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

[Matt Mihaly]

On 29 Oct 2002, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:
> Brian Hook wrote:

> Actually, research on learning suggests that you learn more from
> another student that is close to your own level than a "master"
> student. Another student will do it with you and allow you to form
> questions, a master will do it for you. That ruins the
> experience. Being a good teacher is HARD. There are lots of other
> reasons for favoring newbie peerage over twink play though. I
> don't want to get into it all. It should be obvious to anyone with
> lots of MUD experience.

First, it's not a choice between "newbie peerage" vs "twink play"
(nice rhetoric though). Second, I've played MUDs nearly every day
for 11 years, and ran a successful one for the last 5 years. It's
not at all obvious to me.

>> You can still "interfere" to keep things balanced.  If you have a
>> game that pits city-states or realms against each other, you can
>> have power shifts in the struggle, but you can also put in safe
>> guards to prevent minority states from being crushed into rubble.
>> You don't need to reset the world just to "fix" these problems.
 
> Then the politics involve influencing the admins, whining and
> screaming on forums etc. That's the interaction between players,
> not characters ;). Besides such balancing tends to screw up the
> game play value, doesn't it? Making the game too tedious or too
> hard for the majority in order to curb the minority.

All meaningful interaction is between players pretending to be
someone else. It's still between the players.

You're also assuming the admins aren't also characters. Anyway,
Achaea's been going for 5 years without those problems ever raising
their ugly heads, and I don't see it ever being a problem. There's
just no way for one group to dominate the game, or rather, it'd be
such a monumental task of organization and coalition building that
it's not even viewed as a threat by us.
 
> Power... is a rather engulfing concept that stretch far beyond
> threadmills...

And if you use power in the broader senses, a level playing field is
impossible, so why bother discussing it? Everyone is going to have
different levels of power of persuasion for instance, and there's
nothing you can do about that aside from removing all interaction.
 
> Oh, we all compare ourselves to others and struggle for
> acceptance. All the time. I would even consider flirting to be
> "advancement of power"...

Give up now. Some people are more competent than others
 
> Well, all the other players move to that continent that is 100
> miles away, and resources are spent on that area rather than
> improving the newbie areas.

Well, obviously resources are spent on a new area, and given limited
resources, spending resources on anything means you're not spending
them on other things. Limited resources is part of life.

The idea that all the other players move to that continent is a bit
wacky though. We introduce new areas all the time, and players don't
move there. That doesn't even make sense from a human behavior
perspective. Most people do not go live on the frontier, away from
public services, familiarity, and relative safety.
 
>> Straw man.  People go back to their old _persistent_ games all
>> the time.  Look at UO, EQ, etc.  They go back to their old _fun_
>> games all the time.  If a game is about consuming content, then
>> they don't
 
> They do? I might consider dabbling with M59, because there are no
> other graphical PK MUDs, and perhaps for a couple of hours of
> remembrance, but that would be it.

He didn't say you do. He said people do, and they do. We get lots of
players who leave to go check out the latest graphical MUD. Many of
them come back a couple months later, because Achaea is their home.

--matt


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