[MUD-Dev] Playing catch-up with levels

[Jeff]

From: "Amanda Walker" <amanda at alfar.com>

> The difficulties of translating/mutating the d20/D+D mechanics to
> a populous, diverse, unmoderated setting like an MMOG are fairly
> well known and, if I might be so bold, somewhat obvious... at
> least, to anyone who "wasted" excessive portions of their youth
> playing the game (like me :-) ).

I don't think they are well knows or obvious at all (to play devil's
advocate).

In the case of the referrers vs the newbie, the referrers pull the
newbie into the game at which point there is a momentary realization
of level mismatch. In most cases this realization happens BEFORE
indoctrinating the newbie to the MMORPG environment.

What happens when the newbie realizes it. Does the newbie quit?
Sometimes yes, mostly not. Now we need to talk about the psychology
of friends. As I have no degree and only a smattering of passed
psychology classes, I will do my best to articulate my observations
in my typical dictating-my-reality stream-of-thought
manner. Friendships are about relationships. You have ppl with
slave-master relationships and ppl with mutual respect
relationships. There are many relationship archetypes.  Let's take
me and my friend Cheese as an example.

I don't know Cheese too well, but I've met him at a Cybercafe off
and on for years. I've been to a party at his house and drank and
gotten high with him. We're friends and casually interact. Cheese is
a football player who's still in high school and has a CUTE
girlfriend. I'm a straight 28 year old programmer who is very well
paid and who weighs less than him (I skinny). He has much better aim
in Counter-Strike and I'm much smarter than him. This means I do
better on public servers and he does better in scrims. We both play
games almost every day and are socially balanced equals with
different lifestyles who talk about games from time to time. I
started Lineage 2 which I had been talking up since Shadowbane came
out (heh). I got into the closed beta and then started on the open
beta. He decided he wanted to play because he saw that I was really
having fun (not to plug L2, but to better explain). When he started
in the OB, I was level 15. The level difference was not insane but
there was a difference. I had played in the CB so I also had more
experience. When Cheese joined L2 we started a student-sensei
relationship, where I tell him what to hunt and where to go, what
armor to wear...because unlike in life, there are very efficient
methods you can identify with experience. This is social
roleplaying. This is why I think it's still an RPG.

When you meet people in a really good leveling group, you tend to
assume a role. You state your role as the healer, the tank,
etc. What happens beyond that is where the ACTUAL social roleplaying
emerges. Are you the talky type? Do you talk about drugs, girls, and
computers (like I do)?  Do you complain (this experience/exp/game
sucks, etc) when you feel disappointed? Are you altruistic?
Etc. Anyone can identify a rather large number of different "types"
of players beyond the game mechanics of being a paladin or
archer. Again, this is the roleplaying. MMORPGs force you into
spending copious amounts of time communicating WITH OTHER PEOPLE in
the interest of efficiency in advancement, or the lure of just
giving up takes over (statistically). Perhaps the failure of MMORPGs
is not a crude time consuming metaphor, a lack of content, or even a
lack of people who like to roleplay, but that MMORPGs don't properly
motivate ppl to communicate ENOUGH. YMMV.
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