[MUD-Dev] Richard A. Bartle talks MUD Design

[GZ]

"Miroslav Silovic" <miro at puremagic.com> wrote:

> Majority of players hate camping, period. While instancing does
> prevent camping, it does so without solving the real problem:
> milking the same static spawn over and over.

> How about dynamic drops: the more you raid a single zone, the less
> likely will you find anything worthwhile (which has additional
> benefit of being realistic)?

> This gives player population a *strong* incentive to spread out in
> the world and explore. Now you only need to provide enough space
> for them to keep out of each other's way.

Camping is "easy". Players go the way of least resistance to power,
no hate or love involved.  You artificially force them to travel
around, it will take them about a week to come up the the
statistical probabilities of finding "the one ring" in a certain
place and start camping that place again.

You decrease the probability of finding something special in a
certain place based on the group or player, they will realize it and
it will be perceived as artificial attempt to make them travel
around (which stinks as you are not engaged in a rewarding activity
- i.e. watching yourself on a horse in DAoC (apart from social
chatting of course), not as an addition to gameplay.

Plus, most MMORPGs, with all the landmass and size they have, don't
really have a lot of locations you can juggle around. Finding the
"one ring" in the newbie grounds would be kind of pointless ...

I doubt there is a specific hate or love towards camping, what
people hate is standing in line camping a specific spot, and that is
where instanced content comes into play.

Keep in mind that in most MMORPGs, while the group is "camping" a
"spot", at least one player is "afk"most of the time. Forcing them
to move around very frequently and you generate some interesting
results about that...
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