[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] How big is enough?

[Zach Collins Siege]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Ian Hess <ianhess at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I've been hacking at a hobby project for some time,between playing and
> administrating various games.  Ingoing back to work on my db schema
> again, I've runinto questions about how big to make the world, andthe
> obvious fallout in performance and storage, as wellas population
> density.
>
> I've been thinking about a world size in terms of howlong it could take
> a determined character to walk fromone side to the other.  I was curious
> if there are othermetrics that might be better used to determine a
> maximumscale to plan for.

The relative amount of attractive content comes to mind. How spread
out are items and areas that players will have interest in? Towns or
other gathering places will be attractive because shops and
guildhouses tend to go there. Newbie zones will be attractive as long
as new players are coming in. Item-gathering opportunities (ore,
herbs, vegetables, whatever) will get people moving, depending on how
that's handled (plants can be picked once and have to respawn, veins
in a mine might deplete over time, et cetera).

-- 
Zach Collins (Siege)
"If code can be speech, then software can be art."