[MUD-Dev] Removing the almighty experience point...

[Michael Hartman]

Jason Messer wrote:

> Any time you do manage to create a thrilling and dangerous
> experience the reality of computers and computer networks threaten
> to destroy that experience at any moment.

I firmly believe it is no longer appropriate for game designers to
dumb down their game due to the possibility of lag. Does lag exist?
Of course. Do computer crashes happen? Of course. Does that mean you
should design for these extremely rare and infrequent problems? Not
if you want to make a good game.

A perfect example of this is a very old, very time honored concept
from the mud world known as "wimpy." Wimpy was basically a setting
each player could configure that would cause their character to
automatically flee from combat when their hit points reached a
certain % of max. If you had 100 hit points, and you set your wimpy
to 20, you would flee if you ever dropped below 20 hit points.

The main reason wimpy was created was so people's characters would
not get killed just because they lagged. 5-10 years ago that was a
major concern. University networks were frequently overtaxed and
there were not multiple commercial backbones with tremendous amounts
of bandwidth.

The problem with wimpy is that it makes it hard to have challenging
encounters. MUD developers would have to either design foes that hit
so hard they'd kill you before wimpy kicked in, or they would code
special encounters where the foe blocked all exists. Basically what
you had was developers making encounters that nullified the effects
of wimpy, because at its core wimpy is a very bad game design idea
(though it probably was necessary at the time to avoid dying every
30 minutes).

The lesson learned from wimpy seems to apply here as well. Sure,
some customers have crappy net connections. Well, that's a
shame... for them.  It is only the very rare person who has such a
poor net connection that they will constantly have lag problems. Any
such person really should not be playing online games.

There comes a time when you cannot let your game design suffer
because you are worried about very rare situations that affect a
minority of your players. That time is past.

--
Michael Hartman
President and CEO, Threshold Virtual Environments, Inc.
http://www.thresholdrpg.com
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