[MUD-Dev2] Meaningful Conseqences

[John Buehler]

Matt Owen writes:

> A lot of people (myself included) tend to be 'put off' if they've missed a significant portion of
> content. [snip]
> 
> Going back to the horse issue above, this could be easily resolved by bringing new servers online
> every 3 months or so (following a real life business plan of expansion based on player volumes). Each
> new server would start at GameYear #1, ie the first bit of the rolling content. New players would then
> be able to experience the world from the beginning and older players could re-experience or re-do
> parts they've missed.

If I had a say in the operation of the game, I would lobby hard against such a thing.  A major goal of the nomadic MMO structure is
to ensure that nobody knows what's coming.  When content is repeated, the game will have veterans and newbies, and the veterans will
know exactly where to go and what to do.  To my thinking, that's undesirable.

> It's even possible for the 'history' of each server to be unique in it's own way. Village #2 on Server
> #A was sacked by the XYA guild, but Village #2 on Server #B three months later, survived the attack
> and various minor resources were never released into the world.

This is my hope.  But remember that the game world content is throw-away; the gamemasters are staying only about a week ahead of the
players who are collectively churn through it.  The goal is that every game instance is unique, telling a story that is unique to
the gamemasters and their players.  There should be no expectation that "the horse villages should show up any day now".  Each group
of gamemasters would be inspired to come up with unique ways of using the content generation tools to tell a story that is their
own.

Certainly gamemasters with less skill would just repeat things that they had seen in other storylines.
 
> All things come to an end, so worlds that have had rolling content for say, 3 real-world years, suffer
> apocalyptic events that effectively re-roll the world, back at GameYear #1.

It is my intention that they come to an end, and that's it for that world; a month, a year, a decade.  The gamemasters declare that
they're going to start a new game, and players sign up for it.  That's the ethic of the nomadic MMO - experience it and move on.  I
can well imagine that a web site could be created to describe everything that happened in an old world, complete with maps,
timeline, description of events and so forth.  Somebody might even write a work of fiction loosely based on the antics of the
players and the gamemasters' NPCs.