[MUD-Dev] Cans of Achievements and Quests

[Sean Kelly]

On 4 Sep 2002, Sasha Hart wrote:
> [Sean Kelly]
 
>> The combination of non-linearity in MUD quests combined with the
>> fact that in persistent worlds you don't want players to level as
>> quickly means that by necessity the players have to re-do quests
>> multiple times in order to advance to the point where they're
>> capable of doing the more difficult quests.  This means a lot of
>> busywork and (to me) boredom.
 
> Console RPGs have repetitive random encounter battles filling much
> the same role (e.g., giving the opportunity to reach level before
> moving onward and upward). LOTS of people like this format,
> though... anyone heard of "Final Fantasy"?

Yup.  And played most of them.  I enjoyed the stories (even if they
were all thematically the same) and the exploration.  The repetitive
fighting was the low point for me.  But then I was never able to
finish any of the Wizardry games for the same reason.

>> I grant that coding such a system would likely be an incredible
>> amount of work, but that is the kind of persistent world I'd like
>> to see.

> I'm not so sure that it would be all THAT much work, but I'm also
> not so sure that the work is always the point.

True.
 
> There is a cost problem.  By default, it would also be an
> incredible amount of memory and disk space. That's important for a
> pay game, and CRUCIAL for a free game!  Finding out what data
> structures to use, and particularly what data can be cheated and
> how, is really necessary for resolving this to the extent
> possible.

Because nearly everything in the game would have to maintain state.
True.  But disk space is cheap.  The issue to me would be keeping
performance per server as high as possible so as to keep the player
population density high.

> There is a reliability problem.  Such a scheme can be a real pain
> to deal with in debugging. If the database goes insane, you have
> to roll back anyway (of course, this doesn't go over well). Every
> bug you write has a chance of screwing up the data and requiring
> the database to be healed, sometimes when such a thing is
> impossible.

I don't agree.  This was discussed a bit in the persistence thread.
Databases have a transaction model and enforce business rules (via
keys and triggers) for a reason - specifically to eliminate these
types of problems.  The worst a failure should cause is a timewarp.

> So each additional feature of this kind puts a little more
> pressure on the resilience of the code. Even if you can get the
> bugs licked really well, data have other ways of being corrupted -
> deliberate exploitation by users, bad memory and disks, etc...
> and EVERYONE hates game failures.

These are issues that have to be addressed with any game.  I don't
see any particular difference when the amount of world persistence
increases.
 
> There is a problem with the result.  The other class of problems I
> see is that people (here I mean designers more than anyone) don' t
> necessarily WANT that kind of persistence. It is desirable to you
> & I, but the consequences are not 100% milk and honey, even
> correctly and fully implemented. What does any given bit of
> persistence _do_ for us?

I agree completely.  I've tried to make clear in this thread that
this is what _I_ want.  I understand that the majority of players
either don't care or don't care enough to not play a game that
doesn't meet these expectations.  MMORPGs wouldn't be nearly so
popular if all players wanted the same thing out of persistent-world
games as I do.

> I think *small-scale* proofs of concept are going to be very
> useful in getting this kind of feature out of the head and into
> the games. I am not a genius, I'm not about to juggle all of these
> big problems at once before I even know how it will turn out.

I agree.  I'd likely play with the concepts on a small-scale MUD
level and go from there.  I'd hoped that Neverwinter Nights would
provide a decent platform to start with, but it turned out to be
more focused on LAN-gaming and less on persistent world support than
I had expected.  Perhaps NWN 2.0 will change all that :).
Otherwise, perhaps at some point I'll find the free time to
experiment with an engine from scratch.


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev