[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[Justin Hooper]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Chris Lloyd wrote:

> >>     [...] This way the big quests are very sought after and guarded,
> >> whereas the smaller ones are more frequently given out due to their
> >> already low value.
> 
> > This will not work. It only takes one person to blab. I, for
>
> So what if one person blabs? Its their own loss. I would expect people
> to give away the solutions to the lower-xp quests to the newbies, and
> to keep the higher-level, more xp ones to themselves and only share
> them with their close allies. From an admin point of view, do you
> really care how many people do those big quests? As long as they don't
> give out any world-changing items, its up to the mortals to decide if
> they want 1000xp for the quest or 10xp for the same quest after they
> tell a few people. I would hope that this might mean that players
> would actually have to trust each other occasionally!

No, it's not their own loss.  It's the loss of everyone who'd been going
through the work to complete the quest within the game fiction in
anticipation of a "big reward".  Suddenly one blabber has ruined this for
all the players.  The difficulty is that the "currency" of this exchange
is knowledge, and knowledge can spread by multiplication.  Thus, you've
established a power structure where individuals of comparable power (i.e.
people who've worked through the quest) have the ability to effect MANY
individuals of perhaps middlingly less power (people who are just about to
complete it).  While it's an interesting exercise in machiavellian
politics, it just smacks of grief play with a twist, IMHO.  Specifically,
I can see the heirarchy evolving such that certain players do the quests
first and then intentionally and very publically "leak" the information to
keep their rivals from having any potential to "catch" them (by whatever
way you mean to measure achievement).

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