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Old 02-19-2004, 10:33 PM   #1
Eldorian
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Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 3
Eldorian is on a distinguished road
For many years I was a player of a MUD, and I was very interested about how the actual formulas worked. I even took about 600 ticks' worth of mana regen to figure out how mana regen worked, as well as over 1000 rounds of combat to figure out how often the attacks come out. This is true of pretty much any game I've played. Diablo 2 for instance, when it first came out, I was one of the people who worked on trying to figure out the formulas that Blizzard used for various things, and thus mathematically deduce the best strategy.

Of course, back when I was a player on the MUD, the Immortals wouldn't tell me what the formulas were -- just said to read the helpfile, for example, or test it out. And Blizzard never gave out formulas, leaving us to figure out it out by testing and/or by cracking the .mpq files to find the values. Of course, this led to more sophisticated ways of encryption, which leads to more sophisticated methods of decryption, ad nauseam.

As a player, I resented this thing about hiding how things worked. Age of Empires made a big impact on me because I asked in a forum about how the formula for trading worked, and one of them gave me the formula straight up. That really encouraged me to play, to know that its creators are freely willing to discuss the formulas. Similarly, I still play Blizzard's Starcraft, partly because it's fun, but also partly because I didn't burn myself out of the game trying to figure out the formulas -- they gave all the values and explained all the game mechanics that I needed to know.

Now however I am an Immortal on a MUD, particularly working with and modelling how combat works, and how various spells affect combat. My job basically is to translate the code into Excel simulations, usually with a pretty graph that helps to visualize what's happening as the variables change. I also recommend various formulas, based on how the head Implementors want things to be affected by other things. Now being on "this side" of a game though, I now also have a natural aversion to telling players specifics of a code. The formulas, once decided on and playtested, are easy to copy, and they represent much more than simply numbers and mathematical operators -- they represent what we understand about what makes a good game work, about balance, fairness, and good strategy.

Yet now, having been on both sides, I wonder: How much should a game's creators reveal about the inner workings of that game? Reveal too much and your competitors copy your formulas, especially if your mud is popular. Yet reveal too little and your players waste time just figuring things out, rather than coming up with interesting and new strategies. So where do you draw the line in terms of reveal how the game mechanics work?

For that matter I might as well as start with us: For us, we will generally reveal what factors matter, as well as the direction they matter (i.e. makes it better or worse); we do not reveal by exactly how much however, nor which formulas we use. But I'm curious as to how other people view the formulas they work with in making a good game.
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