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

[Damion Schubert]

On 5/15/07, Steve Bloo Daniels <bloo at kriegergames.com> wrote:
>
> I'll go one farther on your question: Why do the non-boss mobs keep
> spawning in the same place where they last bazillion guys got killed?
> Why don't they retreat? Call in reinforcements? Plot revenge?  The
> ecologies of all the major MMOs should now be in total collapse due to
> the extinction of key parts of the food chain (no rats, rabbits, snakes,
> spiders, etc.) to say nothing of the Orc/Goblin/Drudge Genocide, the
> clear cutting of the rain forests, the over-fishing of the lakes and
> rivers, the toxic pilings from large scale mining and smelting operations.

When thinking about world-sim type games, it's a common trap to think
about what would be cool as a designer, or an observer, or the first guy
in the world who sticks his toe in the water and sees the ripple.  It's
much more useful to think about what it's like for the 100th or 1000th
person that comes along.

Few people want to log into a world and find that the newbie forest has
been logged, the mountains strip-mined, all the low level critters they
need for quests or crafting goods hunted to extinction.

In UO, it was fun to be part of the first wave and get land for your
house. If you came along later, it was distinctly less fun.  It was like
walking around suburbia instead of a lush green forest, and since every
iota of placeable land had been eaten up, it just underscored that you
came late to the game.  The houses were a reminder of something you
never had, and they ended up being a time killer -- running by 10
identical houses to get from the moongate to the bank was essentially
time that was unavoidably wasted.

If you do want people to leave their mark on the world, I'd strongly
encourage ways to ensure that the early comers make the world a richer
place for those who came later -- this is, essentially, what Second Life
is trying to do. UO had this as well - if you happened to stumble across
a player house that someone had done something incredible with, such as
build a tavern or build a piano out of bolts of cloth, it was incredibly
rewarding, and quite possibly, captured perhaps the most magical part of
the MMO promise. Unfortunately, that's not the side of the experiment
that most players were likely to stumble upon.

--d