[MUD-Dev] RE: Understanding Simulation

[Sasha Hart]

[Shren]

> In my ecology simulation thought experiments, a creature becomes
> tougher as it becomes more rare.

I think this is a great kind of solution to these problems (I would
compare it to the suggestion made earlier in the thread, to increase
the cost of finding prey - a different way of increasing the cost of
kills).

I have some half-baked comments on the implementation & results.  In
the below I'm assuming something like logistic growth.

  -- OK, so as population decreases, the cost of making a kill
  increases, and so we assume the number of kills 'bought' by
  players (e.g., the kill rate) decreases. Let's assume that the
  increase in difficulty and/or difficulty when there are no kills
  are set sufficiently high to prevent extinction entirely.  In this
  case, it seems that things will reach an equilibrium when players
  hit a difficulty that is just tolerable. I wonder whether this is
  acceptable (e.g., a system to ensure that everyone is fighting
  just barely tolerable monsters).

    Objection 1. I neglected population size and per-capita birth
    rate as parameters. As these increase (e.g., as the supply
    increases), the prices can get lower without hurting the
    populations' ability to regenerate at all. Thus the tolerability
    of the fighting is independent of Shren's idea, but birth rate
    is very important to this independence.

    Objection 2. Local fluctuations in supply (artificial or
    natural) are surely going to create fluctuations in the
    difficulty of the critters.

    Objection 3. Just barely worthwhile fighting isn't different
    from the status quo!!

    Objection 4. In some games it won't matter whether fighting is
    worthwhile, because there are other things to do.


  -- Also, it seems that those who kill the most will set the
  difficulty of the NPCs. That's not good if it is important that
  newbies get to kill things. Even if everyone had the same ability
  to kill, the people who are willing to pay more are going to
  contribute substantially to setting the price (difficulty). So we
  might worry about casual players getting lost.

    Objection 1. If the people increasing the difficulty of the NPCs
    were all hunters of roughly the same ability to kill, it would
    be fair for them to set the difficulty. It's a solution because
    all the people who need to be able to hunt the monsters
    regularly are given the tools to do so, while bureaucrats and
    thieves hunt at their own risk. That's fine if you're willing to
    embrace this lack of substantial differences between players in
    kill capacity. On the other hand, it's a big problem if you have
    powerful old-timers and weak newbies beating on the same
    populations. Very level-based games will probably need to keep
    the partition of prey populations by level (e.g., smurf village
    vs. Olympus).

    Objection 2. As casual players stop killing, the supply
    increases slightly and the price decreases. Where this price is
    absolutely seems, again, to depend on birth rate. Thus this
    concern doesn't really seem to hold water - you solve the
    problem for casual players by increasing the supply (e.g.,
    cranking birth rates per capita or overall).

  -- I think a lot of the interest in the system lies in the
  fluctuations of supply and demand. But this isn't compatible with
  McDonald's style consistency in product. Some designers want this,
  although I think it is not hard to make a case that variable
  payoffs can be very compelling, particularly if the fluctuations
  are mostly up above the limits of player toleration rather than
  below them.

  -- I wonder about the function of player kill rates
  vs. difficulty.  It would be nice if it was a clean line, but it
  probably isn't.  In some cases kill rates aren't going to be
  sensitive to difficulty until you run up against kill
  *possibility*. If you let players do better in groups then you are
  working against the maximum effective group size that can be
  mustered. It probably also depends on what kind of difficulty it
  is (I won't even pretend to know how).

In any case, this concern alone could completely destroy everything
I wrote above while assuming a simple supply-demand kind of
situation. Oh well ;)

> Extinction becomes extremely unlikely, however, a creature can
> easily be nudged into limited terrain.

The use of space here is very cool - in effect you are rewarding
players for spreading out. Lots of interesting side effects of this
- for example, if things are stable then people might develop little
hunting territories, but as populations decreased in some places
people would move on, possibly into others' territories...

This and PVP makes for some interesting fights over resources ;)

> Then again, however, I strive for dynamic ecology instead of
> realistic ecology.

The demand for "realistic" ecologies is what I perceive to be the
biggest reason for the difficulty in using ecologies in MUDs.

As if that weren't enough, I don't think that the typical idea of
"realistic" is really particularly realistic (as I argued earlier,
extinction is a great example - extinctions do occur in the real
world, but the real world has more than four species as well, so
each extinction, while sad, is for most purposes a drop in the
bucket).



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