[MUD-Dev] Morphable worlds, Reset based systems revisited

[Koster]

From: Colin Coghill
> On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 03:43:59PM -0600, brian hook wrote:
  
>> Hey, great, but that's not addressing my point -- my point is
>> that CounterStrike and BF1942 and Quake are examples of
>> multiplayer games where you don't have to provide new content all
>> the time in order to keep players interested.

> In that vein, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Genocide MUD

>   http://www.geno.org/
 
> If it's still the same Mud I used to play all those years ago
> (looks like it) then you have a world that resets many times a
> day. Zones get rearranged, items get redistributed, everyone loses
> all their gear and starts again. The only persistant thing is the
> number of kills you've made and games you've won.
 
> I think it has more in common with Quake or Unreal Tournament than
> it does with the more traditional hack-n-slash MUDs, but it's
> still rather fun and exciting.

All games based purely on skill do better when reset. Otherwise you
get "the rich get richer" going on. A reset allows a new scramble
for position, and makes it easier for an average player to get a
foothold. It also allows luck to play a greater role.

The earliest muds, as I understand it, had a fair amount of
characteristics like this. Richard can probably step in on this, but
didn't MUD1 have a mechanic about gathering items and returning them
to a central location? And there were PvP fights among those
gathering the items? And when all items were gathered, the item
locations reset? I know that many Abers at least followed a model
similar to this.

Even with systems like that, though, you still end up wanting
leagues as a compensatory mechanism for differing levels of skill,
something that a mud does poorly but that a smaller game like Quake
does very well, merely by instantiating multiple servers.

-Raph

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