Player count threshholds (was: Re: [MUD-Dev] Text Muds vs Graphical Muds)

[Matt Mihaly]

On Sat, 6 Jul 2002, Russ Whiteman wrote:

> I started playing Simutronics (GemStone III) while they were only
> available on GEnie, with a peak in-game population of 60-80, and I
> started working for them a few weeks after they became available
> through AOL, where population peaked at about 600, and on through
> AOL's flat-rate, when the population ran around 2000 and
> occasionally approached 2500.  So I've got observations from a
> fairly wide range of sizes.  I could not say that I saw any
> particular behavioral changes at the ranges stated above.  The
> overall behavioral changes we saw seemed to be more related to the
> explosive growth-rates that were caused by other factors (the
> increased exposure we got when we first moved to AOL, and the same
> again when AOL went flat-rate).  The flood of new arrivals simply
> overwhelmed the existing culture, leading to something like
> anarchy.  It didn't help that we were chronicly undersized for
> both of those periods, it was rather like the "overcrowded rat"
> experiments so apochrophal during the 70's...

I'm be interested in knowing your thoughts on how Simutronics dealt
(apparently successfully given they're still around with a lot of
customers) with this kind of explosive growth. It's one thing to
create a graphical MUD where you are aiming for a ton of users, and
entirely another to take a MUD (text in this case, but that's
irrelevant really) that was designed for small number and ramp it up
suddenly.

I'd assume they added more world content to lower the player
density, but do you remember what systems were added or modified to
deal with the sudden increase? Which ones worked? Which ones didn't? 
Any speculation as to why?


--matt

"[AIDs is] the greatest single assault on humankind that we've ever
known, greater than war and greater than the Black Death." - Stephen
Lewis, UN special envoy to Africa.

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