[MUD-Dev] [bus][des] Anarchy Online and the free MMORPG...

[olag at ifi.uio.no]

Adam M:

> When you make the game free, and thousands of new players all
> arrive at once, how long do you think this takes? The oldbies get
> tired of answering after around, oh, 12 hours? 6? 3?

Oh, but that doesn't matter. Newbies are enthusiastic enough to help
each other, even if their theories are non-optimal. That is an
advantage for long-term gameplay too. (Oldbies move elsewhere if
they are bothered.)

The problem is basically when you don't have enough newbies and
oldbies are inaccessible.

> Which reminds me: the "newbie-only" starting area contains approx
> 6 quests, one of which is BROKEN and another claims (in story
> text) it will give you an item (although it doesn't appear in the
> system messages) but never does.

Which one? I thought I had done them all. Did you find the
nano-formulas in the starting-area btw? :-)

> You're misunderstanding the situation: it is not the gameworld
> that is killing the player, it's the GUI.

I understand what you say, but I am not convinced that the GUI
should prevent you from doing what you tell the GUI to do. You might
want to improve the targetting interface, but that is another issue.

If you cast a nuke on yourself... Ok, then you're dead. You should
be allowed to do it. And you should be allowed to make mistakes,
just like we do in the physical world (forgetting to put ammo in
your gun, pressing the wrong button etc).

The role of the interface is to be transparent... not to negotiate.

> It's less than 2 years old. It is ridiculous to think that a 2004
> harddrive is "not good enough" for this kind of task.

Yes, in theory. I agree.

But, if your harddrive is fragmented or has slow seek times for
other reasons then it will become an issue for any process that
requires scattered data that doesn't fit in memory... Accessing a
harddrive means a slow-down with a factor in the 1000s.

(I've been to parties with hundreds of people and get usable
framerates. I sometimes get hiccups, but only for a few
seconds. Maybe you'll get a better performance by defragmenting your
disk. Worth a try.)

Ola.
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