[MUD-Dev] Striving for originality

[Kwon Ekstrom]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
> On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Kwon Ekstrom wrote:
>> From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>

> People play basketball quite regularly too, and yet there's only
> one Jordan.

Yes, but there's alot of good basketball players too, and I don't
think Jordan would score many points standing on the court all by
himself against several of his peers.

> I doubt I could, in fact, beat Achaea's top combatants right
> now. I tend to be quite good at combat, so with some practice, who
> knows, but they spend their time mastering combat. I spend mine
> running the world. There's simply no way I or any of my admins
> (who all have their duties) could compete with players who have
> that much time to practice combat.

I never said that it had to be the admins, in a starting mud it
should be the admins, and I tend to be amung the best pkers on every
mud I've bothered the spend the time doing it.  What I did say was
that it should be done.  My personal experience after several years
of pvp is that if a newbie comes on and a player kills them, then
another player kills that player because of it... the newbie tends
to kill players who kill newbies when he gains some ability.  With
that in mind, over time the "majority" of your players will defend
newbies.  And only the most annoying of newbies end up being killed
(because the players who would normally help them are too busy
thanking the killer for shutting him up)

>> What I was suggesting is that the players themselves enforce the
>> rules.  If you login and start killing and looting all the newbie
>> pkers, and some players come up and kill and loot you because of
>> it, you learn not to kill and loot newbies (unless you can take
>> the people who'll come after you as a result).

> It is naive to assume the bullies don't have a large network of
> supporters and friends too. Furthermore, if I'm a leader of Ashtan

I didn't say that the bullies don't have their supporters, but I've
noticed something over years and years of playing experience.
Bullies may get friends, but generally they have less than helpful
players.  For example, on the last mud I played there was a player
who tended to cheat newbies using their own ignorance, as those
newbies started to learn the game they simply wouldn't do anything
with him.  He eventually left the game because he was being
constantly killed by large groups of the people he used to cheat and
nobody would group with him to kill mobs for more equipment.

Granted, few people go to this extreme, but everyone is a newbie at
one point or another.  Players who pick on newbies greatly limit the
number of potential future allies.  I've yet to see a system where
people who pick on newbies get more allies than people who help
newbies.

> still act just like organizations do in Achaea. Look at the
> US. Claims to be interested in human rights. Talks a lot about the

This isn't a topic I care to go on right now, but before you point a
finger at the US, take a look at China. Great Britain, France, the
governments of those countries that people die in (quite a bit of
which specifically forbid assistance from certain countries) and
then take a look at the amount of resources those countries put into
philantropy.  You'll notice that the US is at the top of those
countries donating money.

> serious problem of tens if not hundreds of millions of people
> being destroyed by AIDs, or the genocides that our media can't
> even be

We know what causes AID, and so do they, that's a personal
responsibility imho

> I'm not trying to make a political statement. I'm just pointing
> out that given how willing people are in the physical world to
> totally ignore the suffering of those outside their group, it's
> unrealistic to expect that people will do differently in a virtual
> world.

> You may find small MUDs where the players can keep the other
> players completely in line, but I'd argue that's because those
> MUDs are so small there really is only one community in the game
> (the player-group as a whole).

I don't think I'll be responding to any more of your posts on this
thread, for the most part I've noticed that you've tended towards
unrelated examples to prove a point.  It's sort of like using
statistics to prove that eating potatoes in the US causes cancer
(over 95% of people who have cancer eat potatoes).  You've gone from
"basketball" to "how countries don't wipe other countries noses".

I'd suggest sticking your arms out and seeing how small your box has
become (if you have enough room).

>From my experience, I've seen this work time and time again.  You've
gotta work at building it up.  I spend quite a bit of time working
with pkers (since as I've mentioned it is amung my primary
interests) and have seen alot of things work and not work.  On a
whole it really depends on a single word... respect.  Perhaps in a
mud with a few thousand simultaneous players it wouldn't work, but
I've seen it work on muds with medium/large playerbases.

-- Kwon J. Ekstrom

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