[MUD-Dev] No bots allowed

[Travis Casey]

Tuesday, March 12, 2002, 4:35:58 AM, Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

[getting back to my 'fun' email after a few weeks of having been too busy...]

> I've never understood that either, because none of these games
> have any real tactics in the straight melee combat, nor in the
> spell combat. Its simply a case of damage over time. The reason
> the current online games had the super powerful monsters designed
> for a whole group was due to polygon count as far as I can
> tell. Saying that humans are so superior that monster AI couldn't
> cope, whilst fashionable doesn't really cut much ice when you
> analyse it.

I don't think polygon count is the explanation, though -- you see
the same type of thing happen even in text-based games.  Here's two
things I think are contributing factors:

  1 - The desire to be a hero.  People would rather take on a single
  uber-monster than a pack of kobolds, even if the kobold pack is
  objectively harder to kill.  Why?  Because it's mythic.  Great
  heroes slay great monsters.

  2 - Initiative.  Not in the paper RPG sense of "who goes first",
  but in the sense of "who's in control."  In a traditional RPG
  scenario, the PCs are the active component -- they go to the
  monsters, the monsters don't come to them.  In many games,
  especially older text-based ones, monsters won't even give chase
  when you flee.  The upshot is that while the game designer chooses
  the place of the fight, the players choose the timing.  They can
  freely take time to go get the most powerful weapons, the best
  armor, and the best healing and magic they can.  The monsters, in
  contrast, generally have to handle the players with whatever the
  designer gave them.

--
Travis Casey
efindel at earthlink.net

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