[MUD-Dev] Player malleable worlds (was expected value and standard deviation)

[Sean Kelly]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, Corpheous Andrakin wrote:

> Quite right, NWN is NOT a MMOG, most of the tools used to make the
> major MMOGs on the market are volatile, powerful and definitely
> not even close to being dumbed down and made ready for use by your
> average user.  Half-Life did it too, releasing code for modders.
> But neither of these games handles thousands of players at the
> same time in the same place on the same server.  To make such
> tools would take out a lot of time from things that players whine
> about most, like class balance, and bug fixes.  I can see the
> "balance" we'll get if we let the player do it :P

Actually, in many cases the players are better at determining class
balance than development teams, at least as far as the little
refinements are concerned.  Look at Diablo 2, for instance.
Blizzard has a reputation for playtesting their games to death and
yet within the first few weeks of release the player base had found
some strategies that seriously upset class balance.  As good as any
team is, I can almost gurantee that they can't test a product as
thoroughly as a group of dedicated powergamers.  Another exceppent
example of this is how the magic system in Asheron's Call was
reverse-engineered and an application written to eliminate all the
busywork that had been engineered into the system.

And if you're talking about games that aren't pay-for-play MMOGs
(like NWN) then who cares if the players screw up the class balance?
They're the ones hosting games.  If they want a skewed class balance
then let them have it.  Heck, there are some fictional worlds (if
we're talking RPGs) that *should* have a skewed class balance.
Perfectly-balanced games might make sense for shooters and other
standard PvP scenarios, but not necessarily when you figure in
things like plot and story.


Sean
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