[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Spreadsheet about activity feedback

[Mike Rozak]

Virtual worlds are designed so that activities interconnect.

For example, if a player wishes to kill monsters, they must first
arrange a party (chat/socialization), buy weapons and healing
potions (trade), travel to the monster killing fields (travel), kill
the monsters, travel back, and then sell the loot (trade). While
travelling, the players may encounter other monsters (kill monsters)
or enemy players (kill PCs), or hire transport (trade).

Basically, it's all one big feedback loop. Doing activity X requires
activity Y to be done, which requires acitivty Z to be done, and
causes activity A to happen at some later point.

I wrote a simple spreadsheet that illustrates this feedback loop. In
the spreadsheet you can type in how many hours of travel, trade,
etc. a player spends to do 1 hour of combat. Likewise, for every
hour of trade they undertake, how much travel, combat, resource
gathering, etc. is required. Microsoft Excel then chugs away at all
these values and guestimates what percentage of time a user will
spend in combat vs. travel vs. chat, etc.

I put in some initial guestimates, but the interesting part is to
see what happens when the guestimates are changed. For example, the
"trade" activity often involves chatting with other players. If I
were to design a system where trade could be done without chat (such
as an anoymous auction system), then the overall usage of chat in
the VW halves. (Or at least that's what the model says.)

Thus, the spreadsheet allows you to deal with hypotheticals... If I
make weapons and armor decay faster, this increases the amount of
time required for trade or crafting, which in turn has other
effects, one of the the non-intuitive ones being a slight reduction
in the number of quests a player goes on.

You can download the spreadsheet from:

  http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/ActivityFeedback.xls

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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