March 1999
- Storytelling vs simulation, Koster, Raph
- Storytelling vs simulation, Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
- Storytelling vs simulation, Mik Clarke
- Storytelling vs simulation, J C Lawrence
- Storytelling vs simulation, Matthew Mihaly
- Storytelling vs simulation, J C Lawrence
- Storytelling vs simulation, Matthew Mihaly
- Storytelling vs simulation, Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- OT: MUSH semantics (was: Influential muds) T. Alexander Popiel
- Storytelling and Gods (fairly long) Matthew Mihaly
- Storytelling and Gods (fairly long) Koster, Raph
- Storytelling and Gods (fairly long) Matthew Mihaly
- Generic event handling Adam Wiggins
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Ben Greear
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Matthew D. Fuller
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Nathan F Yospe
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Jason Spangler
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Oliver Jowett
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Oliver Jowett
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Petri Virkkula
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Chris Gray
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Petri Virkkula
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. J C Lawrence
- How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections, and some philosophy. Petri Virkkula
- ADMIN: Kanga.Nu outage and other news -- please read J C Lawrence
- Elder Games Martin C Sweitzer
- Elder Games Adam Wiggins
- Elder Games Koster, Raph
- Elder Games Matthew Mihaly
- Elder Games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Elder Games Martin C Sweitzer
- Elder Games Matthew Mihaly
- Elder Games Kylotan
- Elder Games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Elder Games Kylotan
- Elder Games Koster, Raph
- Elder Games B. Scott Boding
- Elder Games Wes Connell
- Elder Games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Elder Games Matthew D. Fuller
On Mon, Mar 15, 1999 at 08:11:15AM -0800, a little birdie told me
that B. Scott Boding remarked
>"Koster, Raph" wrote:
> >
> > This still, btw, only postpones the inevitable exhaustion of all the game's
> > mechanics.
> >
>
> I've seen situations where the only way to become certain classes is to reach a
> certain level and then abandon all exp and start at level 1 again. The new class
> had additional qualities though that made it more powerful.
One of my big beefs with this course is the power differentials it gives
you. To make your 'older' players go for it, you either have to make it
attractive to them (more power), or force them into it (which just isn't
going to fly). As you keep adding more tiers, you have to increase the
power at each tier. So you end up with this massive different between a
'level 1' who happens to be a '15th mort/gen/tier/whatever', and even a
'level 10' on their 1st time through, to the point that the 'old' player
can be linkdead, and the 'new' player can be an excellent tactician, and
the 'new' player will still get utterly slaughtered. Is that necessarily
bad? No, because the 'older' player has been there, put in the time, and
earned their power.
But the power differential hits its most striking against mobs. Anything
that's possible for that new player to kill will not even register on the
older player's radar. No matter how you balance it, the mobs will be
either impossible for the new players, or boring to the older. It'll be
either impossible for new players to level, or far too easy for older
players. You can work around this by saying, 'each gen, your xp to level
doubles', but it's kinda a hackish way of doing it. You can create
'seperate areas', so older players can't get to the same 'easier' areas
as new players, but then you blow inter-gen grouping, you blow 'helper'
tasks like corpse retrievals, etc etc.
The only clean way to avoid this that's easy to do is to keep the power
differentials so small as to be trivial, which won't work because then
people won't go for it. And to keep the game open ended, you have to
keep adding more and more, meaning that the people who play 18 hours a
day will soon be able to sit at level 1 and slaughter all the new level
2000's.
Of course, if you discard 'mobs', 'leveling', 'inter-player combat', etc,
none of this applies... mind you, then you're just running an IRC server.
Any time you allow players to open-endedly become more 'powerful', you
just end up with an infinite stream of game balance problems.
Different ways of dealing with open-endedness are, of course, myriad, and
an interesting topic of discourse in their own right ;) I'm working on
a scheme involving a VERY intricate skill tree/web for my present
project, with a lot of checks and balances.
---
Matthew Fuller | fullermd@over-yonder.net
Unix Systems Administrator | fullermd@futuresouth.com
Specializing in FreeBSD | http://www.over-yonder.net/
"If it doesn't work the first time, bring more ammo the second" - Elder Games B. Scott Boding
- Elder Games Michael Hohensee
- Elder Games Matthew Mihaly
- Elder Games Benjamin D. Wiechel
- Elder Games Chris Gray
- Elder Games Chris Gray
- Elder Games J C Lawrence
- Elder Games Nathan F Yospe
- Elder Games J C Lawrence
- Multiple clients (was How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections) Matthew D. Fuller
- Multiple clients (was How to support 1000+ simultaneous connections) Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Matthew D. Fuller
- Naming and Directories? Adam Wiggins
- Naming and Directories? Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Mik Clarke
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Nathan F Yospe
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Nathan F Yospe
- Naming and Directories? Mik Clarke
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Jon A. Lambert
- Naming and Directories? Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Naming and Directories? Ben Greear
- Naming and Directories? Mik Clarke
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? Jo Dillon
- Naming and Directories? J C Lawrence
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Mark Gritter
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? Chris Gray
- Naming and Directories? J C Lawrence
- Naming and Directories? Jo Dillon
- Naming and Directories? Jay Carlson
- Naming and Directories? Jon A. Lambert
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Naming and Directories? J C Lawrence
- Naming and Directories? Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Balancing a Mud Martin C Sweitzer
- Balancing a Mud Neerenberg, AaronX
- Balancing a Mud Mik Clarke
- Balancing a Mud Martin C Sweitzer
- Multiple clients (was How to support 1000+ simultaneous connec Marc Bowden
- ADMIN: Signature length J C Lawrence
- distributed, _untrusted_ servers Oliver Jowett
- OT ADMIN: Web links to MUD-Dev J C Lawrence
- (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
- (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
- (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
- (fwd) MUD Economies J C Lawrence
- Potential New Laws Benjamin D. Wiechel
- Mud Economies (A simple idea) Wes Connell
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) B. Scott Boding
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Mik Clarke
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Nicholas Lee
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) B. Scott Boding
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Nicholas Lee
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Martin Keegan
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Nicholas Lee
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Wes Connell
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Matthew Mihaly
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Nathan F Yospe
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Matthew Mihaly
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Nathan F Yospe
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Nathan F Yospe
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Brandon A Downey
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Adam Wiggins
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Martin C Sweitzer
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Quzah [softhome]
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Richard Woolcock
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Chris Gray
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) J C Lawrence
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Christopher Allen
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Matthew Mihaly
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) Chris Gray
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) J C Lawrence
- Mass Creation OLC Functions (idea from Elder Games) J C Lawrence
- On the topic of Mud AI Leif Hardison
- On the topic of Mud AI Nicholas Lee
- On the topic of Mud AI Andrew Norman
- Unicode, ascii and names Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Variable-sized structures in C (was: Naming and Directories) T. Alexander Popiel
- Variable-sized structures in C (was: Naming and Directories) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Renaming objects. John Hopson
- Renaming objects. David Bennett
- Variable-sized structures in C (was: Naming and Directories) Petri Virkkula
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Robert Green
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Matthew Mihaly
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Adam Wiggins
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Robert Green
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Matthew Mihaly
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Matthew Mihaly
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Christopher Allen
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Koster, Raph
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Chris Gray
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Benjamin D. Wiechel
- Self-organizing worlds (was: Elder Games) Mik Clarke
- online economy behavior (was: Self-organizing worlds) Chris Gray
- OT: just a little something... Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- (fwd) implications J C Lawrence
- Downtime J C Lawrence
- Getting Started with Mud Server Stormblade
- Getting Started with Mud Server Ross Nicoll
- Getting Started with Mud Server Jim Clark
- Getting Started with Mud Server Ben Greear
- Getting Started with Mud Server Chris Gray
- Getting Started with Mud Server Jo Dillon
- Getting Started with Mud Server Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Terms Ola Fosheim Grøstad