[MUD-Dev] Winnable MMO

[Mike Shaver]

On Apr 03, szii at sziisoft.com wrote:

>> Well in Shadowbane you can not only defeat your enemy, but
>> destroy their cities and assets and force them into shame and
>> beggary in the meanest hovels of outlying areas called ruins. I
>> personally thought that was a good definition of winning. The
>> only thing we forgot was the lamentation of the women.
  
>> But I could be wrong.

> You can't touch the bank accounts/mules, though.  Any large guild
> will have considerable wealth amassed in these boxes and will be
> able to rebuild entire cities fairly quickly.

For varying values of "fairly quickly".  A newborn city-tree is
vulnerable to attack by normal (non-siege) weapons for 12 hours, and
rebuilding a high-rank vendor can take literally weeks.  Not because
it "should" take weeks to gather that money, but because they take
that long, wall-clock/calendar time, to "grow".  And during that
time, the guild no longer has access to high-level vendor-produced
items, trainers, etc., so they'll be that much easier to defeat when
raiding their farming/levelling groups, etc.  Getting your city
taken out will suck.  (Some guild on my server lost their tree after
only a few days of investment -- might have been a bug, or a really
bad tree-management error -- and they're not happy about it.)

Also, a defending guild can literally throw money at the problem of
building/wall damage, by buying "water buckets" and other forms of
architectural healing.  So a lot of that money is likely to be spent
saving the town.

One thing that's not clear in SB is why you would ever _not_ destroy
your own city when it was clear that you were going to lose.  If the
attacking guild doesn't yet control a tree, they'll gain control of
it, and some of the city assets.  The effects on the defending guild
are identical whether the attacker destroys the tree or they do it
themselves, so it seems like a no-brainer to scorch the earth.

> "Winning" implies a finite event/discrete point in time at which
> the measurement is taken..otherwise you're just "ahead" in the
> game.

For some guilds, "winning" will be driving other guilds to reroll on
other servers, because they keep getting their hindquarters handed
to them.  I agree that it's not a discrete win, like the end of the
9th inning or crossing the 4x400m finish line, but it's a clear sign
of competitive achievement, which is what I think most players want
from "winning" anyway.

Mike

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