[MUD-Dev2] Meaningful Conseqences

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 06 March 2010 06:36, Damion Schubert wrote:
>As a way of example, World War II Online currently has a 'reset button'
>mechanic. at which point it declares one side the winner and starts the
>whole thing over.  Classic MMO design theory would call this crazy
	The reason this is called crazy is all to do with marketing
theory, not design theory.
	From a marketing point of view, if you bring your game to an
end then that's just crazy - people are going to stop playing! That
means they'll stop paying! Augh! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!
	From an MMO design theory point of view (well, mine, anyway),
you do actually want people to bring your game to an end, at least at
the individual level, so that people can feel they've "won". This
takes the pressure off them, typically converting them from jaded,
weary achiever into relaxed, nothing-to-prove socialiser. It's the
"atonement with the father" step out of the Hero's Journey if you
want the lit crit reading of it.
	What this means is that people don't stop playing, they just
stop playing the same way. They'll hang around indefinitely. This is
the point that the marketing people don't seem to get.
	There is actually a business reason for not wanting to do this,
though, depending on your revenue model. If you have a subscription
model, then you get the best of both worlds: your long-term players
are paying you the same as everyone else, but they go several
weeks or month without playing at all or using resources. For a
micropayments or (in the old days) per-hour charge, it's still not bad -
they're not paying you but they're not costing you either. However,
it may be that you can get more money from them by keeping them
tied to the game for longer: they'll leave in frustration or
disenchantment eventually, but during that time you could have
got more money from them than if they're stayed 10 times as long
playing casually.

	The very first MUDs would reboot the entire game world once
they were "played out". This could be once a week or several times
a day, depending on usage. This is because they didn't have respawns.
You killed the goblin and the goblin stayed dead until the whole
virtual world was restarted (although player characters did
persist). This was a "sudden reset" style, which was eventually
superseded by the "rolling reset" style we see today, mainly because
players didn't like showing up and finding a world with all the
best loot gone and a 30-minute wait before it would be back
again. The technique does have some very useful features, though,
to do with no-going-back, show-stopping events: you can collapse
an entire dam, with dire consequences for all, because you know
it's going to be back how it was next reset. This functionality
in rolling reset worlds is handled through instances: the floor
falls out from beneath you in WoW's ToC, but come instance end
it's right back where it was ready for the next time.
	WW2O has this sudden reset approach; it's over a longer time
period than the early MUDs, which means it can have some respawning
within it, but it does definitely reboot. Interestingly, if you
have the right subject matter you can get the effect of a reboot
from player activity: EVE encourages the players to clear the
pieces off the board themselves, just not all at the same time
(well, not very often).

		Richard