[MUD-Dev] Richard A. Bartle talks MUD Design

[Miroslav Silovic]

Douglas Goodall wrote:
> Damion Schubert wrote:

>> None of this changes the fact that players don't find wandering
>> around looking for random monsters to kill.  They prefer camping,
>> as it provides a predictable reward for a predictable amount of
>> effort.

> There is a simple solution: increase the reward for other
> activities (wandering around, quests, etc) until the additional
> risk is perceived as worthwhile. DAoC tried this with its camp
> bonus. It worked--I could get more XP by moving from camp to camp
> than by sitting still. But few players adopted this strategy. The
> barrier seemed to be convincing other players that it was true,
> rather than getting them to do it once they tried it... Some newer
> games may have succeeded. I did very little camping (in the
> traditional sense) in CoH, EQ2, or WoW. There is probably more
> room for non-camping solutions in niche markets (I did no
> "camping" in the usual sense in Second Life, Underlight, Castle
> Marrach, etc).

Hmm, I realised I've been rather terse in my original posts. For one
thing, I neglected to provide any context.

What prompted me for my suggestion was DarkeMUD's anti-botting
measures. Their magical system would reward you a small ammount of
XP each time you casted a spell. So the people would spam-cast a
large number of spells as fast as they could. This... well, Was Not
Fun. In fact, it was not too different from camping on a
mob. Needless to say, you'd want to spam-cast a single spell with
optimal XP/mana ratio. (funny, this works in Morrowind,
too. BLEEETCH!)

The measure was to greatly increase the XP from each spellcast but
only give you the full reward if you didn't cast the same spell for
some time (it was pretty long period, 20-30 minutes or so). Suddenly
it became rewarding to run around, fight monsters and cast a large
number of varied spells. By the way, there was much bitching&moaning
regardless, but it died down once people figured that the new system
actually worked well.

Anyhow, I think the players actually want to level to the fun
content in a reasonable time /and/ they hate being forced to
camp. So, as far as the optimal levelling strategies go - camping
should be squashed. Just to extend the pun, it should be filed as a
game design bug and then squashed.

IMHO, Darke solution can be extended to a more general strategy and
formulated as: Give lots of XP for any specific activity but only
once per <long period of time>.

    Miro
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