[MUD-Dev] Time debt

[Aaron Switzer]

On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 10:24, Darkwolf wrote:
> Jason Lai wrote:

>> The way I'm planning on implementing time debt in my MUD -- in
>> order to discourage people from playing for a ridiculous number
>> of hours a day -- is to allow people to play with minimal penalty
>> as long as they aren't on for, say, 10 hours in a day. The
>> penalty will be having to drink lots of caffeine ;) After 10
>> hours, your character starts suffering harsher penalties
>> including suddenly falling asleep. In-game sleep and not being
>> logged in will both recover the time-debt; the former lets you
>> chat out-of-char.

> The problem I see with that is that it penalizes people with odd
> schedules.  If I can only play 3 nights a week, but on the days I
> can play 12h/day why should I be penalized beyond what someone who
> plays 8 hours per day 7 days a week is penalized when I'm playing
> 20 hours less? (I use the 3 day example above is because I worked
> 4d x 15h for close to a year and its a good example in this
> instance.)  The problem with artificial systems like this is that
> they always end up screwing over someone.  I don't understand why
> some people have a desire to punish the biggest fans of their game
> by limiting their play time.

I don't think that this punishes players with schedules like yours.
In fact I think it helps.  The main thing to remember is that the
idea is to push only the tedious, repetitive tasks offline.  So
there would still be a lot to do for long stretches of online time,
such as adventuring.

The reason why I believe that a system of this nature would actually
help players like you, is that you can get your character to do it's
training throughout your work time, so that you can concentrate on
the "fun" stuff when you have time to play.

Consider this scenario.  You're creating a blacksmith character.
During your work period you only log in for less than 10 minutes a
day.  Once in the morning and once in the evening, for roughly 5
minutes each time.  During those brief logins you setup a new
training task for your character.  In this example of a blacksmith,
that training could involve creating the building blocks for suits
of armor, like turning ingots into sheet metal.

When you login during your play period you now have a more capable
character, only having spent under an hour of time online during
your work period.  You can immediately start to take advantage of
those new skills, which in my mind is always the fun part (new ==
fun).

To take the example a step further, you could make the act of
building the final suit of armor a fun, but time consuming, process
by taking the Puzzle Pirate approach of turning it into a mini-game.
The better you do in the mini-game the better the quality of the
suit of armor. But I digress.

My gaming schedule is similar to yours in the fact that I work long
hours during the week and generally only have time to play during
the weekends.  If I could invest a small amount of time during the
week to advance my character and then be able to fully enjoy those
advancements when I play, I believe that my overall experience would
greatly improve.

One other thought I had was that this system would work nicely with
non-game client interfaces, such as a website, that would allow you
to manage your character's offline activities, from a place like
work, without having to load the graphical client.  So you could
keep your character training/advancing throughout the week without
ever having to actually enter the game.

- Aaron Switzer
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