[MUD-Dev] Re: MMO Communities

[Damion Schubert]

Randolf Richardson wrote:

> Actually, I think 40% is rather high and could create an unfair
> balance from the perspective of those who don't participate in
> team playing at all [no matter what their reason(s)] -- it almost
> seems like casual players who wish to increase their levels
> quickly still have to get involved in team playing to keep up, and
> that could be discouraging to such a player.

If you are allowing both solo and team play, the trick is that the
math needs to ensure its profitable to get together with a team even
counting the time necessary to find a group and travel to be with
them.  In standard RGPs and many MUDs, experience is split - kill a
monster, worth 100 experience, and a two-player team will get 50
each.  In Shadowbane, we go the opposite route.  That two-player
team would get 100 experience each, as would a three player team.
Larger teams this amount decreases somewhat, but the message is
learned from players early on: grouping is way more profitable than
soloing due to sheer killing speed, although soloing is pretty easy
to do for a majority of classes.  In our case, we probably have it
set too quickly.

The game still has a mechanic which rewards soloers and smaller
groups though.  While larger groups are optimal for experience gain,
it's more profitable in terms of treasure to kill monsters solo or
in a small group.

> I also wouldn't be suprised if casual players began building teams
> with the sole intention of gaining these experience points and
> then disbanding the team once they no longer needed it, thus the
> team system is sort of being circumvented and not being used for
> what was obviously intended -- true team playing between players
> who really want to participate in a game in this way (at least I'm
> assuming that's why someone would go to all the trouble of setting
> up a team- based environment).

Actually, we want both.  The reason we want grouping is not so
people can play with their friends - they can play with their
friends in any of our competitors.  What we want to do is Maximize
'Contact Points' - give players the most opportunities possible to
meet someone new who they might click with.  To this end, disposable
groups are good - they mean that players will encounter more other
players.

Players who play solo, while I'll gladly take their money, are more
likely to wash out of the game.  Quite simply, I'm then competing
with Baldur's Gate and Morrowind and all of the other games out
there that can focus all of their resources on making an extremely
tailored and deep single player experience.  It's hard to get them
to pay you ten dollars a month unless you can offer them something
they can't get offline for free.  Usually, that's the experience of
being and playing with other people.

To get people to stay in your MMP, you need people who like to play
your game with certain people.  Disposable groups give them the
opportunity to meet as many of these people as possible - it's sort
of an equivalent of 'browsing' other adventurers the way you might
browse Orkut.

All that being said, if your combat is described as a 'treadmill'
and your grouping is described as 'forced', then you're probably
designing a game with not enough carrots and too many sticks.

--d
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