[MUD-Dev] Transportation (was: UO rants)

[Patrick Dughi]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Chris Lloyd wrote:

> There are plenty of games worlds that are said to be 'big', and yes, they
> might contain thousands of rooms and hundreds of objects, but in terms of
> time, can be quite small. I'll take a DikuMUD as a typical example - There
> is one city, and lots of outlying areas. The game 'area' is several hundred
> rooms wide. One side is a desert, and the other side is artic waste. Bearing
> in mind that the game is played in real-time, why is it that it takes a
> player only 15 seconds to travel from one side of the globe to the other?
> The use of macros to enter the directions makes this even easier, and I know
> players who remember unfeasible numbers of routes across worlds with just
> the letters N, S, E and W.
> 
> Then we have recall spells, portals... And the rest. In EQ there were
> portals to all parts of the world (fair enough, since I don't believe all
> the lands were connected, anyway). This was part of the plot, and a reason
> was given to explain the existence of such magical, naturally-occurring
> doorways. But in a text-MUD, people can walk/swim/paddle their way across a
> continent in seconds.
> 
> Solutions? Well... We could put in an arbitrary one-second delay for moving
> between rooms, but do players want to have to count the rooms they go
> through? Or should we simply invent a good reason to have a waypoint or
> portal at regular intervals?

	Before you look for a solution, you may want to look for the
problem.  You notice that someone can go from the two furthest points in
your world in an unbelieveably short amount of time.  Is that a problem?

	As an example, I'll bring up my girlfriends recent most favorite
game, Diablo II.  After watching her play it incessantly, I noticed that a
great deal of time was spent in travel.  It was actually a higher priority
to find the waypoint portals, than to kill monsters/get stuff/enter
dungeons/etc.  Time was spent backtracking in case a waypoint was missed. 
After all, if you quit and restarted, you don't want to have to deal with
all the creatures you beat before, or all the now-worthless treasure, etc. 
In real world terms, it was an investment of perhaps 5 minutes per map
(with monsters), and that was severely annoying. 

	Now, imagine a text mud doing anything to make travel take the
same generic amount of time.  5 minutes (probably with few/no enounters) 
to walk from their start location to the next area, and perhaps 3 more
areas till they arrive at one where the player feel both challenged and
capable.  Or a half second pause between steps - which most will call lag. 
Maybe you have movement points which come back only with rest.  One mud
even killed your connection if you spammed movement/skill commands too
quickly.  You can slow them down, in any number of ways, but why bother? 
What do you get from it?

	Perhaps you get a heightened sense of reality.  You'll also get a
bunch of frustrated players who have to spend the first and last spread of
minutes just _getting_ to where they want to start playing.  Maybe you
want to increase the challenge - time spent traveling is the obstacle you
must overcome.  Time that could be better spent entertaining your players,
if they are even at their console and not letting a script walk for them.
Wait - you've got a noble cause!  You want those explorer-type persons to
have a good objective, and making the whole world immediately accessable
would undo that.  I suppose you'd ignore the fact that the explorers
wouldn't really need speedwalk or instant transportation, unless they're
going to skip those areas they've already covered..

	Why are we limiting travel again?

	In my experience, if you make it too hard to travel, either in
time or effort, people won't.  If you make it required that they travel,
inorder to advance, or simply to advance more quickly, people will revolt.
On the other hand, if you make it exciting or unique, making travel part
of the game instead of something you have to do inorder to play, people
enjoy it all the more.  

	Maybe the problem is; "I have travel in my game, but it adds
nothing to the play. I need to justify the requirement that one must
travel." 

	I think perhaps that those portals you mention are a good idea. 
If you require that they fit into your world theme, you can surely make
them do so.  Perhaps those who are not affluent enough to use portal
transportation will have to walk, and brave the dangers of the wild.  Your
explorers will probably want to walk anyway.  If you still feel you need
some limitation on travel, simply set a sort of breakpoint at which some
critera must be met.  This way you don't have a stop-motion action, but
instead the character is constantly in action. 

	Example:

I wouldn't allow any character to swim across the ocean from my virtual
America to my virtual Spain.  If you want to travel there, you'll need a
boat.  So, you can run to the coast, and then you're going to spend some
time finding and provisioning a ship before you actually cross.  You might
even have to wait till the harsh winter storms are over.  It takes the
same as if I would have made them stutter-step across the world in half
second increments, but they're never idle or bored.

	In the same vein, if you're going across the desert, you really
should have to have a horse or camel, unless you're just skirting the
edges.  Some mountains may require climbing gear, or the ability to fly. 
Magic offers a new realm of travel too; perhaps you have to cast the
earthquake spell three times in an area to open up a crevase in the earth.
Maybe you just need to find some way to get your whole party to breath
water. 

	Most muds I programmed for had movement points - the only time
they really came into play was either at low levels, or when you were
climbing/swimming.  This was used as a breakpoint of sorts, allowing those
that could fly, or purchase a boat to travel more expediently than those
who could not.
	
	In general, if something exists only as a limitation, it's usually
not rewarding to have in the game for players.  The question then is
whether or not you as a game admin have a reason for it to be there
(balance, reality model, etc).

						PjD




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