[MUD-Dev] Community? (Level Grind)

[Damion Schubert]

Sean Howard wrote:

> It's a matter of min-max. If you get more out of killing the same
> constantly respawning creature than exploring, especially in a
> competitive environment, you'll do what needs to be done.

> I've always thought there should be some sort of badge system for
> completing dungeon. You get a badge for each dungeon you complete,
> and badges for completing X number of dungeons, or all the
> dungeons in Very Large Area. These badges can be equipped, a few
> at a time, to give you bonuses and skills (give them gameplay
> reasons to collect). People will still min-max and find which
> dungeons give you the best badges and what the easiest order to go
> through them are, but they'll still spread out through the content
> rather than replaying the same one over and over again with no
> further benefits.

It's more than a matter of Min-Max.  It's about repeatability.  Some
tasks are more repeatable than others.  Often, it's the ornate
detail that makes something repeatable.  For example, Tetris is
infinitely repeatable - Myst is not.  More relevant to MMP
discussions, the combat in City of Heroes is highly repeatable fun,
but doing the same quests over and over again ultimately helped
drive me from the game.

In a perfect world, of course, we'd have a world where no experience
was repeated, but numerous problems prevent us from doing that,
including the high cost of content creation.  As such, it behooves
us to think about how to make combat itself as fun, engaging and
ultimately repeatable as possible (or to replace combat with another
repeatable activity, as Puzzle Pirates did handily).

I see a lot of people saying that we need to emulate more
complicated games in our MMPs: the Baldur's Gates, the Mysts, the
Prince of Persias.  These games are all great games, but they aren't
very repeatable.  The more intriguing lessons are the games that are
much more repeatable: Tetris.  Civilization.  Even solitaire.

--d
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