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

[Matt Mihaly]

On 26 Oct 2002, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:

> Simply expanding the existing world has 3 unfortunate side
> effects:
 
>   1. the world becomes too big for socializing

That makes all sorts of assumptions about game designs that aren't
warranted I think.

Achaea currently has 343 players online. There are over 10 million
distinct locations each player could be in. (~12000 custom rooms,
the rest generated) At the moment, 136 of those players are
clustered together in the top four occupied areas of the game, all
of which are player cities. Those cities generally have around
200-250 locations each. That's pretty good physical density,
considering that I'm willing to bet those players aren't using 50%
of their cities.

Aside from physical density, every organization in the game has
continent-wide communication channels, and there is also a
continent-wide shout command, an area-wide yell command,
continent-wide player-to-player tells, the market channel, and
player-to-player persistent messages. The issue isn't whether you
are going to be able to socialize, but how much socialization you
want.

My point is just the size of the world is only relevant to
socializing if the designers choose to make it so. We decided that
to a large extent, the more the better. They have the option to turn
off whatever they want, and some prefer to spend most of their time
in out-of-the-way places, but that's by choice.

>   2. there is no level playfield which puts off newbies

I thought you wanted a world, not a game? What does a level playing
field have to do with a world? It also may put them off, but
apparently not enough to prevent quite a few success stories in text
and graphical MUDs.
 
>   3. you are stuck with all the horrible design decisions of the
>   previous design

*sigh* Yes, that's quite true unfortunately.

--matt


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