August 1999

• Game design and gender: An interesting article Nathan F Yospe
• • Game design and gender: An interesting article Jon A. Lambert
  • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
    • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Jeremy Music "Sterling"
      • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Cynbe ru Taren
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Matthew Mihaly
          • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
            • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Ben Greear
              • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Albert
          • Game design and gender: An interesting article Koster, Raph
          • Game design and gender: An interesting article Laurel Fan
          • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
            • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Willowreed@aol.com
              • Game design and gender: An interesting article Albert
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Koster, Raph
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Adam Wiggins
          • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
      • Game design and gender: An interesting article Ola Fosheim Grøstad
      • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Matthew Mihaly
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Adam Wiggins
          • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Caliban Tiresias Darklock
            • Game design and gender: An interesting article Matthew Mihaly
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Mik Clarke
        • Game design and gender: An interesting article Marian Griffith
        • • Game design and gender: An interesting article Ola Fosheim Grøstad
  • Game design and gender: An interesting article Greg Miller
• question about tile-based games Chris Gray
• • question about tile-based games Scott Boding
  • question about tile-based games Jeremy Music "Sterling"
  • • question about tile-based games Katrina McClelan
    • • question about tile-based games Caliban Tiresias Darklock
      • • question about tile-based games Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
        • • question about tile-based games Chris Gray
    • question about tile-based games AR Schleicher
  • question about tile-based games Wes Connell
  • question about tile-based games AR Schleicher
  • • question about tile-based games Wes Connell
• Mud Census? Timothy O'Neill Dang
• MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Par Winzell
• • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Dr. Cat
  • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
• MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Par Winzell
• • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
• MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Wes Connell
• • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
    • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Colin Coghill
      • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
      • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
        • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Miroslav Silovic
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
              • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Caliban Tiresias Darklock
          • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
        • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
        • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Mik Clarke
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Mik Clarke
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
                • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
          • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Wes Connell
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Albert
          • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
          • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
            • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
                • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
                  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
              • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Caliban Tiresias Darklock
              • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
                • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
                • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
                    • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
                • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
  • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ola Fosheim Grøstad
  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
    • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ola Fosheim Grøstad
      • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Koster, Raph
        • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Ola Fosheim Grøstad
    • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Greg Miller
  • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Marian Griffith
  • • MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs Matthew Mihaly
• Designing fun sims. (was MUD-Dev digest, Vol 1 #142 - 4 msgs) Ola Fosheim Grøstad
• The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
• • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Colin Coghill
      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Sellers, Michael
        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Matthew Mihaly
          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Sellers, Michael
      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, SCC, Game Commando
        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Jon A. Lambert
                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
                • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
                    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Koster, Raph
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
                          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
                            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
                              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis Casey
                                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Robin Cloutman
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
                            • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
                          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Laurel Fan
                          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Mik Clarke
                      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                    • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Timothy O'Neill Dang
                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
                    • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
                      • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                        • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
                        • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
                  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Travis S. Casey
                    This is mostly various random thoughts on the topic... haven't had time to
                    respond individually to interesting messages, unfortunately. I chose
                    JCL's post to reply to because he's made some points I'd originally wanted
                    to make.
                    
                    On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, J C Lawrence wrote:
                    > Dundee <SkeptAck@antisocial.com> wrote:
                    
                    > > Even over a given time period, it would mean that if the average
                    > > person uses the skill 10 times a day, then anyone who uses it less
                    > > than 10 times a day is effectively getting worse at it - since
                    > > whether you are "good" or "average" or "terrible" at a skill would
                    > > just depend on where everyone else was.
                    
                    That's not strictly true, since it's a comparison of ratios rather than
                    absolute uses. For example, if the average character does 100 skill uses
                    a day, and uses skill X 10 times a day, its ratio for skill X will be
                    1/10. If Fred uses skill X 9 times a day and does 100 skill uses per day,
                    his ratio will be 9/100.
                    
                    Now, while Fred's absolute number of uses of skill X will get farther and
                    farther behind the average over time, the ratio of his ratio to the
                    "average" ratio isn't affected by that -- it remains constant. Thus, Joe
                    wouldn't get worse at the skill -- he'd simply stay below average.
                    
                    > There's a base player perception principle underlieing this:
                    >
                    > Players expect, even demand, that the game will always reward them
                    > for their time investments, and doesn't remove those awards once
                    > gained.
                    
                    The majority of players, yes -- probably even the vast majority of
                    players. However, this isn't true of *all* players. In the paper RPG
                    world, there are players who willingly choose to play systems in which
                    skill decay exists, and even those who play systems where there is *no*
                    possibility of improving character skills.
                    
                    > > You'll just be better at the skills you use more often, and worse
                    > > at the ones you don't.
                    >
                    > Predictability comes into play here.
                    >
                    > I play for a week or so and get to the point that I know that
                    > roughly one fifth of my fireball spells will succeed. On that basis
                    > I also know that I can go whup GooGoo without too much bother.
                    >
                    > A few days later others have been beating up on their Fireball
                    > skill, unbeknownst to me, and the ratios, and my position within the
                    > ratios, have changed. Now my fireball spell succeeds one tenth of
                    > the time. GooGoo eats my arse.
                    
                    This is a possibility; however, I'd expect it to become less likely over
                    time. Consider:
                    
                    Mud X has just opened. To date, there have been 20,000 skill uses, 50 of
                    which have been fireball. Thus, fireball's ratio is 1/400. People start
                    using fireball more heavily, and an hour or two later, its been used 150
                    times, while total skill uses have only climbed to 25,000. Fireball's
                    ratio is now 3/500 -- more than twice what it was before. People who
                    haven't stepped up their use of fireball have effectively lost skill.
                    
                    It's a year later. To date, there have been 4,000,000 skill uses; of
                    these, 24,000 have been of fireball. Someone starts ramping up their use
                    of fireball, using it 200 times in ten minutes. There have now been
                    4,000,400 skill uses, of which 24,200 have been fireball. Fireball's
                    ratio changes from 0.006 to 0.00605.
                    
                    Note that in the second case, the actual increase in rate of fireball use
                    was higher than in the first, but the effect was smaller because of the
                    greater "inertia" of the well-established ratios.
                    
                    
                    Now, this is still a loss of predictability -- my point is simply that as
                    the system gets older, the potential for sudden variations in established
                    skills becomes smaller. Sudden variations are most likely to happen with
                    new skills or skills that have been used only very rarely. This problem
                    can be mollified by having broader skills -- i.e., instead of having a
                    skill in "fireball", have a skill in "fire magic" which is used for all
                    fire spells (possibly with modifiers for different spells). This skill
                    will be used more often than any individual fire spell would be, and thus
                    would be more insulated from sudden ratio changes.
                    
                    It might be possible to make the gathering of inertia faster by initially
                    having skill uses count for more -- e.g., during the beta-test period,
                    count each skill use as 10 uses. Once the mud opens, count each skill use
                    as just 1 use. This would make the skill ratios become more stable than
                    they were during the beta test period. The admins might also want to
                    "initialize" the ratios with guesses -- e.g., take 10,000 skill uses,
                    decide how they think they'd likely be distributed, and set starting
                    totals for each skill according to that. This would give an initial
                    "mass" of skill uses to give some inertia to the system and some basis for
                    calculating values, but allow the mud to self-adjust over time.
                    
                    Probably the best option would be to combine these -- initialize with
                    reasonale guesses, run an alpha test with accelerated variation, crank the
                    variation down, run an open beta with normal variation, and then keep
                    separate track of the skill uses in the last month or two of the open
                    beta, and use those ratios to reinitialize the database with a large
                    initial mass for the real opening. That would give you something that
                    ought to reasonably approximate what the real ratios should look like, and
                    you could choose an arbitrarily large initial mass -- maybe 5 or 10 times
                    the actual mass of that month or two.
                    
                    
                    A bigger problem that I see is how this would affect new characters, if
                    implemented directly. Consider a new player who gets on the mud and
                    creates a mage. The first skill her character uses is "fire magic". Now,
                    this character has a fire magic ratio of 100%, and thus, by the strict
                    definition, has just become the best possible fire mage -- until he/she
                    uses some other skill. If she then uses "sword" skill, she now has ratios
                    of 0.50 with both of those skills, and 0 with all other skills.
                    
                    There's also a question of how initial skill would be determined -- using
                    the system strictly, someone who's never used any skills has a ratio of
                    0/0 with all skills -- which is undefined mathematically.
                    
                    IMHO, a good simple solution is to simply give each starting character a
                    starting divisor -- e.g., add 100 to their actual number of total skill
                    uses. Thus, a character who has never used any skills has a ratio of
                    0/100 in all skills. A character who has only done one skill use has a
                    ratio of 1/100 in that skill.
                    
                    This would serve to do two things: first, it damps the initial wild skill
                    swings down. Second, it makes characters improve over time, as their
                    number of actual total skill uses rises. (Without the added "filler"
                    total uses, a character's ratios all *always* add up to 1. With it added,
                    a new character's ratios will add up to something small -- starting at 0,
                    going up next to .01, then to .02, and so on. This would be an asymptotic
                    increase -- the total of ratios would never reach 1, but could come
                    arbitrarily close to it.)
                    
                    (When doing this, I wouldn't include those "phantom" 100 uses for each
                    character in the mudwide statistics -- doing so could create problems,
                    since a sudden rash of people creating characters and then abandoning the
                    mud could impact the mudwide ratios significantly.)
                    
                    --
                    |\ _,,,---,,_ Travis S. Casey <efindel@io.com>
                    ZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ No one agrees with me. Not even me.
                    |,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'-'
                    '---''(_/--' `-'\_)
              • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Chris Turner
              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
                • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Chris Turner
          • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
          • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ilya, Game Commandos
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
            • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
            • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Ola Fosheim Grøstad
              • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Caliban Tiresias Darklock
                • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
  • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Adam Wiggins
    • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing J C Lawrence
    • • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Wes Connell
      • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Greg Miller
  • The Best Guy on the Mud Thing Dundee
• Balancing issues (renamed) Marian Griffith
• Singleton design pattern (OT?) Eli Stevens {KiZurich}
• • Singleton design pattern (OT?) Wayne Pearson
  • Singleton design pattern (OT?) Cynbe ru Taren
  • • Singleton design pattern (OT?) Adam Wiggins
• OT: My absence J C Lawrence
• ScryMUD: News update (Opening to the Public on the 4th of September!) Ben Greear