29 Sep, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 41st comment:
Votes: 0
aidil said:
The way equipment persistence is handled can have a significant balance impact.

Right, I mentioned that in my first post, but the balance impact doesn't answer my question:

"I've played rent-based muds before. I understand why some people like the feeling of having a super-rare item, and I can appreciate that it creates a different sort of attitute towards equipment, and results in a different style of gameplay.

But even if that's what you want, is there really any need to make people log on butt-naked? This is particularly relevant for roleplaying muds, but also holds true for other games to a lesser extent (barring themes that provide a solid reason for why equipment is lost). Wouldn't it make sense to at least allow certain items to save on the wearer, even if it's just clothing and the like?"


aidil said:
Besides unique items that can be kept out of the game by players, there is also hording. Then there is the thing that its silly to expect that every player should have the very best equipment they can afford/use all the time.

If you don't want people having super-powered equipment, wouldn't it better to just not give it to them in the first place, rather than give them the gear and then take it away again afterwards?

But I appreciate that's a matter of preference. My point was that not all items need to be powerful, and (assuming the mud actually has clothes as physical objects, and that there's not a thematic reason for it) I don't see why people should find themselves stripped completely naked every time they log on.
12 Oct, 2009, Ing wrote in the 42nd comment:
Votes: 0
Well, from an RP perspective, I had always assumed my character wasn't going to sleep with all her weapons, armor, and whatever is stuffed into her pack. It seemed perfectly normal for stuff to be removed, in that light. Of course, I never really thought of her ever being naked and most people, if they cared, wrote something in their descriptions, as was mentioned earlier.

I wouldn't say I've always had a problem with this method of handling gear, but it certainly turned me off in the beginning. I always felt I had the disadvantage and didn't like the idea of worrying about getting new gear or having enough gold to pay the rent. At any rate, I have a hard time fitting that mechanic into RP, but most people I've seen just seem to ignore it or play it up as taxes. If you can't pay them, the powers that be take your gear away.
12 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 43rd comment:
Votes: 0
Ing said:
If you can't pay them, the powers that be take your gear away.

Grand adventurers can defeat 20-story fire-breathing dragons, but are powerless when it comes to resisting the Tax Man. :tongue:
10 Nov, 2009, Grobbak wrote in the 44th comment:
Votes: 0
Hey all, I'm new here, but the Mud (Carrionfields) I volunteer for has been around for over thirteen years.

For those of you not familiar with CF, we are an enforced RP, PK mud.

Here's how we handle this.

The majority of clothing in CF is "non-limited". Meaning, if it's a sword on a mob, you kill said mob, the sword will always be there.

Then there's "limited" clothing. Meaning, if it's a sword on a mob, you kill said mob, he will have it once (or whatever the limit is), then he won't have it again, because there is a limited amount of those swords available.

You loose nothing when you log off, quit, crash, etc. Everything is saved in your pfile.

However, since there are limited items, and players desire those limited items, you are only allowed so many days away from the game
and then you will be hit with the anti-hording code, ie: the you'll be stripped of your limited items if you don't log on for two weeks or so.

Has anyone ever seen a system similar to this out there?
10 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 45th comment:
Votes: 0
Grobbak said:
You loose nothing when you log off, quit, crash, etc. Everything is saved in your pfile.

However, since there are limited items, and players desire those limited items, you are only allowed so many days away from the game and then you will be hit with the anti-hording code, ie: the you'll be stripped of your limited items if you don't log on for two weeks or so.

Has anyone ever seen a system similar to this out there?

Both approaches are common to Diku muds. The first (everything saves when you log off/etc) is standard for the Diku/Merc branch, while the second (limited item drops with saving restrictions) is standard for the Diku/Circle branch. It's not so common to combine the two, but sometimes you'll get a Diku/Circle that removes the 'rent' command and ends up with something similar to the system you describe.
10 Nov, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 46th comment:
Votes: 0
Just to toss my reasoning for having rent into the hat….

Our game (a Diku) has rent as part of the game balance equation. We chose rent to avoid the whole item level annoyance, but still have a way to limit putting powerful gear into the hands of low level characters.

On our game, all equipment becomes damaged through use. If it isn't repaired, it eventually breaks and becomes a pile of scraps. Damaging spells also have a chance to hit equipment, so that AOE fireball might not do a whole lot of damage to the players, but it may cause their gear to suffer and thus soften them up for further attacks.

Additionally, if you quit at any random point, all your gear drops to the ground where you are. It remains there until someone/something finds it, or the game reboots. Our humanoid mobs are smart enough to compare gear and loot/equip stuff they find that's better than what they're using.

If you rent at an inn, you have to be able to afford one day's rent to rent out with all your stuff. If you're gone for more than a day, the innkeeper will pull from your bank account, and then start selling off items until you're paid up, or have nothing left.

Because of the way this works, you CAN take a lowbie along to kill a big mob, and they CAN loot the super-cool weapon of doom. They can then go around having fun doing lots of damage to stuff for a few hours, but they won't be able to keep it because they won't have the kind of steady income to afford the rent every day.

It seemed to work pretty well back in the day.
10 Nov, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 47th comment:
Votes: 0
What prevents people from finding safe places to just hang out idle, to hold on to that "super-cool weapon of doom" without paying rent?
10 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 48th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Our game (a Diku) has rent as part of the game balance equation. We chose rent to avoid the whole item level annoyance,

Interesting - you explicitly chose to add it? I thought modern muds only used rent because it came built in to their codebase.

quixadhal said:
Because of the way this works, you CAN take a lowbie along to kill a big mob, and they CAN loot the super-cool weapon of doom. They can then go around having fun doing lots of damage to stuff for a few hours, but they won't be able to keep it because they won't have the kind of steady income to afford the rent every day.

It seemed to work pretty well back in the day.

I remember playing a couple of muds like that around late 93 or early 94. On one of them it took me about an hour of play each day just to afford enough rent to keep my equipment until the next day. I soon got fed up of that, so I gave everything away and deleted my character. I forgot to pay my rent on the other, lost my gear, and quit there too.

It still doesn't answer the question though - do you really need to strip them naked? Surely the innkeeper would throw them out rather than selling off their underpants?

David Haley said:
What prevents people from finding safe places to just hang out idle, to hold on to that "super-cool weapon of doom" without paying rent?

Idling rules probably. Still, with some clever planning (and an active clan) I imagine you could avoid the need for paying rent, or even set up your own competing locker service, by ensuring someone is online at all times. I could see the same approach being used for the old school LPMuds with their "your pants drop on the floor when you quit" approach.
10 Nov, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 49th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I could see the same approach being used for the old school LPMuds with their "your pants drop on the floor when you quit" approach.


Doubt it would work there, actually. If your LP is old-school enough to drop-on-quit,
it's probably old-school enough to do a scheduled reboot every day.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
10 Nov, 2009, Scandum wrote in the 50th comment:
Votes: 0
Random crashes I'd guess, it's included as a standard feature in most Dikus.

Might be an option to make repairing equipment an alternative to paying rent. Then again, people might continue to actively play for a while just to afford rent, though that wouldn't keep people around forever.
10 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 51st comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
Random crashes I'd guess, it's included as a standard feature in most Dikus.

I could see the old-school LPMud reboots Cratylus mentioned being a problem because the eq never saves in the first place, but as far as I recall the rent-based Dikus didn't wipe eq on a crash (unless it was lying on the ground).

Scandum said:
Might be an option to make repairing equipment an alternative to paying rent.

Could do, depends why you want rent. If it's to stop lowbies from having supergear, or simply to serve as a cash sink, then repairs would be a pretty nice alternative IMO. But if you want to keep rare items in circulation, it's not going to be enough unless rare items automatically degrade over time.
10 Nov, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 52nd comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
What prevents people from finding safe places to just hang out idle, to hold on to that "super-cool weapon of doom" without paying rent?


That would be the daily reboot, a common feature of most DikuMUD's, even when they've been debugged well enough to not really need it. :)

Our attitude was that if someone really wanted to go to the effort of killing a big boss with their high level character to re-twink a lowbie every single day, fine. There's only so much one can do if the players are dead set on working around the system, and the rare cases of this happening are usually someone leveling an alt, or trying to get their friend up to their level fast. Either way, it beats the whining from people who group up and help kill something, only to discover the rewards are just one level too high for them to use.
10 Nov, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 53rd comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Either way, it beats the whining from people who group up and help kill something, only to discover the rewards are just one level too high for them to use.

That can be annoying too (although I'd still prefer it to rent) - but those aren't your only two options. You could also do things such as:

(1) Allow players to use any level of gear, but only save stuff their level or lower (which would be a bit like the scenario you described with rent, except players could always keep their usual gear).

(2) Allow players to wear a maximum total level of gear, so they could use that Ubersword (but nothing else), or a few powerful items, or a whole load of weak items, etc.

(3) Allow players to wear any item they like, but provide them with reduced benefits if they don't meet the level - so a level 10 longsword that had +4 hit/dam in the hands of a level 5 player would only give +2 hit/dam.
10 Nov, 2009, Runter wrote in the 54th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
What prevents people from finding safe places to just hang out idle, to hold on to that "super-cool weapon of doom" without paying rent?


That's precisely what has happened MUDs in the past I have played. Also I'm not sure that designing your application to require daily reboots is best case.
10 Nov, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 55th comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
Also I'm not sure that designing your application to require daily reboots is best case.

I agree. In fact I find the notion a little preposterous, to be completely honest.
11 Nov, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 56th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Runter said:
Also I'm not sure that designing your application to require daily reboots is best case.

I agree. In fact I find the notion a little preposterous, to be completely honest.


Because you're spoiled. :surprised:

Even assuming a daily reboot wasn't required due to crappy coding (memory leaks), in most of the environments we used to run MUD servers, it would STILL have been required due to administrative demands. Remember, most MUDs were run on university equipment, and generally run by students. Getting permission to run a game was hard enough, trying to get permission to run one that would take a significant amount of resources (over half the machine's RAM, a good chunk of disk space, and keeping the CPU load at 40% or more) was harder still.

In our case, we had to limit the number of logins to < 40 AND limit the RAM usage to 8MB AND renice the process to 10 in order to be allowed to run the game during class hours (8am - 8pm). We were also told to prepare for a reboot of the hardware at a set time every day, even though it might not actually be reset every day.

Those days are long gone, of course. Now, everyone reading this probably has their own machine, and possibly even a VM or three. There's no longer any danger of hitting the memory or CPU limit, and even Windows doesn't need a daily reboot anymore. :)

Still, there are plenty of commercial games that do the same thing. EVE-Online does database maintenance every day, and at that time things also get repopulated, or expired. Do they need to kick people out to do so? No… but it's easier to get people to accept a small downtime on a regular schedule, than to have them wonder why it's laggy (because it's running on the backup database, or writing everything to the transaction log while the backup is running) at certain times.

So, no… designing your game around such a think is probably pretty silly. Taking advantage of it, on the other hand, isn't.
11 Nov, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 57th comment:
Votes: 0
For what it's worth, I didn't mean that the idea was, is and always has been preposterous; I know why it might have made sense a decade or two ago. But as you say, those days are long gone. :wink:

A daily reboot for things like maintenance are a different story, though. (Do they really need it to be daily, though?)
11 Nov, 2009, Runter wrote in the 58th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
David Haley said:
Runter said:
Also I'm not sure that designing your application to require daily reboots is best case.

I agree. In fact I find the notion a little preposterous, to be completely honest.


Because you're spoiled. :surprised:

Even assuming a daily reboot wasn't required due to crappy coding (memory leaks), in most of the environments we used to run MUD servers, it would STILL have been required due to administrative demands. Remember, most MUDs were run on university equipment, and generally run by students. Getting permission to run a game was hard enough, trying to get permission to run one that would take a significant amount of resources (over half the machine's RAM, a good chunk of disk space, and keeping the CPU load at 40% or more) was harder still.

In our case, we had to limit the number of logins to < 40 AND limit the RAM usage to 8MB AND renice the process to 10 in order to be allowed to run the game during class hours (8am - 8pm). We were also told to prepare for a reboot of the hardware at a set time every day, even though it might not actually be reset every day.

Those days are long gone, of course. Now, everyone reading this probably has their own machine, and possibly even a VM or three. There's no longer any danger of hitting the memory or CPU limit, and even Windows doesn't need a daily reboot anymore. :)

Still, there are plenty of commercial games that do the same thing. EVE-Online does database maintenance every day, and at that time things also get repopulated, or expired. Do they need to kick people out to do so? No… but it's easier to get people to accept a small downtime on a regular schedule, than to have them wonder why it's laggy (because it's running on the backup database, or writing everything to the transaction log while the backup is running) at certain times.

So, no… designing your game around such a think is probably pretty silly. Taking advantage of it, on the other hand, isn't.


In this day and age I'll pass.
40.0/58