[MUD-Dev] Time debt

[Stephen McDonald]

Eva said:

> I'm not sure if I understood this correctly, but wouldn't a system
> like that encourage people not to play your game? Or spend their
> 'inactive' time offline, rather than socializing with others?
> Especially if the debt is cumulative and you penalize high debts,
> people will eventually stop logging on, at best you will end up
> with a lunch-break game.

That would be a danger, yes.  The trick would be to have content
which is interesting enough to keep players playing.  Another way to
mitigate this would be to have time debt diminish during playing
time as well as off-time.  But without interesting content, people
wouldn't be playing the game in the first place.  I'm not saying
that socializing will be the only activities open to people.
Questing, killing, and looting are all valid activities, which might
produce only small amounts of time debt.  Politics, subterfuge, and
espionage are other choices.

In one way, however, I think this can be an advantage as well.  Time
debt would enable casual players to enjoy the same high skills as
hard-core players.  They need not be left in the dust by players who
camp for 60 hours a week.

> Putting some tiresome tasks into offline time is a valid strategy,
> but building a system around offline time seems a bit far-fetched.

Certainly a game could implement time debt for only a few tasks.  In
fact, for experimental purposes, it might be best to start out
small, to see what issues to consider for balancing play.  It may
turn out to be an intractable problem.

Keeping people playing rather than training offline all the time is
hardly the only problem I can see with this model.  An even bigger
problem might be mules.  A player might create a couple crafter
mules, for instance, who practice their trades 24-7, except when
they are called in to produce something for the main character, or
to sell something.  I haven't seen any good solution for muling yet.

					-----steve m
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