[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Loot on demand (was: Will company sanctionedcheating hurt theMMOcommunity?)

[Tess Snider]

On 5/13/05, Koster, Raph <rkoster at soe.sony.com> wrote:

> In-game bulletin boards are pretty much standard issue on
> muds. But when we put them in UO (which we considered a required
> feature for launch, because of their ubiquity in muds) they were
> hugely underutilized. Granted, they weren't a very good
> implementation. And I believe EQ had in-game boards at launch as
> well. I know M59 did.

Yes, EQ did.  I remember, as an enchanter, the moment I learned my
first invisibility spell (at some ridiculously low level), I decided
I was going to journey all the way to the other side of the
continent.=20 (What can I say?  I'm an explorer.)  On my first
journey to Highpass Hold, I did a very thorough exploration of the
keep there, and lo and behold, there was an in-game bulletin board
there.  My server was young enough at the time, that only a few
people had ever found the bulletin board.  There were a tiny number
of posts, largely of the "i wuz here" carving-your-name-in-a-tree
variety.

Ultimately, I think that most graphical MOGs don't lend themselves
very well to serving large quantities of text.  The clients,
themselves, aren't well suited to displaying the amount of text that
typically piles up on a bulletin board, and the players aren't very
inclined to read massive quantities of text (even if they did so, in
a past life, on a text-based game).  Out-of-game forums don't tie up
precious game resources, they are typically displayed in an
application well-suited to displaying large quantities of text, and
they allow players to include or reference media which might not
otherwise be uploadable to the game (such as screenshots, art,
movies, or whatever).

Tess
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