[smadronia]

For those muds with a limit on levels, how do you keep your players from getting bored and either leaving or causing problems?

Many muds have a top level, and once that's gained there's not a whole lot left to do. Players gain that level, get bored sitting around, and then they'll create anohter character to level and get bored with, or start causing trouble, or leave. How do you prevent that?

I play on a mud where this is common, someone with a lot of time on their hands can level up and remort a character in a couple months. A heroing system slows them down a little, but once they're at the top all they can do is automated questing, which bores a lot of people.

Some people say to introduce a remorting system of some kind is an answer, other say more areas, or questing. Others still say take out the level cap and let people just keep going. What else is there out there?

[John]

This sounds like a H&S mud, and IMO this is a big problem with H&S muds. If the staff don't continue to include more skills, areas and quests then it gets boring for experienced players. But if they add in new stuff TOO often then it just starts to feel like YAA (yet-another-area) and gets boring.

A way to keep the mud fresh is to have player conflict, which is how RP-muds manage to keep their muds fresh without constantly adding new stuff. If the mud doesn't allow PKing at the lower levels, then allow it at the higher levels and let the players create clans and have wars over territory. That would allow for a lot of conflict and allow for new roles to be created and new tactics to be thought up to win. You don't need to RP it out, but if everyone is at the same level then you have to think carefully on how to win.

Just my 2 'sid *plink plink*

[Tamsyn@zebedee.org]

[Grey]

On Seasons, we have an autolevelling system with a very steep exponential incline as nte levels get higher (max 250 player levels). Each race has a levelling rate that absorbs a % of exp toward level, but we also use a skill based training system, and we have elsewhere to spend exp such as stat raising (capped by level, so only at the highest level can you reach your race's highest possible base stat for all 6 stats), player jobs (smithing, merchant, runesmith, etc.) which all have skills that need exp to train and a whole lot more. This is basically a hybrid of skill based training and autolevelling and it worpks this way..

Ex. Human (levelling rate 10%, exp rate 100%) kills a mob worth 100 exp. the exp rate says to give 100% of this exp to the player so he receives +100 free and +100 total experience. now taken separately, the levelling rate says we give them 10% toward a level (NOT taxed out of what was gained), so 10 exp goes towards their automagic-levelling, which is controlled by a formula in all user bodies that uses their level as a function to calculate how much experionce is needed to attain the next level.

The way to keep players from getting bored is to control their levelling to some degree OR give them as many options wherein they can spend experience points while still maintaining a goal-oriented playing style as well as keeping it fun. On seasons, we both control the levelling and give the players options to spend exp on.

[smadronia]

I've seen a handful of ways to try and keep players interested myself, although all with limited success. And yes, generally I see this problem on hack n slash muds, where role play is all but non-existant.

The best way I've found to keep people interested is to give them something to do, which usually takes it's form in some kind of questor, usually an immortal. However, I've also noticed it's short lived, people log in only for the quests, and then log back out.

I've seen other muds grant immortalhood to the players that have been at the top the longest. While it doesn't really keep them interested, technically it gets them out of the mortal realm, so it partially solves the problem.

I've also seen high level pk put in, one mud I frequent has a highland system. There's a flag for it, and if you're top level, you can fight for it. If you wint, you become the highlander. There's no exp loss or anything like that, and only people in pk can actually fight for it, which takes some of the fun out. It kept people interested for a while.

[Jherlen]

For roleplaying muds and H&S muds both, I find nothing keeps players involved more than inter-player conflict. Your high level players might have maxed their stats out, but if there's some kind of rival clan or group of the same power that they can fight with, they'll probably stick around for a while. Fighting with players, be it through RP or combat, is a lot more fun than fighting with an NPC.

Give people other goals aside from just gaining levels and getting stronger, too. Let them build houses or castles or countries, let them hire/train armies to fight for them, let them go to war with other players over areas.

Another thing is not to neglect your veteran players. A lot of times when a player has been playing your game for a year or two, he has a lot of good ideas for how to improve the game you can use. Make them feel included, listen to their ideas and value their input even if you wouldn't have thought of those things yourself. A lot of times I think the biggest factor is causing a veteran player to leave a game is that they decided the staff didn't like them or didn't appreciate them.

[Tocamat]

[Pris]

I think the important thing to remember is that it's not always your job to keep the higher level players happy. As long as you build the things you love to build then, for the most part, players will be happy to hang around and make their own amusements. Yes, sometimes those amusements will include causing trouble but those people will usually be like that no matter how much you try and placate them.
I think the way to stop high level players from becoming unruly or is simply for the creators in the mud to stay active. Just do the job of building stuff for them and for the most part they'll be content.

Pris

[Iluvatar]

We are a H&S Circle that encourages roleplay and this topic is very near and dear to my heart. We've enabled a remort system that simulates 300 levels by achievement of 100 levels, pesonalized testing to progress to 101 which allows you to restart at 1-100 again and again until finally level 103. By experience points to earn, testing requirements and redundant kill limiters it's not an easy process even for the so-called 'techno-mudders.'

We've active clans enabled and working on guilding systems but since not a PK, that's a pretty useless functional tool except to create strong alliances and friendships among people both on-line and off-line. Tough zones need groups of mortals in order to beat it, you rely on friends.

We've expanded the world by adding new zones, added in quest zones, limited maximum attainable stats to include hitroll and damroll, <phew> the list goes on and on...

Some of my peers are of the opinion the super mortals (103 Avatar in our case) have won the game, they get their name on a sign somewhere and should either A) recreate or B) go away. I'm sorry, I don't agree with that philosophy and I'm constantly striving to fix it. You just don't throw away a 103 after all that work and you have strong friendships. If bored, you cause trouble OR you power-level friends and multies, often both.

I take it as a personal challenge to try and 'out-think' and 'out-maneuver' these super morts by virtue of enhanced mobs and quests. We've created super zones with the goal being the mobs think and react to the players actions with reciprocal skills and spells via dg_scripts. Interactive, enhanced mobs plus room complexity plus embedded cross-zoned quests for almost 'one-of-kind' types of equipment (by description) seems to have quelled the tides of rebellion so far.

I know it's only a temporary fix and we're working on mort assemblies for spells and equipment to add sort of a MUSH flavor and another way to earn a certain 'unique' status by individual player. My personal project is composite mobs where by all visual indications you are fighting one mob but in reality it can be as many as I wish of varied levels and abilities.

They all hate me now.

[enigma@zebedee]

We allow people to play multiple characters (although with strict restrictions on helping one char with another) and that does help keep people interested - it takes time to play one character in every class up to high level legend.

One thing we have going for us though is that our classes are all very different - and a design requirement for a new class is that it really should do something new. No 'red mages' with different damage messages for the existing spells, or whatever. This means that playing 5 or 6 different characters up to very high level is not repetitive - and in fact just within some classes there is such variety that people have played 3 or 4 characters of that one class to legend.

It was noticable for example when we added necromancers, or even when we completely revamped warriors, a lot of our old players stopped logging on occasionally to chat and started logging on to play again.

Some of our 'power' players have 30+ characters, with 10 or more at legend.

(To explain - we have level 1->19 as normal levels then 20->29 as legend levels, once legend you can never drop down to mortal again)

Another thing as mentioned previously is the constant expansion and new areas. In particular we are doing 'legend monsters' which are more intelligent monsters, or mobile monsters or even massive multi-room monsters. (Or in the really deadly cases all of the above).

One of the latest ones just in final testing now is an Elder Wyrm a mile long, capable of devouring grazing animals whole and smashing even legends into the ground beneath its feet. That keeps people busy for a while, and (if they survive) the kill is worth a lot of xp.

[Molly]

[the_logos]

But why stop at just adding more content? Why not add more depth instead? Add new systems that interact with existing ones, allowing for emergently complex behavior among the players and player organizations. Trying to keep players infinitely entertained with the old loot n' level mechanic is a losing battle. You can't make content faster than the eager little buggers can suck it up.

I mean, if this is all that entertained players, our company would have been out of business a long time ago. Our hack n' slash mechanics are crap. We've never bothered putting much effort into them. Granted, they're better than just typing "kill monster" but they're not very good. There's almost no equipment to be gained from killing monsters either so that equipment-collecting ladder doesn't exist to climb.

...And yet our average customer on Achaea plays 35% longer than an average Everquest account. Hard to pin down precisely why that is, but considering Everquest has just about the best loot n' level ladder around, it's pretty clear that you do not need to make that sort of gameplay the focus of your world in order to entertain players.

I really think it's all about orthogonal game systems rather than trying to tack on new content to a single game system. You can add new monsters and equipment forever, but not as fast as the players can consume that content. Of course, more content and more depth is the way to go, but if I had to choose one, I'd choose depth over content.

--matt

[karlan]

[nienne]

Thanks very much for this topic... this is something we have struggled with for a long time, going from uncapped years ago (with then a strict group of players that were too powerful for anything or anyone), to a capped system where players then get bored, and adding a new area every now and then just isn't feasible to keep up with demand. Some great ideas here... definitely from experience though, the best thing is to have something dynamic that they can do - like the conflict listed below, guild wars etc. Or some system that requires play to maintain top level.

Someone listed means below to restrict levelling; a large exp curve, skills and etc to spend exp on... we've tried these and they work temporarily, but sooner or later they get back to the cap and they're still bored. Without something constant to do (either maintaining level or interacting with others) they still tend to get bored...

[Darren Brimhall]

Why not mine these top players for input and suggestions for exspanding the MUD?

Not only make it interesting for them, but for the rank newbie's as well.

Darren Brimhall

[camlorn]

What is it lately with necroing threads from around 2003-2005? Just curious here. I'm not going to say don't reply or anything--but if it's this old, and it's going to get brought up again, maybe it deserves a new thread.