[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Player pyramid

[Sporky McBeard]

"Mike Rozak" <Mike at mxac.com.au> wrote:

> A few days ago I thought of an interesting player model, which
> organizes players into a pyramid-like shape:

It seems to me that you are trying to group players by some
arbitrary criteria. I mean, you've got a pyramid. Now what? You can
certainly group players by their motivations, but I don't think
you'll find many answers from it. It also assumes that a player
stays in one particular level.  Personally, by your chart, I've been
at every level at least a dozen different times in the hundreds of
MMORPGs and MUDs I've played.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that what a player WANTS
from a game and what a player GETS from a game is based more on the
game itself than the player. Obviously, personal preference does
factor in, but we are creatures that adapt to our surroundings
rather well. In the right circumstances, we can seem to be
completely different persons.

Categorizing people's motives by their outward actions tends to be
misleading. You can make anybody into anything, and you'll
frequently find people who exist in several categories at the same
time. I don't think that being a 60% achiever/40% killer means
anything at all. We certainly can't use it to predict future
actions.

> The model exhibits a conflict amongst the players:

The conflict between players comes out of just about everything in a
game.  Teenagers who think L33t-speak is cool are just going to
upset us older folks who don't know what that new fangled "emo" crap
is or why you'd want it. People who want to play for 15 minutes
aren't going to get along with people who want to play for two
hours. People who want to be merchants won't like power
gamers. PvPers won't agree with PvEers, and neither of them will
like socializers.

You don't have to go out of your way to find conflict. We are all
different. We always have been and we always will be. If we can have
wars over something as silly as religion, we will certainly have
virtual wars (where there is less risk and danger) over something
even sillier.  Understanding a conflict won't stop it, and I'm not
convinced that we should stop it. It's our differences that make us
nifty.

> After all, if every player wants to be an intergalactic trader,
> there won't be anyone around to buy the goods. A world needs
> consumers (game-like players) to keep intergalatic traders happy.

See? This is what I'm talking about. You don't need to worry about
every player being an intergalactic trader, because players will
naturally segregate themselves into little
cliques/tribes/gangs/whatever. If killing monkeys becomes popular,
you'll see people starting to kill monkeys because they want to
belong, and you'll see people purposely not killing monkeys to not
belong, and you'll see people trying to save the monkeys because
they like monkeys better than people (and let's face it, who
doesn't?). The more people you have, the more possibilities you have
(even in something limited like CoH), and the more conflicts you'll
have to deal with.

But what you are talking about is economics. Traders need to make
money to be happy... Or do they? You see, there will be people who
are traders because they enjoy trading. Making it profitable will
just sweeten the deal, but it will also cause people who don't enjoy
being a trader to do it for that profit. Now you've fractured the
class into what are essentially power gamers (people who derive
their fun from exploiting a system for gain) and sucker gamers
(people who derive their fun from a particular activity, no matter
how broke it may be) - and now you've got conflict between the two
sides. How do you balance something like that, except to give the
power gamers an easier outlet to keep them away from these
particular suckers?

If you don't think this happens, go over to the WoW forums and check
out the difference between the under balanced class (warriors) and
the over balanced class (paladins). The strange thing is, power
gamers in one area may be suckers in another. For instance, if you
like crafting, but not fighting, you might pick the exploity combat
class but pick a sucker crafting class. When you aren't having fun,
you want to get the gain with the least amount of trouble. When you
are, there is no limit to the trouble you'll put up with.

- Sean Howard
www.squidi.net
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