[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface

[Adam Wiggins]

> On Mon, 22 Sep 1997 08:17:59 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins
> >One of the main 'goals' for our game is to find teachers that can
> >teach you the things you want to know.  This is the side effect of a skill
> >system, and some muds have basically made this their entire focus.  See
> >Raph's mud, Legend.  I like this aspect quite a bit.  Questing to find the
> >ancient teacher of X is a lot more interesting to me than questing just
> >for loot and glory.  Then again, I've always considered character advancement
> >to be the funnest part of an RPG, so it's no surprise I've made it the
> >focus of my own.
> 
> This sounds really great, but unfortunately you combine this with some
> of the other factors in the game you're describing... and it's sort of
> like creating the world's greatest basketball code and making the
> world's major races dwarves, gnomes, and halflings. Character

Short hoops, my friend, short hoops. :)
(This example has more relevance than might first apear.)

> development is a lot of fun when you're *developing*, but after a few
> run-throughs you get tired of it. It really doesn't matter how detailed
> I can make my character when someone else can walk up and destroy all my
> work for no real reason.

Wrong.  It makes it everything.  Again, I'm coming from years on Arctic
where player-vs-player actions (stealing, fighting..) are common, and expected,
parts of the game world.  I find it boring if the procedure is simply
jumping through hoops until I have an all powerful character.

To sum up our mud, if such a thing is possible, in one sentence:

Get as far as you can.

This doesn't mean you every hit some sort of 'ceiling' on your character's
abilities, although it does get progressively harder to advance or even
keep up your skills, resistances, and so forth.  It means that's it's a
dangerous world, full of surprises from both the game and other players.
I find this exciting, and it increases the 'glory' of characters that
do well by tenfold.  You're correct that this means that not just anyone
who sticks to it long enough will always land 'on top' (whatever that is).
You've got to be alert, and the more dangerous a profession you choose, the
more likely you'll be facing an early retirement for whatever reason.  Even
if you choose to be a farmer or a blacksmith (perfectly good professions
given our economy), life won't be perfectly safe or complacent.  I understand
that not everyone likes this sort of game, which is why we plan to state
all of this straight off in the intro text, like a mission statement or
whatever.

> >> suspicious of languages if it was possible to converse with creatures in
> >> their native tongue -- in a P&P game, when you come up to the orc
> >> stronghold, you can speak to the orcish guard in his own language and
> >> possibly get through the door without a fight. In online games, no such
> >> thing is generally possible. For a weak fighter, this would be a great
> >> asset, but online? Nope... you just have to go get someone to beat the
> >> orc's head in.
> >
> >I don't see why you couldn't do this.  
> 
> Nor do I, which is why I sort of turn my nose up at languages. Nobody
> ever does... of course, this also comes down to another problem I see in
> a lot of MUDs, which is that a lot of really cool things are overlooked
> in favor of easier things. You *could* 

Sure, and this list is about coulds, so I stand by my original statement.
Anyhow we've probably beaten this to death.  I like languages; they aren't
a huge component, but they are one of those small details that can really
bring a world to life.  Did Tolkien's languages make his books any better?
Not really, other than making it easy for him to churn out cool-sounding
and consitent names.  But I feel they added a huge amount to the overall
mood and setting.

> >Have the orc only allow people through
> >who he's seen speak a phrase of at least n words in orc.  You could even
> >take it further and require some knowledge of orc culture.
> 
> Yeah, those are fun... 
> 
> 	>speak orcish
> 	You now speak Orcish.
> 	>say Hey, you stupid moron, open the #$!%&ing gate or I'll stick
> 
> 	my shield up your butt sideways.
> 	The orc smiles and opens the gate.
> 
> Seriously, things like that amuse me for much, much longer than they
> ought to. ;)

Actually, this makes sense for an orc stronghold.  Change it to the elven
city and it's a bit stranger.  'Tis why I mentioned the watchword phrase
instead.  Or do some simple parsing for well-known insults, to catch players
off-guard.  Again, a stupid little thing, hardly important, but if I did
the above and the system parsed out 'moron' and had the orc tell me to
fuck off, I would be both amazed and very amused, which is of course the
point of me playing th emud in the first place.

> >Right.  Well, since we don't have any such well defined states as 'fighting',
> >this would be very difficult for us to implement.  Also, invisibilty is
> >a very powerful and difficult to obtain spell, and it is far from perfect -
> >others can still smell, hear, and sense you through other means.
> 
> Why does every game developer I ever try to talk to keep insisting that
> HIS game is one hundred percent immune from every example I give because
> 'my game has no such concept'? Skill-based 'classless' systems have been
> around a long time, and they're by no means immune to game balance
> problems. In fact, just about every game system suffers from game
> balance problems, and rather serious ones in many cases. Does anyone
> recall 'Man, Myth, and Magic' which allowed anyone miserly enough to
> save up 3000 or so gold to instantly become SuperCharacter?

I never said there was no game balance problems.  If anything, they are more
difficult, because the character 'states' are less discrete.  What I said
was that that particular example was difficult for me to apply, although
you'll note I did try anyhow.  It's like someone asking me to fix their
computer for them, and I end up saying, "Welp, if this were Linux I'd
just look in file X, but this is Windows, so you either can't do that
or I don't know how.  Sorry."

Game balance problems that we have and will run into: skills which advance
too quickly/slowly by certain methods, or just in general due to bad
difficult settings; skill decay which is too fast/slow for certain characters
due to strange stat combinations; computer-controlled deities which
incorrectly judge the desires of those who pray to them; deity favor not
changing appropriately for certain actions; or teachers that require impossible
favors in order to teach what they know.

We spend quite a bit of time, as well, concocting strange situations to 'test'
the system.  Ie: "What happens when someone is hanging from a rope by one
hand and tying their shoes with another, and someone else either on a ledge
or a nearby rope attacks them?"

Another big issue is how players should leave the game.  We feel strongly
that they should leave the game entirely similar to traditional muds, but
this causes a lot of problems in a 'realistic' mud.  If they quit while lieing
on the ground bleeding to death, what happens while they are away?  Should
it not let them quit?  What if, instead of that, it's a fatal poison in
their veins, destined to kill them any moment?  What if they are unaware of
the poison? etc..

Anyhow we're not immune at all.  The questions and answers are just
different, which is something I like.

> >I was about to say 'I don't see what's so anti-social about sticking an
> >axe in someone's head', but I think possibly that's going a bit far.
> >I'll instead say that I enjoy all sorts of character interaction, hostile
> >or not.  Hostile actions just tend to be counterproductive for both parties.
> 
> I mainly dislike hostility between players because it's too easy for one
> player to force such activity on another. If I'm walking along with my
> character, which I've invested some four months in developing, and some
> multi-year veteran of the server who happens to be bored sees me walking
> along and decides to squot me like a pumpkin -- well, I just lost four
> months for his momentary giggle at watching the MUD's 'huhuhuhuhuh, you
> killed somebody, he's DEAD, huhuh that was cool' message. On a
> permadeath MUD, I don't get any of it back, either. Even when death
> *isn't* permanent, when I've worked for a week at making the next
> stepping stone in my character's development and suddenly lose it all...

Agreed.  One thing I hate about muds right now is the MASSIVE amount of time
you need to invest to have a descently interesting character.  We're
going for short-and-sweet character careers; I imagine few people will
play the same character for four months.  Years is probably impossible.
So I agree: permadeath is bad on a mud where you 'have' to spend 20+ RL
hours just to get a character far enough into the game that it starts to
be fun, and frequently 100+ hours for a 'good' character.  Forget that;
I don't have time for it.  Back when I was attending a university and
had nothing to do but ditch classes it was a little different.

> to be fun. Challenging, yes, definitely. Occasionally frustrating, yeah,
> great. But binary? Would you play a game like Dungeon Keeper if every
> time you were defeated on level 11 (like most of us were, repeatedly)
> you had to start over on level 1? All or nothing? Jesus, man, starting a
> new character is a tremendous pain; you put in all that work, and then
> you're Joe Wimp for at least a week. During that week, of course, you

Yes, which sucks.  We get around this two ways: for one, characters
start descently strong.  No being defeated by dogs or squirrels.  Second,
you get character points added to your account when you loose (via death
or deletion) a 'built up' character, so that you can start you next one
with more advantages.
Also, the power difference between a brand-new character and the best swordsman
that ever lived is much, much, MUCH smaller than your average mud
nowadays.  The best swordsman that ever lived will have a rough go of it
against three or more descently trained opponents.  An army of newbies is
enough to run him down no problem, assuming he's not smart enough to run
the other direction as soon as he sees them.

> have to wander around hoping nobody decides he's bored enough to whap
> you for the heck of it. If you're lucky, or you have 'connections', then
> someone can hook you up with some equipment and start you off with a
> decent amount of money. The rest of us, of course, just end up going
> somewhere else.

I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions on how our game works.
Suffice it to say, it's nothing like anything I've ever played, and that's
on purpose.  Yes, there's a learning curve.  No, not everyone will like it.

> I could point out that there are other such places out there that a lot
> of people really hate. Dark Metal, in the MUSH world, routinely has
> large numbers of people logged on; a lot of people there really like it.
> It's also known as 'Twink Metal', a rather pejorative term as a 'twink'
> is the MUSH world equivalent of an asshole, and the founders have long

Heh.  Twink usually means a whiner or someone just incompetent on a
hack'n'slasher.  Guess the definiton of the term represents the
views of the playerbase.

> since moved on -- and consider it a failed experiment. While there
> certainly is sufficient interest to keep it running, it's still not
> exactly 'running successfully' when the creators have abandoned it. 
> I'm not saying this is the case with Arctic, but I *am* saying that you
> can certainly have a game that has completely failed, generally sucks,
> and everyone rags on -- but still has over a hundred players logged in
> at a time. 

Oh, certainly.  Midthevia is one of the most played muds on the internet,
and it sucks donkey balls like there's no tomorrow.  My point with Arctic
was that I love to play it, even now after I've pretty much exhausted
everything it has to offer, and that I'm not some sort of freak, there
are others that actually agree with me. :)  (Or, at least, they share
my freakdom with me.)

> >The example, as I recall, was a 'low level' (which I will take to mean
> >unskilled in combat) character fighting against a 'high level' (by which I
> >will assume you mean skilled in combat) mobile.  This is useless for the
> >low-level player, because you only learn by fighting someone whose skill leve
> >is roughly equivilent to that of your own.  
> 
> I take serious issue with that statement, but it's useless to debate the
> matter.

Why?  It works great, so I'm curious to know why you think it wouldn't/doesn't.
Or perhaps you mean, you don't think that this is how it works in RL?

> >(This, of course, is why teachers
> >are ideal, as they can tailor their own fighting to be at a 'virtual'
> >skill level equivilent to that of the student.)
> 
> My unarmed combat instructor most definitely did NOT do this, and I have
> the scars to prove it.

Are you saying that you think that this is a better method?
Having tried both in a variety of different skill areas including
unarmed combat, programming, archery, and plenty of others I could
probably rattle off if anyone cared, I *much* prefer actual intruction as
opposed to being pounded into the ground faster than I can even blink.  Yes,
I do learn from the second method, but I learn somewhat *faster* from
instruction, which was my point above.  The 'high-level' character dragging
the newbie in against the 'high-level' monster doesn't gain the newbie
anything, since he would be just as well of fighting something that was only
moderately more skilled than he.

> >I might also point out that millions of people
> >enjoy blowing each other away multiple times with shotguns on such
> >popular games as Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, yet no one seems to question
> >their sanity.
> 
> It's a little different when you have a game where any player can whip
> himself up to full power in less than 60 seconds and 'death' basically
> means 'hit the space bar'. Given that set of circumstances, as opposed

Right.  You have to balance the power-gaining with power-loss.  We've tried
to de-emphasize power anyhow, but for all the combat related skills (which do,
indeed, make up nearly 1/3rd of our total skill tree) power is pretty much
what it comes down to.  We have it set up so that you can learn quickly
but it's always dangerous.  Mortal combat is definitely to be avoided,
although if all you ever do is spar, your abaility to deal with dangerous
situations and of course your pain tolerance will remain at pitiful levels.
Even so, trying to train yourself by getting involved in fights to the
death is a bad idea.  Half of being a good 'warrior' is picking the fights
that you can win.

> to a game in which you potentially spend months developing a character,
> PK becomes a good deal more acceptable in my eyes. There's a tradeoff; I
> don't want to trade even a *day* for some dork to have a cheap thrill.
> But I'll certainly trade a couple minutes. (Owner and operator, Clan
> Hellrazor.)

*nod*, a balance issue, as always.  Another thing brought up here is how
easy it is to *escape* deadly situations.  We have it set up so that a
quick-witted player has many, many options.  This harkens back to Arctic:
I've been involved in probably hundreds if not thousands of PKs, but the
number of actual player deaths I've caused there has probably been around
a dozen.  I myself have been killed twice.  This isn't because my characters
are all that great, it's because I think ahead and know my options for
getting out of tight situations.  This is applicable to everything, of course,
not just PK.

I *despise* stuff like:

> l
A Sunny Pasture
> scan
Nothing around.
>
The dragon arrives from the north.
The draggon obliterates you with his bite.
You are dead.

Dunno if you caught the earlier thread with me griping about this, as
well as my many examples about how to avoid this sort of thing.
To sum up: make danger give a clear warning in most cases, and give the
player time to respond.  Naturally this means the best assassin is someone
who can give the player a little warning as possible, but ideally this
should be quite difficult.