[MUD-Dev2] [Off Topic] Have impatient players ruined 'The Ship'?

[William Leader]

A friend of mine recently purchased a copy of 'The Ship', and was 
showing me how the game is played. The basis of the game is that each 
player has a character and that all these characters are on a cruise 
ship together. When a round begins you character is given another 
character as their target. Likewise someone else is also targeting you. 
The goal is to eliminate your target and not get eliminated yourself 
during the round. Meanwhile your character has needs much like The Sims, 
sleep, eat, drink, wash, excrete, and so on. . Now since the game has 
all these elements like searching for tools, weapons, disguises, food. 
and the like its obvious that it was intended to be a slow paced kind of 
game. This is especially true considering you can't eliminate your 
target whenever you want. If the ships crew sees you with a weapon or 
you are caught on a security camera, then you will fail. You must wait 
until your target moves to a location where you can eliminate them 
without being caught. So you have to wait until they, for example, go to 
the bathroom since there are no cameras or staff in the bathroom.

Now here is the problem since this game is hosted much like a game of 
counter-strike, where players can host their own servers with their own 
options. Because of this players are able to adjust things like round 
time. It seems that the majority of the servers that have more than two 
or three players have all set the round time to something incredibly low 
like 2 or 3 minutes. Its hardly enough time to arm yourself, let alone 
find your prey and hope they move somewhere unsafe. As a result the game 
plays much more like counter-strike in that everything is rushed and 
very 'twitchy', instead of the slow placed sneaky-stalker game that it 
seems was envisioned. Basically as it is the short rounds are a much 
poorer experience in my opinion since you spend the first minute 
frantically running around to find a weapon, then the second half of the 
time running around to find your target, by which time you are out of 
breath and can't catch them. So if you run, then you will be too tired 
to kill your target, If you don't run, then you have no weapon, but can 
also easily outrun the player targeting you.

I would argue that impatient players have ruined game play on many of 
the servers. There are a couple of servers that have a longer round time 
but they are sparsely populated and this causes a problem as well. If 
there are only three players on a server you can simply kill the first 
player you see without taking the time to identify them. since there is 
a %50 chance that they are your target. Since there is no penalty for 
killing the wrong player (so long as you don't get caught) then even a 
game with longer round times can't be played as designed.

has anyone else seen/played this game and have any thoughts on how one 
could push the round time back to longer times on popular servers, 
(aside from the obvious patch the server so rounds can not be shorter 
than X). I don't want to punish players that want short round times, but 
I think players who want the longer round time as the game was designed 
should have the opportunity to play that way.