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

[Douglas Goodall]

Damion Schubert wrote:

> 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.

There is a simple solution: increase the reward for other activities
(wandering around, quests, etc) until the additional risk is
perceived as worthwhile. DAoC tried this with its camp bonus. It
worked--I could get more XP by moving from camp to camp than by
sitting still. But few players adopted this strategy. The barrier
seemed to be convincing other players that it was true, rather than
getting them to do it once they tried it... Some newer games may
have succeeded. I did very little camping (in the traditional sense)
in CoH, EQ2, or WoW. There is probably more room for non-camping
solutions in niche markets (I did no "camping" in the usual sense in
Second Life, Underlight, Castle Marrach, etc).

> 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.

I see this as the real problem. Not so much rest/recharge (as you
can just make that faster, or allow it to continue while
travelling), but real-life issues with poor technical solutions. For
instance, team members have to go /afk, but no game lets you /follow
reliably. I don't have a simple solution for that.

> 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.

This also has several simple solutions. Instancing, random spawn
times/locations, distributing loot over multiple mobs, getting
widgets to purchase/craft loot instead of the loot itself, etc. None
of them are perfect, of course.
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