[MUD-Dev] To good to be TRUE, in an MMPORPG?

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2001 10:00:02 -0700 
luke  <luke at rocketship.com> wrote:

> Too bad it's not for real. I kind of liked the idea of all the
> NPCs and PCs being created by sexual reproduction. 

While cute, in GoP games it suffers from the Tragedy of the Commons.
There's too much disjoint between the short term profit and the
longer term penalties.  

UO in its early incarnations did such ecologies.  The players
decimated them.  Repeatedly.  Then, while they starved for want of
food, they bitched to the admins that the game was unfair and that
of course, it was some other bozos that had killed all the game
animals for their minimal XP.

If you hunt back in the archives Raph posted some fairly detailed
reports at the time.

> My idea is, let each player have their own family...

Martin Keegan (where ever has the lad wandered off to?) did some
good initial design work on this area in '98 or '99 IIRC.  There's
some discussion of it on the list along with inherited traits,
family names and liege structures IIRC.

> The players would have to swap characters every so often to keep
> the gene pool diversified.

Permadeath could be as effective as well as rewarding caution.

--
J C Lawrence                                    )\._.,--....,'``.	    
---------(*)                                   /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
claw at kanga.nu                                 `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/                     Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly
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