[MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was: A rant against Vanguardreviews and rants)

[Sean Howard]

"Raph Koster" <rkoster at san.rr.com> wrote:

> The original design of dancing as implemented in SWG actually had quite
> significant consequence in gameplay. Players as they fought took damage
> not only in the usual ways, but also accrued "combat fatigue." This was
> healed via the entertainment system -- it was an attempt to drive
> players on a regular traffic cycle back to towns and back to social
> centers. Until the rise of bot entertainers, this seemed to be working
> OK, though combat players resented it to a degree.
>
> Once the Jedi system was revealed and started incentivizing people to
> macro professions they didn't like, that's when we started seeing tons
> of macro entertainers. Prior to that, you didn't do entertainment skills
> unless you actually wanted to.

I really don't want to be rude, but that's not true. The way the system
was designed, you needed real people to remove your battle fatigue, real
people to heal your wounds, and real people to buff your character. It
didn't take long for people to macro this behavior to reduce absurdly
extended (forced) down time. Likewise, to master a profession, you needed
apprentice points gained from teaching people skills. It also didn't take
long until the starports were filled with people paying people if they
allowed them to teach them a skill - 1k per skillpoint or something - just
because the natural chance for the apprentice system required specific
things from other players that were not common (how many people hung
around with an empty skill box to be taught?) such that people had to
bribe them for the opportunity. If you make gameplay out of socialization,
people WILL min-max socialization - just like people minmax sexual
relations with prostitutes.

Yes, I realize that some people liked these systems, but obviously, a
significant portion of the playerbase did not. And the way they were
designed, it was always cheaper, quicker, and easier to go with a bot than
a person, thus destroying the market and opportunities for those who
played to the system. Everybody blames the bots, but the bots were just an
extension of players not wanting arbitrary barriers preventing them from
doing what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do it - happens every
time. This time, unfortunately, it involved screwing over other players
because, frankly, other players were the fundamental problem to overcome.

However, I do find it interesting that you say it was there to encourage
people to return to towns. If I may ask, why then did you make it so that
the various functions only properly worked in exactly two buildings? A
town could be absolutely barren, but you walk into a cantina and find a
hundred people dancing in their underwear.

For the doctors, I'm sure the point was to centralize the services
provided, but with entertainers, it ended up far too centralized. By this
I mean that you had a single cantina with thirty or forty people dancing
around - it seems that with that kind of noise, it would be very, very
difficult for the entertainer class to play out in the manner that was
expected of them. It also concentrated people in the major cities only,
since people didn't want to search for a cantina. If their current city
didn't have one, they'd go to Theed where they knew absolutely there would
be people. So, in a way, that decision ended up making more ghost towns,
not less. And I have to ask, did you not consider that Entertainers would
be forever damned to only one room for their entire existence in the
world?

I know I'm being critical here, but I do deeply respect SWG as a flawed
masterpiece, and I'm extremely curious about the thought processes that
went into these ideas.

-- 
Sean Howard