[MUD-Dev2] [Design]Characters moving between worlds [was Personal virtual worlds]

[Mike Rozak]

Dave Scheffer wrote:

> Apologies that I missed the lead up to this post, but Mike do you have
> such a product?  The vision you're outlining is one I've had for almost
> two decades now, with the added concept that unlike today's Centralized
> MMOGs or CMMOGs the worlds are Decentralized (DMMOGs) and are built
> along a common framework where characters seamlessly move between worlds
> and the underlying attributes of their items take on the visual
> appearance of their immediate PW.

My philosophy and approach doesn't allow characters to move between worlds. 
There are at least three levels of "easy to move around worlds" that I've 
identified:

1) Players find it easy to move around worlds, but they have completely 
different characters in each world.

2) Players transfer an identity and appearance between worlds, but character 
attributes and objects don't move.

3) Characters transfer between worlds.

My general opinion about characters moving between wolds (3) is that you run 
into heaps of problems that ultimately require worlds to be "acredited", 
with so much cooperation between world authors that they might as well work 
on the same world through shared source code/data. The basic problems 
involve: balance of rewards, security of the character's data, consistency 
of the world's feel/design, and transferring non-standard items between 
worlds.

I'm not terribly interested in characters keeping the same appearance 
between worlds (2) since this ultimately devolves into players and authors 
only being allowed stock humans, and maybe some custom clothing per world.