseball
games you will not hear anything new. You would be lucky to hear
something new after the first ten. It is the nature of computer
simulations of any kind for users to burn through commentary. How
many times did you laugh at the "Why are you touching me!" line in
Warcraft before you turned the comments forever?

> You skim the text to see what's happening, or you recognize the
> length of the response and that tells you what it says. Combat
> tends to be either too terse (in other games) or too spammy
> (Marrach).  Finding a balance that is still interesting to read
> after a year would be very very hard."

No matter how sophisticated the system, at some level it still comes
down to "scissors, paper, rock". You will quickly drop the "paper
covers rock" prose to get to the meat of the bout. However, in the
beginning, it helps to expain that action and help you plot your
tactics. A simple switch to toggle on and off the verbose
descriptions should help with the problem above.

> We are working on some ideas on how to prune this exponential
> growth of outcomes somehow, but have not come up with a
> satisfactory answer that gives as good prose as our existing
> system.

Again, this is the nature of these kind of systems. Users will burn
novelty from the system faster than you can ever add it. One partial
solution is to throw a few low probability events into the mix. This
would add some spice especially if they were timed to only happen on
long cycle.  Add a few events keyed to skill level, class, location
(or whatever) and the system will seem much richer. (The first time
you cut the candles in half would be a real treat).

Another "solution" is to have so many things like fencing that
people move to a new activity before they exaaust all the potential
events.  Of course, this is still more work!

> As an alternative we are also in the process of rewriting our
> fencing system so that our players volunteers can build new prose
> for maneuvers -- at this point, they understand the fencing system
> better then we do!

This is an excellent solution. You move from writer to editor which
is more far more efficient in terms of content creation. It also
allows you to channel the much higher level of expertise and
commitment this special group of users bring to the enterprise.

> I'll enclose a brief log of a real Marrach duel, some documents
> written by our players on fencing, as well as some stuff on the
> culture of Code Duello in Marrach.

(Brief?) Very cool.

<but cut>

---
John A. Bertoglio
co-laboratory, Inc.
(503) 781-3563
jb at co-laboratory.com
www.co-laboratory.com






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