[MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg Munt [mailto:greg at uni-corn.demon.co.uk]
> Sent: Thursday, June 10, 1999 5:18 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Game Economies

> Do pay-mud administrators feel that they *have* to stay 
> 'mainstream', to
> only have what is deemed popular? And, if this is the case, 
> how can pay-muds
> be involved in any way, with extending the 'state of the art'?

No--in fact, the greatest potential profit in my mind lies in doing new
innovative things, because a ton of competition is about to jump in doing
what we already did. So a lot of my job is finding ways to oush the state of
the art (or at least the default feature set) for muds further.

The flip side is, if you make a game that is too difficult, too complex to
enter (not shallow--just talking about barrier of entry here), or yes, too
dynamic (too unpredictable, too disturbing as opposed to comfortable, etc)
then yes, your playerbase can and will suffer.

As an example--we're very scared of trying some of the massive,
world-affecting events that Matt runs on Achaea, because there's a
significant portion of the playerbase--we're talking tens of thousands--who
don't give a damn about events, and would just be pissed if sya, their
spells didn't work for a month because of "those stupid roleplayers and
their goddamn events."

> Endnote: from reading Raph's posts about UO - specifically 
> 'what we planned
> on doing' vs 'what we actually did' - UO seems to be a lot 
> closer to the
> 'state of the art' than most free muds. Yet a lot (apparently) of the
> original plans either remain unimplemented, or have been 
> disabled. Now, we
> all know that UO has no problem clearing its costs - so how 
> are these fears
> of Mihaly's justified?

If UO had been less experimental, it could probably have been twice as
successful as it actually was. (Scary thought, but true). It simply would
have been stabler and more robust at launch, not suffered as much from
image-crippling problems like lack of spawn, overly restrictive economy,
etc...

-Raph


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev