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

[Damion Schubert]

Miroslav Silovic wrote:
> otis.viles at gmail.com wrote:

>> Some MUD codebases have something similar; as each spawned mob is
>> killed, a counter is kept and the XP value slowly drops to 0. My
>> experience has been that rather then encourage people to find new
>> places to grind in, they either whine for reboots (to reset the
>> counter to 0) or try to find bugs that will crash the server
>> (having the extra benefit of resetting rare item resets).

> Sounds like a trivially fixable issue: Make counters persistent
> and only decrease them slowly over time.

None of this changes the fact that players don't find wandering
around looking for random monsters to kill.  They prefer camping, as
it provides a predictable reward for a predictable amount of effort.
It also provides time to rest and recharge, as well as time to
chat. Players are quite efficient at optimizing their play
experience for results, even to the extent of draining out all of
the fun out of their own experience.

The most camped mobs in the game also will be the ones with
extremely rare loot on them.  I'd heartily encourage you to find
ways to distribute that loot that's camp-proof if you can, but you
should know that if players want a piece of loot and there isn't a
somewhat predictable and repeatable path to get that loot, they'll
go nuts.

That's not to say that there aren't solutions that aren't camps.
CoH's 'clear out a dungeon' paradigm is also one that resonates well
with players, probably moreso than camping.  However, I firmly
believe that you shouldn't disable camping as a technique unless you
ensure there is an activity that players enjoy that could take it's
place.

--d
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev