[MUD-Dev] Re: Time limited worlds (was: Why Virtual Worlds areDesigned by Newbies)

[Mike Rozak]

Dana Baldwin wrote:

> Can players not create the quests/missions to drive other players
> experience?

In a VW where players are expected to spend approximately 1000
playing, yes. PvP MMORPGs obviously work.

In a VW that is more mass-market, and where players are expected to
spend approximately 100 hours playing, I don't think so. Here's why:

1000 hours is plenty of time to form in-game friends and guilds, and
(more importantly) in-game rivalries/enemies. 100 hours is enough
time for in-game friends, but perhaps not rivalies/enemies because
of log-on time overlaps:

MMORPG players play an average of 20 hours per week
(http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000758.php), which means
they're probably on 4 nights a week for 5 hours. This
frequency-of-attendence means that, for any other given player,
there's a fairly high chance the other player will also be logged on
sometime during the session. The chances go even higher over the
week. Plus, there will be clustering of player groups, like the
east-coast shift vs. the west coast shift. This means that players
are going to get to know one another, enough to make friends,
enemies, rivalries, alliances, etc. Added to the hundreds of hours
of in-world experience, and players can easily give one another
quests to take out an ememy's outpost, etc.

If a VW is only 100 hours of content, it will attract less-ardent
players. For example: I play games 5-10 hours a week. I'm spotty
about the times I play, and for how long. If I were playing a world
with 100-hours of content, the chances are that every time I logged
on there would be different players online. My interactions with
them would be casual meetings, like sitting next to people on an
airplane. The only way I'd meet the same person twice is to
specifically arrange a connection time. Friends will arrange to
meet. ENEMIES WILL NOT. If I had not arranged to meet up with
someone, I might join up with one or two others and play the game
with them, not against them.

Would a 100-hour PvP world even work? Players would never have time
to really make enemies, nor would large guilds form (although
smaller bands might). The emotional impact doesn't seem to be as
intense as the 1000-hour experience. If I were into PvP, I'd find
the 1000-hour experience much more compelling, perhaps so-much-so
that I'd make extra time.

Conversely, I don't see how a 1000-hour PvW world can work since
it's way too expensive to create that much content for the limited
market size. Consequently, either the content quality diminishes
(which it does), or automatic-content (the grind) is introduced. If
I had 1000-hours to play PvW games, I'd rather play 10 100-hour
games than 1 1000-hour game. I can do this now, except that all the
100-hour games are offline, so I can't play with my friends, nor can
I meet new people by playing the offline games.

> Instead of time limited worlds, can we shorten the goal to time
> limited content and then see if new worlds are really needed to
> fit the goal?  Whether that goal is to reduce the need to use
> mechanisms to extend static content (gating, leveling) or to have
> more evolutionary regular content for its own sake, increased
> player driven content could be used to fill the void.

In "time-limited content", how long/frequently are players expected
to be around? Are they supposed to be around the 20-hours a week a
MMORPG player is? If so, it won't be mass-market.

Player-driven content - I might agree with this, but in a different
sense. I suspect you're thinking of player-driven content, but in
your world and on your server. (MMORPGs and commercial text-MUDs
commonly use this model.) I think of player-driven content as the
ability for individual players to make up their own worlds, on their
own server. (Non-commercial text-MUDs.)

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au

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