[MUD-Dev2] Player Choice - How Much is Too Much?

[John Buehler]

Cruise writes:

> Perhaps the better question, since there appears to be a simple answer
> to my original one, is how do we prevent players from figuring out that
> their choices are being restricted when guiding them?
> 
> Using James' example - how do you make some players stay and defend an
> objective, without explicitly immob'ing a random % of the playerbase?
> To me it seems quite a simple behavioural training problem.

Yes, except that the one that needs to be trained is the designer.

The thing that designers need to understand is that if they present their
entertainment properly, it will attract players who want that entertainment.
As I mentioned in another post, if all players interested in PvP have
exactly one bit of entertainment to turn to, they will use it to their best
ability to get what they want out of it.  A game that promises everything to
everyone will get a wide distribution of players, with a wide set of
agendas.  Whatever they want to do, they will pursue to the best of the
game's abilities.  Designers look at the results and begin to ponder how
they can take a mishmash player base and bend their wills to the goals that
they had in the first place.

Create an experience in your game that players can look at, understand the
source of the entertainment and then choose to play or not.  Don't try to
change your players.
 
> Okay, one quote:
> Thus spake Sean Howard:
>  >That's why I think we should stop thinking of MMOGs as games. What
> they
>  >really seem to be are shared environments in which a game (or two or
>  >three) take place. For instance, in WoW, you could grind up your
> levels
>  >and do raids for uber-loot (that's one game), battle in the PvP areas
>  >(a second game), or just sit around and tell stories around the
>  >campfire (not a game at all).
> 
> I think this is definately a better view - you are not producing one
> "game", but a collection linked by a common theme. Perhaps this is why
> Puzzle Pirates works so well?

I believe that MMOs are best suited to being a collection of loosely-related
games.  If I were building an MMO, I'd build a theme park MMO where the
games are not related at all.  As I built experience with that, I'd start to
see how I could relate them in some way.

JB