[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Why do people like weather in MMORPGs?

[ceo]

Damion Schubert wrote:
> Wayne Witzke wrote:

>> It seems to me that there is a relatively simple solution to
>> this... Have the day/night cycle actually mimic the real world.
>> In the real world, half the world is light while the other half
>> is dark (well, sort of).  Why not do this for the virtual world?
>> Then, allow the player to choose their initial starting location
>> based on when they expect to be able to play (and their
>> preference for day/night gameplay).

> I just wanted to say that I think this is a really cool idea.

> ...

> Most designs I've been part of have gravitated towards a 2 hour
> cycle.  This was primarily so you could have cool night-only
> effects, without the player ever feeling he was totally hamstrung.

> WoW has a 24 hour cycle.  The net result is that I'm always
> playing at night in their world, which to be honest, is starting
> to get old.

Rather than constrain starting positions, which comes back to the
WoW problem (your gaming location will be chosen for gameplay
reasons, and you might end up spending most of your time there), you
could just have 24 servers all with different daylight offsets :)
but sharing the same data. Each time you login you can choose which
one to login to (defaulting to your last one). Only difference is
the daylight offset...

This would force a game to avoid the IMHO irritating and dumb "each
server is a complete standalone entity and never shares data with
other servers except authent", since it requires any
character/avatar to be able to play to any server, but otherwise
should be fairly trivial.

If you're going to run a sharded system with per-shard player
limits, you might as well make use of it to solve gameplay problems,
no? :)

Adam M
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