[MUD-Dev] Reward system for social gaming?

[Matt Chatterley]

On 12/10/05, Arnau Josep Rossell=F3 Castell=F3 <arossello at atmsa.org> wrote:
> 08/10/2005 10:40 -0700, Christopher Allen wrote:

>> All the "skills" in the game can only be gained through
>> socializing. All the skills are ranked 0-10. You can't practice a
>> skill to get better, you must find someone better then yourself,
>> persuade them to teach you, and then spend considerable time with
>> them practicing.

> I'm curious but doesn't this lead to "join me in room X in 5 min,
> I'm going to the cinema so I'll leave the teaching on meanwhile"
> and then he and all the others in the room go afk together? If it
> doesn't happen is by mechanism or just the community isn't like
> that?

This is a specific issue which is currently sitting in the back of
my mind with the rest of my mud-in-progress design. I intend to use
a strongly skill based system, and to make teaching one of the ways
to increase a skill (other methods include practice e.g. using the
skill and studying for academic skills).

While practice isn't prone to this problem - the difficulty of tasks
and how well you suceed provides a modifier to determine if you
learn anything from a specific piece of doing, and if so, how
much.. both studying and teaching would be easied implemented in an
automated way via a simple set of commands.

Assuming the skill in question is not a combat skill (training here
will involve some form of practice, e.g. sparring), but something
more sedate such as 'bartering', I'm unsure how to make it a little
more involved than simply "teach X skill Y for N minutes".

Many skills fit into the practice model - cookery, weaponscraft,
woodwork, etc, many don't - languages, reading and writing,
map-making, etc.

Two options immediately jump up:

  1. Don't require any RL time to elapse. Teaching is instanteneous
  and restricted to a 'N teachers per day' or 'N learning from
  teachers per day' system. Further limits can be arranged by taking
  the skill difference between pupil and teacher into account, etc.

  2. Make the players involved DO something with a short RL time
  elapse.  I'm at a loss as to what 'something' might be, though -
  perhaps entering a series of semi-random commands - or completing
  a short puzzle to acquire the knowledge?

Thanks,

--

Matt Chatterley
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