[MUD-Dev] ghost mode

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Mike Shaver [mailto:shaver at off.net]

> Single-player games also often allow you to scale down the
> difficulty so that you can decide how much challenge you want.  If
> I want to see the ending in Halo, or just get past something that
> I find to be beyond my skill -- and beyond the skill possible for
> me with the amount of time I'm willing to invest -- then I can set
> the difficulty to "Wimpy McCriesALot" and walk through.

> And I don't think that makes the game any less fun for my crazy
> friend who plays it on "Blindfolded While Juggling Knives", or
> lessens his sense of accomplishment or achievement or
> whatever. (And when we play in deathmatchen, we can tweak handicap
> so that it's equally challenging for both of us, and we have a
> good time.)

> Is a "how hard do I want this game to be?" knob really so
> repellent a concept in the MMO space?

Well if you have an advancement based MMO then yes, as it undermines
the comparisons that players attracted to that type of game
constantly indulge in.

I must confess that I'm surprised you use the easy modes, from what
I can gather from articles on the subject its very uncommon for a
player to have the humility to select anything less than 'standard
difficulty'. I know I'm too proud for a start! Of course in a single
player game, by far the best technique is to transparently moderate
the difficulty to suit the players ability without them even
noticing. There is a nice discussion of this in this months Game
Developer magazine discussing how it was implemented in 'Kung Fu
Chaos' on the xbox.

The most remarkable thing was that the play testers didn't even
realise it was happening, despite the fact that the number of times
you had to hit an enemy radically increased if you were doing well,
whilst conversely it decreased if you were low on lives.

Unless one removes level requirements from content, I can't see how
to apply the above to a multiplayer game without undermining other
players achievements - can anyone else?

Eqs latest expansion (which came out yesterday I believe, but I
stopped playing EQ a year ago), does in fact spawn instanced
dungones that are apparently identical to higher level versions, but
populates them with level appropriate monsters and rewards. I'm
tempted to buy it and re-activate my subscription to find out how it
works in practise, but I know that if I do, it will inhibit progress
on my own game ;)

Dan
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