[MUD-Dev] Web vs. Java client

[Matt Mihaly]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes wrote:

> Well, I'm hoping to avoid that kind of repetitive activity in my
> own MUD, as I hope everyone would these days.  If it's painful to
> play, it shouldn't be there, and fixing it in the client is the
> wrong way to go about it.  The server does a regular reset except
> for the players, and only includes a few random factors, so you
> could "farm" an area every day with a sufficiently advanced
> script, but challenges and rewards scale up rapidly enough that
> it's not profitable.

Good luck. =)

Anything employing consistent logic is scriptable, I maintain,
particularly in a text mud where the output is easily
parseable. It's just a matter of someone having the will to script
it.

> Of course, repetitive activity is the core of most of the MMORPGs,
> but they have to handle much larger player bases with less
> interesting stuff to do per capita.

Well, that's debateable really given that most text MMORPGs are
fundamentally loot n' level.

>> to using it to help themselves out in combat. (Our combat is
>> extremely fast and text-heavy. Most people cannot compete without
>> some triggers, though triggers can also be used against a
>> combatant if you know the combatant has a trigger to do something
>> that uses up a resource.)

> That's definitely in the "griefer" category to me.  If you run a
> bot to "help" you in combat in an FPS, you're a cheater; try that
> at a LAN center, and you'll be kicked out and banned for life, and
> kids are likely to beat each other up over it.  I can't see how
> it's any less cheating in a MUD; high-speed combat is less common,
> so it doesn't come up as much, is all.

Cheating is cheating only if we define it as cheating. If we don't,
it's not cheating, as we make the rules. In our games, it's simply
part of the game, same as scripting to achieve <whatever> effects is
part of Furcadia.  You can argue that that's good, or that that's
bad, but as long as a mud/mmorpg is successful I don't see that it
really matters whether someone thinks that's good or bad. I mean,
players love our combat system, and it drives the majority of our
revenue. It's pretty hard to argue with its appeal within the niche
that is text muds.

>> That's what Zmud's auto-mapper does though. It auto-maps
>> node-based MUDs.  Check out: http://www.achaea.com/maps.htm and
>> click on "Layout version of the heartland of the continent". I
>> believe those maps were made using Zmud's auto-mapper though I'm
>> not absolutely positive about it (a player mapped it).

> Looking at the zMUD page, they were probably reorganized and
> touched up with zMapper, especially the submaps.  Achaea looks
> like it's a fairly regular world, too.  With anything more
> convoluted, it becomes extremely hard to generate a consistent
> layout; I've done diagram generation before, and it's a hard
> problem.  Still, that's something to shoot for.

Oh, absolutely they reorganized and retouched the map. My point was
that it does a pretty darn decent fundamental map. Zmud isn't the
premiere text mud client because players don't want its features...

--matt
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