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Old 01-20-2012, 02:02 PM   #2
camlorn
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Join Date: Aug 2011
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Re: Longtime mudder with ADD puts on his mad scientist hat

Hi,
So, i've essentially done the same thing you have: jumped around between muds for a very long time.

Would I play your mud? No,.

Here's why:
If there's no actual combat, and if it's only telling me I won, it'd be just about the same as rolling a dice rl; the progression has meaning in that the range of acceptible win probability goes up. I can get the same enjoyment out of rolling a dice and posting the results.

If you don't like automated combat, consider a manual system. Good examples are dark legacy with it's jab/slash/thrust system, for which every attack has an associated timer after which you can't do anything, and godwars 2 which is a good example of what to do in a mud, despite the administration problems I think it has (KaVir's great, but the no rules thing sucks imho).

Essentially combat is why I'd play your game. With an instant win/lose system like you describe, I can theoretically get to the top in an hour, if I know what I'm doing; if you like that system, then you'd have to implement the "adventures" system seen in so many browser games, or something similar, and at that point it might as well be a browser game and not a mud.

Progression appears to be fine; you'd probably want to implement stats as floating point values and show the decimal, with a nonlinear scaling system, however; that is, it takes longer to get from 99 to 100 than it does to get from 20 to 21. Also, make the decimal worth something. 21.5 should be noticeably better than 21; not unbelieveably better, but enough that the player notices it. And, you might have spells/skills follow the same system: using them raises them and, for instance, fireball is dependent on a skill called pyromancy and raises pyromancy as you use it, unlocking more fire spells and making those you do have work better.

You might consider an unlimited progression system; I've seen it done well in the one mud I know of that has it. Given that your entire mud is going to be bare-bones and that you're going to have random dungeons anyway, it doesn't matter where the top is as there's never a lack of end-game content.

On the topic of random dungeons, great idea. In fact, I'd go so far as to say make that the main feature of the mud. You've surely seen diablo-esk item generation, so that's random eq for you; you've obviously played nethack or at least know how it woriks. Imho, take some of the ideas from nethack and put them in a mud, and then add some that only make sense to a mud: mystical pedistals that, when something is placed upon them, destroy that something and affect rooms within five units, for example. On that topic, multi-room combat isn't something I've seen too much of; I'm not talking roomless here, but multi-room, if you get the difference.

Finally, blind accessibility in this day and age of gaming is a plus. I myself won't play your mud if you require that I read an ascii map, to navigate or to fight, overuse non-alphanumeric symbols, the list goes on; togglable blind-mode, which has been used with success on some of the major muds, is a good idea. This opens up a whole demographic of players which are becoming a significant portion of the mudding community; I place estimates at somewhere around 3 or 5 percent, atm, but it's probably higher. There's also web sites devoted to blind gaming on which you could post, which few muds do, gaining yourself a pool of potential new players.

And the final point, as this message is huge, you've not shown commitment yet. If you actually don't abandon it and finish it, you'll get players then. I, personally, would want to see more than I wrote this in a couple hours, and am now going to make a mud from it; does anyone want to play?
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