[MUD-Dev] Player Accounts on a Non-Commercial MUD

[lynx at lynx.purrsia.com]

On Wed, 1 May 2002, Damion Schubert wrote:

> Interesting assertion.  My experience has been quite the opposite:
> when you give players something interesting to do, the first thing
> they'll do is reverse engineer it so they can figure out how to
> most effectively and efficiently disassemble that system.  Call it
> cheating and rolebreaking, or call it strategy and tactics, but it
> is a fundamental part of MUDplayer nature.

'Gaming' the system, I think, is a good phrase that describes the
behavior.  But really, it shouldn't be unexpected, the mark of a
born engineer is the kid that takes something apart to see how it
ticks, and how many engineers do you think are in the core audience
for these games?

If I wanted people to focus on doing cool things in a combat system,
I'd hand out points for style. ...  And then I would have the good
grace not to look surprised when people started analyzing what gave
them the most style points in combat and began doing more of that
instead of just hacking the monsters down with ruthless efficiency.

It would make for an interesting choice, really: kill more monsters
in X amount of time, getting that much more loot, or get more XP
(and fame?) for killing individual monsters.
-- Conrad

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