MMO Communities (was RE: [MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations:Theskyisfalling?)

[John Arras]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Byron Ellacott wrote:

> The trouble here is that Boffo's actions have had a somewhat
> permanent effect on the game world: Bubba's cellar no longer has a
> rat problem. Noone else can do this quest, because it is done.
> Perhaps the rats move to another shop, or perhaps they come back,
> but then you have to worry about the quest losing the meaning you
> gave it because it has no real impact.  (Sure, the guards have
> better swords after Boffo's work, but the rats moved to the
> bakery, and now they're poorly fed...)

> Until the creation of such quests is a sufficiently small amount
> of work that it's OK to have only one person able to consume that
> work, it's impractical to have the solving of a quest affect the
> game world.  If you have around two thousand players per shard,
> that means you'd need to put in two thousand times as much effort
> to get the same number of quests for each player as you would when
> quests can be repeated by others.

Or, what if we try to figure out why rats appear and have them
appear at reasonable times and places.

I were really going to implement this, I would use this "society"
idea that I've been working on for a while to keep the computation
down to a minimum. Societies are essentially manager objects like
kingdoms in RTSes that manage simpler NPCs. I think they're useful
because it would probably be too expensive to have smart individual
NPCs in a game where you need tens of thousands of those NPCs
existing at all times.

Societies keep stores of objects to use to do things. Every once in
a while, a society will update itself and check if it has too much
food. If it has too much food, it will generate some rats to place
in its village. It might have rat traps that cancel out rats, so
players should be able to sell rat traps to the village for a reward
if the village is low on rat traps.

The rats are spawned near places you would expect them: shops
selling or making food, warehouses, trash dumps, and even in homes.
The town guards should kill the rats occasionally, but not too often
since they're usually only a nuisance. The society should also do a
census of how many rats it has inside of its zone of control (every
once in a while), so when players come by, the village knows how
infested it is.

The players may talk to the villagers and see if they have any jobs
that need being done or interesting rumors. The villager may know
some information on its own, but more likely it will ask its society
for some information. The society then looks at what it knows. It
knows things about far away societies fighting wars, it knows about
supplies that it has that are low. It can tell players to go help
another village with a shortage, or ask players to get things to
alleviate a shortage here.  Or, it might look at its nuisance
creature count and notice a lot of rats and tell the players that
the rats are a problem.

Whether or not the players are told about the rat problem, they
should realize that rats are bad, and if they kill rats within a
village, they should get points in the society's faction
column. Players should get points for doing all kinds of things for
the village: fighting enemies, building buildings, getting raw
materials, making goods and so forth that the society can then store
away and use as it needs.  These points should accumulate, but decay
slowly so the players need to go find a village leader who will then
reward the players if they talk to it. The "killing rats" could be
stored as a string that tells the last good thing players did, so
when the players get their reward, the reason given for it can be
reasonable. You might even store more than one action.

These rats can also carry disease, so during the society update, the
society can have a small chance of having its population contract a
disease if there are a lot of rats. It would be different code for
how diseases spread, but it could lead to other opportunities for
players to make potions or some such thing for the village.

The main point is that the rats appear at reasonable times and
places, and when players interact with them reasonably by killing
them or by making rat traps to make the rats not appear, they get
rewarded.  And, leaving the rats alone can have serious consequences
for the village where they appeared since the village may lose all
of its food or suffer from disease. But, they aren't placed by hand,
there isn't any quest that has to get reset or anything like that.
They're just a part of the world and they will hopefully act and
appear in ways that are reasonable. The way I've described this
would give players most of the parts of a "rat quest" just not the
nice backstory and fancy language, but I think if the actions really
counted, then the players wouldn't mind. And, it would be really
cheap.

John
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