[MUD-Dev2] [Design] [REPOST] Food in MMOs

[Jacob Cord]

I'm going to de-lurk and chat about some of these ideas, because they really
revolve around some of my own...

On 5/14/07, Lachek Butalek <lachek at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> solutions to alleviate the problems of not instancing. One example is
> the roaming "boss" monsters - no more camping a single spot for the boss
> monster to spawn, because the spawn point is random and the boss roams
> around the world when present in the game. This is a step in the right
> direction, IMHO.


 Why are boss monsters "spawned" at all? Why can't they be little monsters
that were in an environment that supported their unmolested growth and just
grew to the point of being a "boss"? How about the ability for monsters to
interbreed and produce offspring, inheriting traits from their parents. This
would create a virtually limitless procession of new and interesting
monsters for players to hunt.

My solution to this problem, although it is still vaporware right now, is to
allow a growing monster to "dig" its own dungeon. Other monsters that are
out wandering and have nothing better to do will move in if it's not full.
Once a cave/dungeon/village/etc grows to a certain population, the "boss" is
upgraded, the dungeon goes down another level, more random rooms are
created, etc. When a dungeon is cleared out by a player, it is left empty,
or perhaps they can use explosives to destroy the entrance.

The problem with realism is "unreasonable realism"--how far do you take it?
If my monsters are not spawned, but breed, grow old, and die, how do I
control the population? Their food source is a good start, but how do you
control that so they don't overrun the map? They have predators that eat
them for food? The further you go down the realism path, the more
interesting your environment becomes, but you just can't do everything. I've
already mostly departed from writing a MUD to just designing a neat virtual
world.

newbie dungeon. The problem with MMO/MUDs is that there are literally
> thousands of these Nietzchean Ubermensch in the same province or even
> city, which is a major game balance and realism problem even before you
> start taking mudflation into account.


The real problem here, as I see it, is audience expectation. Players have
been trained on the power treadmill and can't believe that anything else
would ever be fun. Commercial MMOs are out to make money, that means bowing
down to the noisome masses that are 12-15 years old but make up the majority
of subscription holders. Don't quote me on that figure, though, I'm just
being cynical. If you get enough of your subscribers whining about permanent
death, or the inability to choose a specific profession, or how "nerfed"
your favorite class is, things get changed: loss of subscribers = loss of
revenue = loss of jobs.

So, there's my RFC. How can food (supply and production) be implemented
> best in an MMO/MUD, to encourage realism and prevent all the problems
> associated with inflated stats, while still providing a fun and playable
> game? What games currently implement food, in what ways, and how
> successful are they? Are there any major problems with the whole concept
> of food in an MMO/MUD?


Here we come back to unreasonable realism. How much time do you have? How
massive is your development staff?

People consume food, so based on population you can extrapolate how much
food you generally need for a town. You can make up your own figures for how
much food farms produce, or base them on area. Do you code weather patterns
and track how much and how often it rains, or do you just randomize the
results? Does the farmer have enough labor to harvest the crops? Do they get
distributed before they go bad? Who builds new farms when the population
grows? If a player waltzes on to a farm and kills the farmer and his help,
do the crops go unharvested? Does someone else take over? Do you (ugh!)
respawn the farmer?

Don't get me wrong, I love these ideas. I think this is where the innovation
will come from in game development, the problem is how far down the realism
path do you go? I'm all for adding food in to my MUD and am thinking about
this very problem--how much work do I want to do? Which factors do I
randomize and which ones do I make more real?

What I envision is this: a group of people form a village. A village has
some basic needs, farms and animal herds for food, houses and buildings to
live in. As a village grows in population, it has more needs, such as a
blacksmith, a miller, a tailor, etc. NPC characters, upon maturation, look
to their town for a specific need, and base their career decision on the
needs of the town. Not enough food? Be a farmer. No blacksmith? Fire up the
forge. If the old miller dies or is killed, a new one takes his place. If
all a town's needs are met, the NPC can leave for another town or go
adventuring. How neat would it be as a player to find a dungeon that was
partially cleared out, with some NPC inside killing off the bad guys? With
enough AI, you can be constantly surprised by your virtual world, and to me,
that's an attractive place to be.

Jacob