[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Mike Rozak]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:50:39 -0600, "Michael Sellers"
<mike at onlinealchemy.com> said:
> I haven't played Vanguard, but from the write-ups I've
> seen about its "diplomacy" sub-game, it seems an awful
> lot like a combat(ive) approach to social interaction.
> Which really makes me wonder if this is how the dev
> team goes about getting dates with girls.

The basic game mechanics are like the tricks that NASA uses when sending
a satelite to saturn. They first shoot it tge opposite direction,
towards the sun, and use the sun's gravity to pick up speed, so that it
can get to saturn. The game mechanics work the same way: You sacrifice
point of type A to get more of type B, that eventually lets you get
points in C. Towers of Hanoi also comes to mind. Combine that with some
"Magic the gathering".

The dressing is not exactly diplomacy: More like rhetoric(?)... a lot
like some of the discussions that go on in MudDev, where point A is
made, then someone finds a logical flaw with point A, and someone finds
a logical flaw in the logical flaw.

However, IMHO, they didn't do a good enough job with dressing. It's not
integrated well enough.

And, as you point out, it's not exactly "social", but kind of an
abstracted verbal combat. It could be used, however, as "Part of a
balanced social breakfast".