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Old 06-10-2010, 11:44 AM   #17
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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Re: Avoiding mistakes in char gen/early game

By being inferior to other choices. If you make a bad choice early on, and it's irreversible, your only options will be to either restart or play an inferior character. In a highly competitive game like mine, the latter isn't really any option at all - and because of the number of character options, mistakes are unavoidable.

It's not difficult, but neither is it necessary, and every second of progress you'd made up until that point would be thrown away. I'd far rather just let the newbie fix the mistake.

There are quite a few games I enjoy, but (for those that require a substantial time investment) I certainly wouldn't enjoy replaying them from the start every time I made a mistake.

Not on that scale perhaps. But most muds allow you to add and remove equipment on a whim, which (from a pure number-crunching perspective) is much the same concept. How would you feel about a mud that didn't let you ever remove equipment? You could put on armour, wield weapons, etc, but once you'd made your choice you'd be stuck with them - if you wielded a rubbish sword, the only way around it would be to delete and restart from level 1.

In much the same way you might put on your anti-magic helmet and wield your magebane greatsword in a regular mud.

Or neither, in my case, as there's no need. Most muds are continually introducing new features even after they come out of beta, so there's always going to be the risk of impacting existing characters.

Some time ago I ran a "nerf week" where I nerfed several of the most popular options over the space of a few days. The response from the players was overwhelmingly positive, and they immediately redesigned their characters to see what new setups had become viable.

In a competitive game, a poor choice can wreck your character. Just because you're not aware of your mistake, it doesn't mean you didn't make one.

I disagreed because that statement is simply not true in my mud. If you make a poor choice, you can just change it.

However as I pointed out earlier, an active mud may well introduce changes that disrupt the balance of established characters. If you look around I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of players complaining about new changes ruining their characters.
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