[MUD-Dev2] Meaningful Conseqences

[Caliban Darklock]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 11:32 AM, Kiztent <kiztent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In EVE, the 'gateways' to 'end game content' are controlled by the
> current people (players) in charge of them.  There's a lot of politics
> and change surrounding that, but the upshot is, if you want to play in
> 0.0 (where the 'good' rewards are) you need to be in an alliance
> that's already in 0.0.  If not, you will be mercilessly PKed (and
> there's non-consensual PvP in all the 0.0 space) until you stop going
> there.

I find it perfectly rational to suggest that this is an advance.

Keep in mind that I personally do not want to play such a game, nor do
I have much interest in playing with the kind of people that actively
prefer such a game, so this isn't me being defensive about my own
preferences - it's more like playing devil's advocate.

If the world of Eve were real, this is precisely how it would work, isn't it?

WoW may be a stellar example of catering to the newbie, allowing any
player to succeed simply by not screwing up, and also making it rather
hard to screw up... but when you look at what really happened in such
a society (albeit without magic and fantastic creatures), it looked a
lot more like Eve.

There was an overwhelming dominance of abject poverty, and a tiny few
massively powerful groups who controlled poor people's lives. If you
wanted success, you made an alliance with one of those groups. You
sold your children to someone affiliated with a powerful group, and
the child gave distinguished service, and with both luck and skill
(and effective awareness and avoidance of treachery) - that child
could enjoy the drips and drabs of "the good life" that fell off the
plates of the massively powerful.

They would have liked a situation more like WoW, of course, where they
could BECOME the massively powerful... but in general, the massively
powerful did not like competition, and would actively try to prevent
people from joining their ranks. (The pie is only so big, after all -
and if you get a piece, it must come at someone else's expense. That
expense may be mine, and I'm not taking that chance.) So the Eve
scenario... where aspiration to the higher ranks is dangerous,
difficult, and generally doomed... is more historically accurate.

It is, of course, questionable whether this is what we want in a game.
But I believe that for many players - particularly those who end up in
those higher ranks, whether through skill or luck or what have you -
the answer is "yes." If we don't give them this kind of game, they'll
just try to turn other games into it.