[MUD-Dev] Expected value and standard deviation.

[Scion Altera]

Thursday, August 28, 2003, 6:27:07 AM, Jeff Cole wrote:

> And that got me to thinking.  In MUDs/MMO* advancement entails
> (ridiculously?) increasing the expected value of a player's
> performance.  Gameplay would certainly be more complex if, like
> poker, advancement required one to balance expected value with
> standard deviation--if advancement involved more decreasing of
> standard deviation and less increasing of expected value.

This idea is very interesting to me. It seems like real-time
strategy games have this aspect the same way poker does. A novice
player will do more muddling around and experimenting, and make more
mistakes.  Over the course of several games, the combined "power" of
the novice's kingdom/army/nation at its height in each game will
vary substantially due to a wide variety of factors, from resource
availability to plain old mistakes. An expert player, on the other
hand, will have found a pattern and a strategy that works well for
the game. They will adjust this pattern to compensate for problems
such as low resources, and I would bet that if you adjusted the
combined "power" of the expert's nation at its height during several
games, the standard deviation of the adjusted powers would be lower
than that of the novice.

What I have described involves a lot of number shuffling to get the
statistics to work, and I'm coming up with it based on what tends to
happen to me when I go to LAN parties: my friends all get a game a
week or so before I do, so I play it for the first time the day of
the LAN. While they're systematically building cities and powerful
armies, I'm bumbling around figuring out what each of the buildings
and units does. Sometimes I end up doing well if it's a game I can
learn quickly, but other times I lose very quickly. The players that
have played the game for a week beforehand tend to have closer
matches, and RTS skill tends to be the deciding factor instead of
luck and how fast I can learn the interface. On games that I am
better at and have played longer, of course, I play much more
consistently well (or poorly). That is why I'm sold on the standard
deviation idea so far.

All this got me thinking about the major differences between RTS and
MUDs. Consider that a kingdom or nation in a typical RTS game is the
player's "character" just like a MUD. That character grows in
ability and power as the player manages the resources available to
her. The RTS player harvests lumber and mines gold to build archers
and swordsmen. The MUD player harvests monsters for gold, experience
and loot. The army increases the RTSer's total power, while the
gold, experience and loot do the same for the MUDder.

It seems to me that a lot of this depends on player knowledge and
skill, then. Given a balanced team on a fair map in the RTS game, an
experienced player has a high average and low standard deviation,
and will in all likelyhood beat the novice with a low average and
high standard deviation. Given balanced characters in a fair arena
on a MUD, the same rule applies: the experienced MUDder will use his
resources more effectively and beat the novice. My conclusion is
that the player brings the standard deviation in knowledge, raw
talent, and skill. The game brings the power level in comparison to
other players, and the ability to alter it. I think it's this way in
MUDs, RTSes, and poker.

                      --    scion at divineright.org    --
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