[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 12 Feb 1999 12:56:35 -0800 (PST) 
Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

>> I mean, aren't we all basically agreed that level as a measure of
>> player quality is pretty worthless? If not, why? What does having
>> level X really say about the player behind the character? What do
>> we expect it to say? What do we wish it would say?

> It says that they've played the game long enough to progress to that
> level.  Now, there is that phenomenon known as "high-level newbies",
> that is, people that got to their level without actually learning
> the game due to get dragged around by someone high level for long
> enough to gain lots of experience, so it's not an absolute
> yardstick.  But it is a good first-pass indicator.

Mike "Lorry" Lawrie (or was it Bartle) argues strenuously on this area
in his general argument on the advantages of perma-death.  Simply put:
given a perma-death system (with suitable political backdrops -- see
Lorry's article) competant high level players can generally ensure
that the members of their ranks are sufficiently competent, and have a
vested interest in doing so to prevent the Imm/Imp from purging their
player records.  Lorry of course argues this from the viewpoint that
non-permadeath systems allow players to "win" thru mere persistence
rather than any particular skill or ability at the game.

>> double-edged sword. Wouldn't it be more efficient to use two
>> swords? Has anyone thought about having two levels -- player and
>> character? Anyone done this? I know several folks here were talking
>> about separating the player from the character on a basic level,
>> i.e. login to a player and thence to a character.

> Yeah there's a few muds that have done that (Lost Souls was the
> first place I saw it).  I don't know if anyone has actually made
> "player levels" or any sort of way to gauge how "experienced" a
> given account is.

I would like to have a given character's stats (or even the account's
stats), be quite marginally important if the player was very skilled
at the game.  In fact, I'd like to make that exact scenario (expert
player not visibly represented in their characters) common enough that
one was never certain whether any given newbie really was a newbie or
not.

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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