[MUD-Dev] Time Theory

[Marc Bowden]

My general guestocentric observations...

--On Tuesday, March 12, 2002 8:44 AM -0700 "David C.Z. Wacks"
<david at dreamzion.com> wrote:


> Some problems I see with mud time:

>   1. day/evening go by very quickly. no real advantage for
>   daytime/nocturnal creatures. e.g. drow/vampires that are harmed
>   by daylight

It's a balancing point for race selection. Sure it goes by fast,
which means you have to be *especially* careful not to let it sneak
up on you unexpectedly. These will, ergo, be the first people to buy
a portable (and expensive) timepiece.

  Rule three: Draining players' funds is a good thing, provided you
  allow them to choose to do it to themselves, and it's part of the
  world mechanic.

>   2. Hard for the player to understand or even care about timings/
>   months/ events/ etc

Guests never, ever want to do anything that's "hard". In a text MUD,
this is usually reading - a dichotomy I will never understand. In a
graphical MUD, it's inventory management. They must be MADE to care
about such things, in accordance with the policies you, as the
administration, have laid out at the beginning. See point 4 below.

>   3. no synchronization to real world events

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the only good thing
about slaving the game clock to the real clock is that you can force
your peak munchkin-invasion times into a certain spot on the
clock. And whose clock will you use?

The only - ONLY - videogame I ever saw do that successfully was
"Roommate Yuriko" for the Saturn (someone who actually plays dating
sims, catch me up if I have the name wrong), where you had to play
at certain times of day in order to catch the girl at home or doing
something specific. And this worked ONLY because of the nature of
the milleu and the audience.

On a MUD open to the world, the rules change and don't scale well at
all in this instance. First, if you're in a time zone where the
game's "day" or "night" is inconvenient to work or sleep (I hear
some gamers do that) you won't play. Second, and related, you've
immediately and accidentally narrowed your playerbase to people who
have no life during the "window of opportunity". You and the peerage
can guess as well as I can the problems they'll truck in.

>   4. time has no real meaning other than when shops open/close

...which will ascribe to it real meaning (it's suddenly tied to
survival value; e.g. Joe is poisoned in the middle of the night and
the potions shop doesn't open for longer than Joe can out-meditate
the poison damage). These things - time, terrain, lighting, fatiuge
- have no intrinsic meaning unless you give it one.

Caution is called for here so that the meanings of certain aspects
of the game world you've decided on do not become a barrier to
entry. Hunger and thirst in DIKUs - especially the early ones -
leaps to mind. It's no fun to play if you sign on during the game's
"night" and starve to death before the bakery opens. ;)

--
Marc Bowden - Soulsinger         Dreamshadow:The Legacy of the Three
  ryumo at merit.edu                                 206.246.120.2 3333
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