[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Dubious Advocate]

From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at soe.sony.com>
>> Dubious Advocate wrote:

>> I maintain that game worlds are damaged solely by dupe exploits
>> and poorly planned loot templates.

> That seems a remarkably narrow view. SOLELY by bad loot and dupes?
> Nothing else?

Remaining in the context of economy, yes.  Normal player activity
will siphon out anyway, and where it doesn't we usually find
invalidated design decisions.  To wit...

>> And neither truly damage a world by themselves but rather simply
>> present a short-term design opportunity.

> You say this despite having seen the economic and gameplay havoc
> wrought in UO?

Yes.  When players were duping items with chessboards/ships hourly,
were duping bags full of million-gold castle deeds by the hundreds
daily... when players were botting fishermen pulling up overly
generous MiBs by the hundreds per UO day...

This is exactly my point.  *** Suddenly the fact that someone could
GM blacksmithing in a week and sell a thirty GM kryss per fortnight
to other players just pales in comparison.  A single duping of a bag
filled with 255 castle deeds counters a year of all player's playing
a straight high-level game.

As devs perhaps you could have pulled out your old global resource
code and made it possible that only XX homes, and by extension XX+1
deeds, could exist in the world at one time.  Perhaps it was
possible to attach a field to each character so that actual MiBs
fished were counted and constrained.

Perhaps not - it was a pioneering time with a brittle codebase.  But
my real point is a poor implementation does not invalidate an idea,
just the implementation.

>> Guild mules indicate a problem with economic distribution.

> Hardly. Players will hoard to the maximum ability possible. If
> players have access to mules, they will use them, period, end of
> sentence. The sufficiency of storage they are granted is basically
> irrelevant.

Players hoard to a destructive degree when the design decisions
encourage it.  There is less incentive to hoard when players have a
game mechanic for distribution that makes for playability rather
than realism.

Early on in UO the players learned to hoard because inventory was
aimed to a far smaller population, and there existed no real
game-level distribution.  And in fact for nearly all games we find
this designer bias - "real merchant players like endless tedium,
must build personal relationships for each sale, and running about
selling 'Fresh Fish' all the time.  Gosh how come we have guild
mules?".

The other factor is arms race - when even middling items are hard to
find, wear easily, are easily looted, and are difficult to replace
(see above observation about distribution)... players hoard.  Again
picking on UO, players learned to hoard because PK was the norm, the
losers/victims where picked clean, and restocking became hard.
Unless one knew dupers.

Eventually players had their own vendors that ran 24x7, and that
helped immensely.  Except there was another invalidated design
decision.  To wit...  housing...

>> Character mules indicate a problem with grouping mechanics and
>> shared storage.  Both are easily resolved.

> In what way? Note that UO had such a massive storage bloat that
> backups of memory took two hours or more to complete, and forced a
> massive effort to do database cleanups in game.

Sure.  Personal housing was never zoned.  And sure, the final
population vastly exceeded initial planning.  Still the answer was
always permit every account no more than a single house, and take
zoning to a place away from the main map.

"Cleanup Britannia" was a positive example of taking on the
short-term design opportunity.  Allocating a server/cluster for
housing and zoning to a single home/account was never assumed as an
opportunity, and so to this very day UO still struggles with this
problem.

> Neither resolved the issue. Vendors were instantly abused as
> ADDITIONAL storage until we imposed a vendor fee based on the
> pricing of items on the vendor. Housing created even more of a
> mule and storage issue by allowing players to hoard to
> unprecedented levels--10,000 shirts in one tile was COMMON.

I just touched on vendor/storage challenge.  But the gist was a
chain of incompletely planned design decisions.  I'm not faulting
the devs - these were lessons to be learned and for the most part
you all (and they still do) did admirably given the codebase.

When players can stack 10,000 shirts they do so, but once they had
the ability to automatically Salvage each shirt they typically
stopped the practice - Salvage was a positive mechanic to adjust a
behavior.  Decay timers would have fixed much of this afterall - no
home I'm aware of had 10,000 shirts each Locked Down in a single
stack on a single tile...

And why were they making 10,000 shirts in the first place?  Because
that's the advancement model they were given.  AC2 demonstrates that
one doesn't have to constrict advancement this way.  Lessons to be
learned.

>> The sole drawback to their approach was unrestricted "on the main
>> map" housing.  UO may be a morass codebase - but there are so
>> many valuable design & business lessons it pre-learned for the
>> next competitor.

> Players don't like virtual housing. I'll say it flat out. Houses
> are popular in large part for bragging rights. That demands the
> ability to show them off. The rules of real estate still apply:
> location, location, location. I'd say the lesson learned is "you
> need to have more space" not "put houses in a pocket dimension."

Moving all housing to a zoned cluster still permits that.
Socializers would probably congregate there anyway.  If you mean
they want bragging rights by dropping a castle right in the middle
of prime adventuring areas... we'll just have to disagree on the
need to permit that.  Making one player happy at the expense of
several hundred isn't good business practice.  And the pioneering UO
demonstrated that truism through negative implementation repeatedly.

> And storage was ameliorated only by enforcing a stringent storage
> limit that is less than 1% of the original capcity of houses.

Yes.  Exactly.  Coupled with a streamlined method of distribution,
mechanics like Salvage, better item decay, and faster more
entertaining advancement...  all working in concert to make playing
a merchant / artisan / gatherer immensely rewarding, and unmatched
to this day in the commercial game world.  And all without
detracting from players who had no desire to be M / A / Gs.

All UO needs is an AC2-class visual implementation.  Too bad a
proven franchise with fanatical brand-loyal consumers was abandoned.

-----
Dave Scheffer
"Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself"


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