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

[Threshold]

Ian Hess 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.
That is worth considering, but I think there are other (perhaps more 
important) issues when considering how big your world should be.

1) How many players do you think you might have? I ask this because 
player density is important. If players are too packed together, they 
are fighting over places to go and things to do. If player density is 
too sparse, they never run into each other and interact.

2) To what extnt is the focus of your game PvE, PvP, RP, etc. If it is 
all about PvE, a bigger world with more places to go, fight, etc. is 
better. If it is more about world PvP, you want the world not so huge, 
but with zones that are conducive to players fighting each other. If RP 
is the focus (yeah, stop laughing) then you want a small world so people 
are constantly crawling all over themselves.

3) How much content do you think you (or your team) can create? A huge 
world that is empty and dull is worse than a small world with the same 
amount of content but easier to reach it all. Big for the sake of big is 
not valuable.