[MUD-Dev] Time Limited MUDs and Dead Horses Revived (was: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed by Newbies)

[Peter Keeler]

Quoting Mike Rozak <Mike at mxac.com.au>:

> The time limit would be on invidivual players, and it wouldn't
> really be a limit. Basically, when the player finished the
> 100-hours of content, they'd be told they can stick around and be
> bored, or leave and go try virtual world X by the same
> author/company. (It could be more drastic; the game could start
> scrolling the games credits, but this is a bit harsh and will
> cause some players to put off killing the evil overlord forever.)

This sounds like a fantastic argument for perm-death of
characters. You level your guy up a bunch, join a guild, make some
friends, maybe defeat the mega-evil overlord... but sooner or later
your character bites the dust and that's that. It could be you fall
in combat, die from a disease or a poison, get assassinated, or die
of old age. At that point, you're done. You could create a new
character, but you'd have to start from the beginning again.

I suspect that many players would be upset if their characters died
in "bad" ways and/or after short periods of time. However, I think
players who had characters that died from old age or in a
sufficiently epic battle after plenty of playtime, the players might
be able to see it as a fitting end to their character's life. After
that it's just the decision about whether or not to start over.

Realistically speaking, people tend to play these games out of
character. That means that the friendships created are between the
players, not the characters.  If a character died and the player
made a new one, he/she would simply have to get in touch with the
old character's guild to recieve out of character benefits. Of
course this factor should be taken into account in the game design
with one of the solutions we've already discussed in our numerous
perm-death threads (ie. the new character is some relative of the
old one).

I think the point of all this is that the fundamental paradigm of
the game could change: you're no longer trying to entertain someone
indefinitely. You just want to keep them around long enough to play
through the lives of n characters, at x hours per character. You
only need that much content. I believe this affects the business
plan of the company, the design of the game, and the structure of
the business in all sorts of interesting ways. It should also change
the expectations of the players right from the start, or it wouldn't
work.

  Scion

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