[MUD-Dev] Player malleable worlds (was Expected value and sta ndard deviation)

[Sean Kelly]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003 Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

> As John Buehler made a good argument on the tools front, and you
> may both be right. Having said that NWN did give easier tools, and
> I'm sad to say, but I've seen precious little player content
> that's any good.

Two excellent projects:

  http://city-of-doors.com/
  http://dladventures.com/

I agree that much of the NWN player-created content is quite poor,
but how many games out of all those that are released each year do
you consider worth buying?  And those are products developed by
professionals with a budget, QA, etc.  The plain fact of the matter
is that an average sampling of anything will be disappointing.

Also, as far as NWN is concerned, most of the excellent content is
never released for public consumption.  It's designed for private
campaigns or closed persistent-worlds.  Besides, even if 95% of the
PG content for a game is terrible... the players that created it may
like it.  And that remaining 5% will likely end up being used by a
massive number of players.

And as someone else said, a major issue is the tools players have
available.  The NWN toolset may be a step in the right direction,
but even BW designed the tools for their game for an unskilled
"average" player.  This may increase the likelihood that the average
player will be able to create something with the Toolset that
actually works, but it has also resulted in a toolset that is
terrible at doing complex stuff.  At lot of the skill in creating
high-end content for NWN involves finding creative workarounds for
limitations in the tools provided.


Sean
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