[MUD-Dev] XP as gift (was: Attractive Grouping)

[William Leader]

"Eli Stevens (WG.c)" <listsub at wickedgrey.com> wrote:
> John Buehler wrote:

> Edit: A Really nice description of a stone trading game

> When I said it was "an interesting, simple game," I meant to
> _think_ about, not play.  ;)

> To cut to the chase:

> Why not do this with XP?  Define a play session somehow (the
> duration of a group, etc.), and at the end of the play session
> have the character assign the XP they earned to other players.

> Edit: A Description of dividing up XP

> A player's level becomes derived from how much XP they have from
> other players.

Eli,

My first thought was that Hey thats brilliant! (and I am not just
being sarcastic.) Players already do this with loot and are loot and
XP all that different?

But then I thought about the "In-Crowd" phenominon when it comes to
dividing up the goods. When a person gets to abitrarily divide
things up, they will subconciously award friends higher than a
casual acquaintance. Players with large social networks would simply
level faster. (It would be nice to quanitfy how much faster but any
number would be a wild guess.) This isn't really a bad thing since
socializing is a valid aspect of gaming. My concern is controlling
it so that it doesn't degenerate into a all out popularity contest
that ends with popular but incompetent players controlling lots of
power. (you know, kinda like politics.) Then all the powerfull
generate the most XP, and hand it out to the others with power,
meanwhile the outsiders are left with litte reward for their
efforts. The outsiders will probably find a different game to go
play at this point.

To avoid this a ranking system could be used. At the end off the
session, each player ranks the other members of the group from
greatest contribution to least contribution. The points are tallied
and XP is divided based on those results. The idea being the lowest
rank person and the highest ranked person won't get wildly differnet
amounts.

The idea is that I won't be able to give all my XP to my buddy, and
he won't be able to give all of his to me. We can favor eachother,
but not to an exclusion of others.

>>From a playability standpoint I don't see how this can work because
I'm not sure players would stand for the interuption each time the
group membership changes (which seems to happen quite frequently at
times)

-Will
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