[MUD-Dev2] Meaningful Conseqences (was: Comparing Worlds)

[Eric Lee]

Christopher Lloyd wrote:
>
The only answer I can see is that as a successful roleplaying game where
there is such a big world to explore, it's specifically designed NOT to have
other people in, because they would mess it up. It's a truly consistant
world - When you die, you're dead. The trainers and shopkeepers aren't
uber-powerful NPCs who will rip off your own legs and beat you with them if
you try to attack them. They can be befriended, annoyed, robbed, killed and
then later avenged by their neighbours. Players love that level of
"realism", but it would be instantly lost if the shopkeepers respawned every
hours. Similarly, I'd soon tire of the game if the shopkeepers or quest
givers that I used always got killed by someone just when I needed them.
>

I had the same thought about Oblivion - "Man, this is a great world but I'm
lonely.  I wish this were an MMO!"  Of course the game as designed would be
broken as an MMO because it allows way too much permanent altering of the
environment.

Current (large-scale) MMOs can't allow permanent altering of the environment
because people would instantly and thoroughly trash the environment, ruining
it for everyone else.  Why is that?  Because people are jerks . . . um, I
mean, because there are no meaningful consequences for being anti-social, or
at least no meaningful consequences that scale to thousands of mainstream
players.  Some games have tried to solve that problem (Ultima Online comes
to mind) with only limited success.

The root problem is that it's easy to have meaningful consequences for a
_character_, but not so easy to have meaningful consequences for a _player_,
and of course it's ultimately the player who's behavior is the problem.
Players can log out whenever they choose and be invulnerable to retribution.
Without proof of identity, players can have multiple characters at once and
play both ends against the middle (e.g. collecting their own bounties).
Players can make new characters if they lose their old ones.

A related issue is limited content.  When there are only so many quests to
go around, you have people standing in line waiting for the evil boss to
spawn again so they can kill him and get the reward.  There's no sense of
causality anywhere.

Are we stuck with rubber-band worlds, where everything snaps back into place
on a regular basis, or are there ways to overcome the problems?  Or is that
the wrong question to ask?  Are players entirely happy with rubber-band
worlds and there's no need to fix it?

Eric