[MUD-Dev] MMO Simulations (was Re: MMO Communities)

[Peter Keeler]

Quoting Douglas Goodall <dgoodall at earthlink.net>:

> I'd be more worried about preventing the mobs players don't like
> from getting out of control. You can always trigger an Orc Horde
> with a GM command or something if all else fails. It's harder to
> prevent players from being forced to fight mobs they don't like
> when their population is based on... players not fighting them.

> There are several ways to determine which mobs are less
> popular. "Age," for instance. Believe it or not, every mob kept
> track of when it was spawned and could even die of old
> age... Except for very powerful mobs (which may be popular
> targets, but still live a long time), this would probably be a
> good way to determine popularity and spawns could favor the
> species with the lowest average age.

This gets back to the "you're solving the wrong problem" comment
from earlier.  Maybe mob population should be based on popularity,
not "players not fighting them".

Assuming you're not actually letting all the mobs run around all the
time regardless of the existence of players nearby (actually it
doesn't matter all that much) just keep track of what mobs players
are killing. Consider each kill as a "vote" for that kind of
mob. Have the system fade mobs that don't get many votes out over
time, and give the admin a list of the mobs that aren't popular.
The admin can decide (and probably write better tools than I'm
envisioning to help) whether the mobs aren't popular because the
players hate fighting them, because their areas of the world are
largely undiscovered, etc. Mobs in popular zones that nobody fights
(and are designed to be fought) probably ought to be put up for
redesign. Conversely, mobs that are very popular probably are so for
a reason: good ease to reward ratio, large population, near areas
where players are... in any case, knowing what mobs are and are not
getting killed would be very valuable for MUD admins, and at least
in stock codebases is something that largely has to be guessed at.

Do any existing games keep records like this and actually use them?

  Scion

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