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Old 08-18-2004, 05:40 AM   #20
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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I wish she was kidding. I'm going to talk about Achaea here, as of our games, it's the one I am by far the most familiar with (being lead designer on it).

One of the upsides of our game systems that in some areas of the game, most notably actually being able to learn skills, player organizations are extremely powerful. They serve to weed out twinks in that they enforce certain basic roleplay standards and simply deny a class to players who aren't fit to play that class. For example, the Druids guild may decide that a particular novice player doesn't have an understanding of what it means to serve and protect nature in Achaea, and so may require that said player go learn and then write a paper on the topic. Being kicked out of the guild before you've progressed to a certain point means you will simply lose your Druid skills entirely. This kind of real, tangible influence in the game is fantastic for immersion because it really does give players significant control, and I believe that the more control you can give players, the more tied into your world they're going to be. City of Heroes, for instance, is the antithesis of this idea. It's a great game, but a poor world. One feels no responsibility towards it in-game, because there's nothing you can actually affect.

On the other hand, this kind of real, tangible influence sucks sometimes. Once you hand significant control to a playerbase it's hard to take it back. They will resent it immensely. So, we've ended up with a situation where some of our guilds (guilds control access to classes) are extremely restrictive, requiring quite a lot of time and effort to get admitted. It does legitimately serve to cull out the people who want a standard hack & slash mud, but there's no doubt it drives away a significant number of players as well. Although 10 years ago when I was in college I would have eaten it up, now, with less free time on my hands, there's no way I'd be writing essays to play a mud, whether that's to create a character or to please a guild leader.

Anyway, we're just very reluctant to mess with the structures players have created and empowered. They're important parts of the world and it's hard to know how radical changes to their level of power will cascade down to the rest of the world. We did reduce the loss you can suffer from being kicked out of a guild at the apprentice stage (Kimberly's situation) from 50% to 10%, but that was because her situation was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, not because of her specifically.

Really, the fear is that by making life too easy and reducing the consequences for your actions vis a vis other players we might end up robbing Achaea of its soul. You can lose your niche by trying to appeal to too broad an audience outside that niche.
--matt
P.S. I only mention this because it's a potentially very interesting discussion that I'd like to participate in. I (and a good portion of the Achaea team) will be in Vegas the next few days on a team vacation. So, can't reply until I'm back on Sunday or Monday!
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