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

[Damion Schubert]

On 10/1/06, William Leader <leader at k2wrpg.org> wrote:
> 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.

It's very easy for a designer to say what's fun.  It's much harder for a
designer to let go of his design, and let the players tell him what's fun.
Then, focus on emphasizing how that gameplay has turned out.

The design you describe as the original strikes me as requiring a lot
of players to have to sit and wait after they were eliminated while other
players are sleeping, eating, drinking, etc.  If I'm correct about that,
this system sounds like it has a lot of built-in dead-time for the losers
that the server mods are trying to eliminate.

--d