[MUD-Dev] [DGN] Designed Downtime (was RE: [MUD-Dev] Better Combat)

[Ryan Shwayder]

David Kennerly wrote:
> Michael Hartman wrote:

>> The overall point is that some game designed downtime
>> dramatically increased the amount of socialization going on in
>> the game.

> Sorry to start tracking mid-thread, yet this particular sentence
> piqued my curiosity.  Would you care to explain an example or two?
> And if I may ask, what is the metric, or informal methodology, of
> rating increased socialization?

I would venture to guess that there was no formal methodology behind
rating increased socialization in an online game. However,
observation proves this theory undenidably true: if players are
forced to have at least some downtime, they will socialize more
in-game. I've observed it first-hand in many games personally. The
games that included little to no downtime succeeded in nearly
alienating me from my group entirely, even if I spent hours with
them (because players tend to go for efficiency, and if there's no
forced downtime, the most efficient groups will have no
downtime). In MMOs that designed a bit of downtime into the game,
such as EverQuest, I found myself chatting quite frequently.

If you want some empirical evidence, take a look at socialization in
EverQuest versus Asheron's Call 2 (which is much less social despite
having some designed downtime in the game). If I didn't have to jet
off to work, I would try to come up with a better example ;-)

..: Ryan "Blackguard" Shwayder
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