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

[Douglas Goodall]

John Arras wrote:

> 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.

This is almost the opposite of real life... Societies with extra
food generally have extra food only because they've found a way to
keep the rats/bugs/mold out.

Also, giving out rats for extra food is a punishment for success (at
least if players are involved in the running of the town). I think
it would be better to punish players for... hm... how about Sloth?
Rats appear when players don't take steps to keep the town
clean. That's more realistic. Unfortunately, it's not any more
fun... At the worst, it would force players to do menial tasks
(picking up trash, etc), and I'm looking for a game that does
anything but that.

Once upon a time, I tried to do something similar to your "society"
idea, though there was a single controller for the whole world. I
even researched and coded biomathematical models for various monster
populations... Mobs migrated, reproduced, fought each other, took
over dungeons, had population explosions (and then invasions),
etc. The world was more "realistic," but that didn't make it
fun. Instead of spending 2 hours looking for a team, I spent 2 hours
looking for mobs near my level. In the end, it didn't matter if I
was playing rat-catcher because of a scripted quest or because of a
"dynamic" world. I was still playing rat-catcher. Or bounty
hunter. Or delivery man.

On the other hand, maybe I just didn't do it right. I think dynamic
content has alot of potential. I also think no one's figured out a
good way to include it. Anarchy Online's mission terminals are the
best effort so far, perhaps because they give the players
*control*. With tighter controls, my system might have been a good
fit for a game like City of Heroes... Even though you just bash
villains, it doesn't have quite the ennui of rat-bashing. Changing
villain populations might make players feel as if they're making a
difference. But it would also make "kill x villains of type y"
quests more annoying when you can't predict where villains will be.
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