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Milawe · 11-22-2008, 03:00 PM

I was thinking more of the design phase before the mud is even open. I'm not sure there's any way to predict if a mud is "too big", but I always thought that the more places to explore the better. Though, on the flip side, if you have too many places to explore that have nothing to explore in them, you could actually be hurting the game rather than adding to it. People would stop search and stop caring that there were so many places to look around in, and they'd essentially just stop looking. Then they would miss all the neat treasures you DO put in becuase they are no longer looking.

For example, say there's a mud with 100 rooms. Of those 100 rooms, 25 have something to discover in them. A person would be relatively willing to explore the 75 other mundane rooms in hopes of finding the 25 special rooms. If the mud was 1000 rooms large and also had 25 special rooms, people would find special rooms much less often and might actually just think there's no point in looking.

I wonder how to determine what's "too big" before players ever enter the picture. Perhaps it's impossible to do without players.

(BTW, cool decision tree! I don't know how I missed that discussion.)

11-22-2008, 03:00 PM	#4
Milawe Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: USA Home MUD: Threshold RPG Home MUD: Stash Home MUD: Archons of Avenshar Posts: 653	Re: When is big too big? I was thinking more of the design phase before the mud is even open. I'm not sure there's any way to predict if a mud is "too big", but I always thought that the more places to explore the better. Though, on the flip side, if you have too many places to explore that have nothing to explore in them, you could actually be hurting the game rather than adding to it. People would stop search and stop caring that there were so many places to look around in, and they'd essentially just stop looking. Then they would miss all the neat treasures you DO put in becuase they are no longer looking. For example, say there's a mud with 100 rooms. Of those 100 rooms, 25 have something to discover in them. A person would be relatively willing to explore the 75 other mundane rooms in hopes of finding the 25 special rooms. If the mud was 1000 rooms large and also had 25 special rooms, people would find special rooms much less often and might actually just think there's no point in looking. I wonder how to determine what's "too big" before players ever enter the picture. Perhaps it's impossible to do without players. (BTW, cool decision tree! I don't know how I missed that discussion.)