I am having a hard time distinguishing whether you are being genuine in your misinterpretation of my clear and well-thought out argument (I spent 4 hours crafting it) or if you are being deliberately obtuse. I am really only interested in the ideas. So I will try to be clear about my objections to your quick retorts.


I do not see how anyone can predict when a player is going to die. You could stand invis behind specific players and kill them or buff the mons they are fighting, I suppose. I really do not see how anyone can predict normal player death at the hands of monsters. It may be true that players die in a random dispersion across the mud, but it does not mean that players will find the corpses+eq with the same randomness. Again, I point to my earlier discussion about how it will not be random. Moreover, it will set up incentives for players to do strange things like speedwalking the whole mud in order to discover the latest corpse. I think this is undesirable. Maybe other admin do not object to this. I don't know.


I do not understand what your point is here. But I will address the 'No' part. Like I said, it is a matter of preferences and tastes. Your definition is not the same as mine. I can live with that. I feel that my explanation of balance is the same as the commonly used definition. You do not feel that way. I can live with that too.


If there are 3 players, X, Y and Z. It does not matter whether X, Y or Z is earning more, as long as they earned it. It is just names. What you have indicated is something completely different. I never said that in every period every thing must sway towards one player. What you have described is really not at all like what I stated earlier.


If everything were easy, then it would be easy for everyone and that would be fair. I would agree with that sentiment. But that is not how I have described balance/fair in my examples. Again, you have intentionally misinterpreted my position. Quite simply, players must earn what they get.


I am not sure I follow your point. Can you clarify. I will try to address what I think you mean. In my game all paths (eg. h&s, mining and foraging) are open to all players at the same time. In the shortrun, you can choose to specialize or dabble. It is the admin's responsbility to keep all methods of gaining power equal in difficulty and in time-consumption. That is the example of balance I was providing. I never stated that any path is limited to any group of players. Nor anything like that.


There are several interesting points in there. I will try to elaborate on each of them. I may have inadvertantly mixed them by trying to combine too many ideas into one paragraph in my previous post. 1) I do believe that randomness is undesirable. 2) I am not sure that randomness leads to unbalance. 3) I am sure that something which seems to be random, like people permadeathing and dropping their eq where they died, may not be a) random, b) lead to a random reassignment of players picking it up and most importantly, c) it will lead to undesirable incentives like the speedwalking eq hunting, which I described earlier. Most of my game is based on the players relying on a set of rules. Those rules happen to be logical and Order-ly. So yes, Order does have a balance meaning for my mud. I think this is true of most muds. So my mud is not particularly different from most others in that respect.


I think we disagree here. I think it has everything to do with balance. See my previous paragraph for a clarification. I think we do agree that creating an incentive for players to speedwalk the whole mud to try to collect eq is not desireable. Everyone can run around equally fast in my mud. And that aspect is fair to each player. It is the permadeath+eqdrop which leads to the undesirable incentives. That was my point.


Here you have highlighted my point. Yes, I want it to be very difficult for L1s to find high level eq. But if a high level player is for example, poisoned by a giant scorpion and dies right outside of town, then the L1 can easily pass by and discover the free eq. I want to discourage this scenario. I think is a very likely outcome in muds. So I think it is an appropriate counterexample. Permadeath not only makes L1-finds-good-eq scenario more likely, but it has all kinds of other undesirable incentives, which I outlined above and in my last post.


I strongly disagree. A closed system is much harder to code and manage. I made a detailed post on this topic somewhere. I will paste it.
http://rome.spoonster.net/phpbb/viewtopi...
see post #3 of that thread.


I think we just disagree about the nature of balance. I believe that issues like keeping every avenue to power in equal difficulty to be totally relevant to balance. If you do not, then fine. If I can comment for a moment, you make your statements of opinion with such force that they come across as brute force denials of other people's opinions. I think if you tempered your statements like 'it has nothing to do with balance' with some more neutral words like 'I think balance is X, Y and Z.' then you may not come across so negatively. I do not believe that an abstract concept like balance will have the same meaning to everyone. I would hope that you would allow for that same possibility. In the past I have read your replies and they seemed much more diplomatic.



I am not confusing balance and interesting at all. I think we may both agree that variety is a formula for making interesting things. There is no confusion for me about that.

I have clearly stated what I mean by balance. Within my definition, everything I have described makes sense. If you do not agree, that is fine. I do not require agreement. I was just hoping to discuss the pros and cons of permadeath. I presented my argument why I think it is illogical and undesirable. I have not heard one single counterpoint to my argument. All you have done is twist and critique my language. You are pretty good at it, btw. TMC, TMS and MudBytes seem to have degenerated into places where the primary sport is critiquing language and intentionally trying to misinterpret or obfuscate the issues. I find that very sad. Finding no ideas here, I will probably go back to lurking on mudlab. It may be more quiet there, but at least there are ideas there. I will not be putting such effort into discussions if no one is willing to discuss.

I am sorry if that came across that way. I believe that there are several good definitions of balance. Any one of which could be perfectly valid. I do not think you are wrong by not buying into a). That may work for your mud. I have no idea. My statement was directed at people who have permadeath and do not beleive in a) and b). They will have to buy into something, which will probably be 'these are the rules of this mud'. I have spent a great deal of time designing my mud using those 2 principles. So they are very important. I certainly hope they are correct. I will to go Beta late this year. So hopefully, I will have some evidence one way or the other.

I do allow for different perspectives. Moreover, I think a mud could be successful with permadeath. I just think it adds additional complications and incentives, which I am unwilling to address. I also have a logical argument against it. I thought I did a good job of stating it.

I'm not sure why your ideas get to be clear and well-thought out, whereas mine are demoted to mere quick retorts, with an implication of being neither clear nor well-thought out. I'm also not sure why you think saying things like that is conducive to helpful debate. Given that I am not inclined to spend much time on this.

Re: random drops.
If players die with basically random distribution, then we're pretty much done – we have established that equipment will be basically randomly distributed across the world.


In that case it seems like we're basically done. There's no sense arguing about something if we aren't even using the terms the same way.



Please don't tell me what I am intentionally misinterpreting.


I was pointing out that balance has nothing to do with number of available paths and everything to do with making sure that people have the same risk/reward opportunities with respect to other players along the paths available to them.



Fair enough.


So, is it random, or not?


I don't think this statement makes sense. You are suggesting that every MUD is more unbalanced as it introduces random factors, because removing all probability increases order which increases balance…

If I may use a more mathematical definition that might clear things up, balance means that everybody may obtain the same expected reward for the same expected risk. If there is no randomness, great, the computations are easier. If there is randomness, you need to deal with probabilistic expectation. Not a big problem.



Yes, we agree that making such an incentive is bad. I think we disagree as to whether creating or removing that incentive has anything to do with balance. I say it is irrelevant to balance.


I disagree, because a creature likely to be able to kill a high-level character is likely to be quite far away from town. Therefore, in the most frequent case, the high-level character will die far away from the low-level areas. Therefore, it will be statistically uncommon for this scenario to occur, and hence it is not a great counter-example.



I, uh, think you misread my sentence.


And this is precisely what goes against the common understanding of balance… Every game has things to do that aren't terribly exciting, rewarding, or risky. That doesn't make the game unbalanced. To suggest otherwise is, well, slightly preposterous: it would mean that a perfectly "balanced" game is made less balanced as soon as a tiny, uninteresting and unrewarding path is introduced!


I apologize if you felt that way. For what it's worth, I felt it was obvious that all of this is my opinion, and adding "I think that" in front of every sentence gets cumbersome after a while. :smile:

Also, if I may make a comment of my own, one of my very first replies to you was that you seem to be using a different definition of balance, so I would think it's fairly clear that I allow for different definitions of balance. I've argued a few times for why I think your definition – acceptable as it may be – is not the common one; I don't think you've provided arguments for why most people share your view.




I started this whole thing saying it wasn't my view. I'm not sure why you are expecting me to defend to the death a view that I explicitly said I don't necessarily share.


I find it sad and offensive that you cannot accept criticism of your points without accusing other people of intentionally twisting, misinterpreting and obfuscating your points that would be otherwise without reproach were it not for your interlocutor's intentional, malicious twisting.

on dark legacy we had the genius idea of making permadeath optional.

I believe this is specifically where we disagree. I see the permadeath as 2 separate events. 1) The player dies. The eq drops to the floor. Now the location of this drop may be randomly distributed across the mud. I think we agree on this. 2) the player(s) who pick up this eq are not randomly determined. I think this is where we disagree. I think the eq will not be evenly redistributed. I think that the permadeath rule will encourage players to engage in this speedwalking behavior. The players who do that will end up getting more eq. In my view, unjustly acquired eq. As I stated in my original argument, it violates a) of my precious beliefs for world-balance.


I understand. I do not believe that 'number' of paths matters. I do not remember ever mentioning it. I do believe that however many paths you do have, that they should be equal in difficulty and time-consumption. I also think we are on the same page wrt to risk/rewards.


I said, permadeath may seem random. [It may even be randomly distributed across the mud geographically.] But the outcomes, the redistribution of eq, is not random.


I am suggesting that some muds can have rules that are permanent and some muds can have rules which vary. I am considering a new world in my mud where the rules (eg. gravity, magic success, etherealness/substance) vary from one moment to the next. In that world, Chaos is the stronger effect. In that world, the players should come to understand that casting fireball during one rd may result in a fireball, but next round casting fireball may result in nothing or even a lightning storm. I think players come to expect that the same rules apply consistently in a given area. So on my primary world, players can rely on the fireball to appear the same in rd 1 as in rd 10. However, on the new world, which I mentioned, players should expect the 'rule' to be that things will not occur consistently. I have used rule in a loose meaning here. To reinterate, I do think Chaos and Order have relevance to balance. I do believe that even chaotic events should apply themselves to the world consistently, in the way I have described with the fireball. A chaotic/random event should not allow one player to gain an advantage over another. I am concerned about the scenario where a mud has random catastrophic events which can harm the player. eg. A meteorstorm falls on the player causing them injury. On the one hand you could have it damage them physically. This might be hard to implement fairly. If the damage is trivial so both L1s and L80s will survive, then it will be a trivial event for the majority of players. Then what is the point? If you make the damage substantial, then it could kill a L1. Is that fair? I do not think so. On the other hand, you could make the storm damage buildings only. So that player's houses, keeps and towers are damaged. This could work, as the player is not permanently harmed; it is a recoverable event for any level player. So in these ways, Chaos/Order matter to balance and fairness.


I do not claim that every action or activity needs to contain difficulty or time-consumption. I only claim that those paths which lead to powergain should. Can you give me an example of your concern how the introduction of an unrewarding path will disrupt things? I am designing my game so that a player can choose to learn skills x, y and z. And at 20% skill in each they gain a new command/ability. The new command/ability gained at 20% x is roughly equivalent in powerlevel as that gained at 20% y or 20% z. I designed it that way to prevent people from learning (fictional) supercoolskill j up to 10% where the best command is gained, then abandoning it and learning the next skill. Do you see a problem with the 20% approach? I used a similar balancing design for guild power acquisitions. This is the essence of my approach to balance.


It was never my contention that it was your view. But you defend it adamantly nonetheless.

When I first read your statement, my first reaction was, 'what is the point?'. But after I think about it, I think it is a great experiment. Are you observing the choices of every player? What are the counts?

Why aren't they? Does it not depend on:
- who happens to be online at that time
- who happens to be in the area at that time
- who happens to come across the location where the player died

These factors are not completely random (e.g. unless you have many players from all timezones, people tend to be online in general periods of time). But, they are fairly close to it.


I'm not saying that they earned it… I am saying that it will not affect overall game balance in the long run if an individual happens to get lucky every once in a while, if everybody has the same chance of being lucky. Of course, I am saying that with my definition of "balance"…


I'm afraid not, because I think it doesn't make much sense to say that all paths must be equal in their difficulty and time-consumption. As I said, take a "perfectly balanced" game, under your definition: all paths have equal difficulty and time-consumption. Introduce a new path that is basically a waste of time: very easy, very low reward, but people find it amusing (e.g. fishing in the creek). Is the game balance suddenly thrown to waste? I would think not…

If you are on the same page as me, then what you agreed to is that the expected risk vs. expected reward ratios must be the same for every player in order for there to be balance – not that for a given player, all paths present the same risk/reward ratio.


OK… let's analyze the logic of what you're saying. First, you say that death may be randomly distributed across locations. How can that possibly be? Only if players are also randomly distributed across locations in the first place: you cannot die where you are not located.

But now, if players are randomly distributed across locations, then it stands to reason that, for any given player, there is a random chance of being in proximity to a death location.

Hence, the redistribution of equipment must be at the very least non-deterministic, because (a) the death locations and (b) the pick-up-player locations are random.


I have to admit that I don't understand how one is supposed to navigate a world in which every action has a random consequence, and hence why it would be fun, beyond the initial novelty, to play in such a game.


I don't know what this means… Chaotic and consistency are hard to reconcile. I can only guess that what you mean is that all players experience the same probabilistic effects.


Yes, exactly, hence why randomness is not at all a problem for balance as long as it is applied evenly to all players. Insofar as all players feel the same randomness, the fact that randomness exists is irrelevant. In fact, many people would tell you that randomness in fact encourages balance in the long run because of its normalizing effects over time.


If that is what you meant, I don't think you chose the best way to go about saying it. You said, I cite:
"I do believe that however many paths you do have, that they should be equal in difficulty and time-consumption"
This says that all paths must be equal in difficulty/time. Therefore, you cannot have paths that aren't difficult or time-consuming if a single path is difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, it is not acceptable to have a path that happens to be easier than others.

That is however not what you just said.

Additionally, we return to the problem of what exactly it means to be balanced. You never seem to consider balance as referring to inter-player; instead, you only focus on what any one individual can do. I've said it before but I'll say it again; why do you not consider balance to be relevant with respect to opportunities across players? If you can do something and get more than I can for doing the same thing, there is a balance problem. It is not really a problem if I can waste time doing one thing, knowing the reward is small, or do something else, knowing it'll be more productive.


I do not believe that I do. I am criticizing your reasons for criticizing it, that is true, but I am not saying that people should adopt the opinion that permanent death is great.

I know is from page two, I am still reading through.

I just wanted to point out the following.

Say you involve perma-death in your game, you make sure you carefully balance PK(in whatever form) and death is a rare thing.
Suppose you further have systems where a person cannot leave a room in the way they came in, and further that the only available exit is locked, or hidden.
Then again, think about having a creature/mob/etc that hates X type of character, or X level characters.
A 'friendly' guide offers to take some other adventurers on a run to a location to get some really cool gear, maybe some nice materials, whatever.
This 'friendly' guide leads them into the room with a locked exit, maybe saying (oop afk a moment, just head over yonder ill be right there!)
The other walks in, gets ambushed has no key nor escape, dies.
'Friendly' guide sneaks in, takes the gear, unlocks the door, and repeats.

The point here (this is a real example by the way from a MUD i played long ago) is that no matter how meticulous and careful you are to strike a balance
is that someone will simply want to revel in someone else's misfortune. As David pointed out, it could be a non perma death attacking someone over and over
to really mess them up. In this case it is a player using the environment itself to act as his knife, and the consequence is someone losing a character, permanently.

Whats the answer? Kill the person who enticed the other to stroll to his doom? Apologize to the dead player, but say they should have been more careful? Its
a really fine line to walk.

I personally do not like perma-death. I am not saying people cannot use it, or shouldnt use it, etc. Just that I personally do not like it.

Though, it was fun using my drow meld ability to entice people to go into the cage, with a zombie that had a penchant for eating players. Though the name of the
game was to kill others, so in the end it was applauded. Ah the good old days.

-Syn

Actually, that situation (of tricking people to their death) is a problem whether or not you have permanent death: it's a problem as soon as characters drop any equipment upon death. But permanent death certainly makes the problem that much more damaging…

But to be honest, it still is a good argument against permanent death IMO. When situations like that can have disastrous consequences for people, you start to wonder whether or not those consequences should exist in the first place.

Actually, I would tend to take it a step further and argue that it's also a good argument against losing equipment on death – or at least death by NPC.

Absolutely. I figured it was more an admonition to be weary what you allow, and if the risk is total loss, how that can be achieved.

In that particular instance, the game was designed to allow for total equipment loss, and some other penalties, and the point was player killing. It was an example from a non perma death game. The example was true though.

My friend and I received allot of equipment that way, and subsequently were hunted as nefarious twins. It was fun, everyone understood the concept and those who didnt and further didnt like it simply left. It was fun, even being hounded through the streets by a group of 10 players.

Somehow I don't get the same level of heart racing action anymore. I hope to rekindle that with my project, at least for myself and my friends.

Anyway, thats another topic, and I must say, this whole chaos business.. I do not agree at all with Detah here. I would also point out on the 'well thought out post' point that mandarin is clear to a person fluent in mandarin. If you dont speak mandarin its not clear to you. The point being, assuming something is clear to everyone, by the person who wrote it, is asinine. Just a thought.

-Syn

If looting equipment from a slain player makes a low-level character hyper-powerful, then that is certainly a massive problem; but it's a problem that seems to me to have relatively little to do with permadeath or the lack of it. Looting high-powered equipment doesn't cease to be a problem simply because the slain character reincarnates; the equipment is still gone, and some passing level 1 schmuck may still happen to stumble on it before its original owner can recover it.

The basic problem in that scenario is that there is far too much emphasis on equipment as being what determines character power. That's not a healthy thing, regardless of whether you have permadeath or not.

This is an area where it's actually quite useful to invoke realism: in the real world (or a world that resembles it) the difference in effectiveness between someone who has no experience of sword-fighting and who is wielding a cheap sword, and the same combat newbie wielding a Hattori Hanzo sword, is actually very minor. The difference between an expert swordsman wielding a cheap sword and a newbie wielding a cheap sword is huge. There can be a very big difference between an unarmoured man and someone wearing plate armour, but the art of fighting while wearing heavy armour is something that also requires a great deal of very specialised training to do properly. Put a newbie in heavy armour and he'll barely be able to move; he'll probably just fall over. An experienced armour-user knows exactly which movements the armour allows and instinctively uses only those movements - he is therefore surprisingly dexterous and fast. But it needs a lot of "muscle-memory" training to get that way.

If the power-determining emphasis is shifted from equipment to character skills, then loss or gain of equipment makes relatively difference to power, and looting ceases to be much of an issue. The same can potentially apply to anything else a slain character might happen to be carrying. In this case, one could (perhaps) make out a case for permadeath being a useful levelling influence: it takes highly skilled characters out of circulation, and their skills die with them rather than being passed to their killer (or to anyone else who passes by) thus clearing the field for lower-level characters to advance. But, either way, neither the presence nor absence of permadeath will help solve the problem of over-powered equipment. That's a separate problem in its own right.

As I was trying to point out earlier, there aren't "several definitions" of balance (maybe several wordings, but they all mean the same thing). Balance, basically put, is just the lack of bias. That fact does not change no matter what perspective of a game situation that you're looking at. What does change is what, exactly, you're referring to as balanced or not balanced about said situation. In this particular case, you can't just generalize and say "X is not balanced"; you have to say "X is not balanced with respect to Y, but it is balanced with respect to Z". These are not different definitions - only different points-of-view.



You may have a logical argument against it, but as has been shown, others have logical arguments for it. Basically what you did was attempt to say "according to definitive sources, my opinion is more correct than that of those who disagree with it", which is just silly. An opinion, by definition, is neither right nor wrong.

Even within the context of the post I'm replying to, you're implying that anyone who doesn't buy into your "a" and "b" views of balance must obviously only be using the "it's my game and I'll run it how I want to" excuse. This is not an accurate assumption at all. People may have a list of "c-z" views that you haven't even thought of before.

Obviously this situation depends on a whole slew of other factors that you neglected to mention. Is the friendly guide an appointed position of responsibility by MUD administration? If so, then the outcome is simple - the victim gets his/her character back and the guide is stripped of his/her powers and title (and most likely banned or given some other punishment). If the friendly guide is "unofficial", then yes, it's an unfortunate scenario for the victim, but that's life. If the character is new enough to the game that they can be so easily tricked and slain, then they obviously haven't put much time and effort into playing the game and don't stand to lose very much in dying. If, however, they are not new to the game, then they will have learned a valuable lesson for further game-play (and probably should have known better to begin with). I don't plan on treating my players with kid gloves. While this type of policy may be unpopular with less experienced MUD players and may even drive people away, the alternative is a game where the administrator and/or staff are constantly having to police the game instead of spending time developing and improving it.

That said, my game is going to be PK-encouraged, so situations such as this are not going to incur very much sympathy from me to begin with.

Edit: Also, while preying on new players is kind of "low", I think that tricking people into inescapable situations is part of the strategy within PK that makes it fun for those who enjoy that kind of game-play. Players will be well aware when (if?) they choose to play my particular game that they should take extreme caution with their character(s) and how serious of a penalty death will incur. As I said earlier, I don't know that I want this penalty to necessarily be permanent death yet, and I just wanted to kind of see what the consensus was on systems relating to it (and this conversation is definitely helping, so thanks to everyone for your opinions thus far).

I think for purposes of this discussion that (1) and (2) are balance-favoring things. But for other issues, like one-time-ever quests, will generate a feeling of dissatisfaction and even unfairness. I do disagree with (3) for the permadeath scenario. I think with permadeath, you set up incentives which lead to undesirable outcomes. That is, some players will do this speedwalking thing. There may even be more insidious incentives created, like players who shadow other players who enter uberareas, just waiting for that player to die. I have spent many hours getting the monster's difficulty level to be equal with the rewards. So I do not want a good 'follower' to reap the eq rewards of that monster. I see this is unbalancing. (This follows from my principle a of balance) I do not believe that just because there is equal opportunity for this speedwalking/tracking behavior, that it will not affect balance. I think it will affect balance. I think it is the admin's responsibility to avoid creating scenarios where a player can unjustly acquire eq (powerful or not). I think the permadeath+eq drop will lead to that outcome.

Quote

Detah said:

I do believe that however many paths you do have, that they should be equal in difficulty and time-consumption. I also think we are on the same page wrt to risk/rewards.

I'm afraid not, because I think it doesn't make much sense to say that all paths must be equal in their difficulty and time-consumption. As I said, take a "perfectly balanced" game, under your definition: all paths have equal difficulty and time-consumption. Introduce a new path that is basically a waste of time: very easy, very low reward, but people find it amusing (e.g. fishing in the creek). Is the game balance suddenly thrown to waste? I would think not…
If you are on the same page as me, then what you agreed to is that the expected risk vs. expected reward ratios must be the same for every player in order for there to be balance – not that for a given player, all paths present the same risk/reward ratio.

We are indeed on the same page. Everyone faces the same difficulty curve when 'learning' the mining skill. Everyone earns the same rewards from attaining x% mining. Moreover, I have tried to calibrate each new ability (whether it is gained from 20% mining or 20% foraging) to reap roughly the same level of reward. I am not saying that every skill/ability is the same. I am not saying that getting from 20% x to 40% x is the same difficulty. I am also not saying that every difficulty in the game is the same.

Quote

First, you say that death may be randomly distributed across locations. How can that possibly be?

Easy. I just made 2 small assumptions. First, that monsters of every difficulty are randomly distributed geographically. Second, that players may be killed by a monster with no particular cluster areas on the map. There is no pk on my mud. So monster's attacks will be the leading cause of death. The scorpion poison scenario makes the whole thing even less random, since there will be a predisposition for players to rush to town to seek aid if severely poisoned.

Quote

Detah said:

However, on the new world, which I mentioned, players should expect the 'rule' to be that things will not occur consistently.

I have to admit that I don't understand how one is supposed to navigate a world in which every action has a random consequence, and hence why it would be fun, beyond the initial novelty, to play in such a game.

I never said every action has a random consequence. I said some actions like fireballs, gravity, and substance will vary from moment to moment. There is actually a logic behind it, but I will not divulge that here (some secrets must be kept secret). The definition of Science Fiction is to make an aberration out of one or more properties of our world. In this world, I have just altered a handful of actions. When it is done, I invite you to come play it. Then you can determine for yourself if it is fun for more than novelty. I think it will be.

Quote

Detah said:

A chaotic/random event should not allow one player to gain an advantage over another.

Yes, exactly, hence why randomness is not at all a problem for balance as long as it is applied evenly to all players.

I think that randomness can be applied which leads to undesirable outcomes. Some of those outcomes may be unbalancing. Some may not. For example, permadeath (which introduces randomness in several ways, as we have discussed) leads to unfair and unbalancing outcomes. I have already explained this multiple times.

Quote

Detah said:

I do not claim that every action or activity needs to contain difficulty or time-consumption. I only claim that those paths which lead to powergain should.

If that is what you meant, I don't think you chose the best way to go about saying it. You said, I cite:
"I do believe that however many paths you do have, that they should be equal in difficulty and time-consumption"
This says that all paths must be equal in difficulty/time. Therefore, you cannot have paths that aren't difficult or time-consuming if a single path is difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, it is not acceptable to have a path that happens to be easier than others.

Again, I do not require that every difficulty be equal. I do not require that the difficulty of every action be equal. I just require that the difficulty/reward curves for each path to power be equal. [Example. The difficulty for acquiring 57% foraging skill should be roughly equal to the difficulty for acquiring 57% mining skill. Also, the rewards for 57% foraging should be roughly equal to the rewards for 57% mining skill. This has not been an easy thing to do. But I think it is desirable and will lead to a fair and balanced mud.]

Quote

Additionally, we return to the problem of what exactly it means to be balanced. You never seem to consider balance as referring to inter-player; instead, you only focus on what any one individual can do. I've said it before but I'll say it again; why do you not consider balance to be relevant with respect to opportunities across players? If you can do something and get more than I can for doing the same thing, there is a balance problem. It is not really a problem if I can waste time doing one thing, knowing the reward is small, or do something else, knowing it'll be more productive.

I think I do consider balance an issue of inter-player. But that is only part of it. I see balance as a very huge issue confronting the admin. It has many facets and it is terribly difficult to fine-tune. I expect the fine-tuning process to take 2 years or more. In my earlier example, I said the reward for 57% mining should be the same as 57% foraging. To make a good specific example, I will need to make up some numbers here. Lets say that a person with 57% mining can mine the very valuable mithril ore at a rate of 5 units per hour. They can sell that mithril for lets say 100 gp. Or they could use it to make armor or weapons. Now take another player who has 57% foraging. They can find the 10 sprigs of the rare plant hemlock in one hour. Those 10 sprigs of hemlock should sell for roughly 100 gp. That means that the reward is roughly the same for those two individuals, who have pursued totally different skill specialization paths. The balancing does not end there for me. It is also my goal to balance the second market uses for those goods. For simplicities sake, lets say that a potionmaker can turn that hemlock into a medium strength poison in 5 min. And that a skilled blacksmith can turn that mithril into a quality mithril shortsword in 5 min. I am also concerning myself with the sell prices of each of those goods and trying to make each avenue equally profitable.

One more response to the 'inter-player' aspect. I think that getting to the heart of balancing a mud is about making sure that the difficulty curves in acquiring power are roughly equal facing each player. No one guild allow you to become the millionaire the fastest, so to speak. If this is the case, then 75%+ of your playerbase will choose that guild. I see that as the definition of unbalanced.

Let's talk solutions. I agree that L1s picking up L50 gear can be a problem whether you have permadeath or not. What is the solution? You indicate that a player's power should be less dependent upon their gear. That might alleviate some of the problem. This seems sensible. I just do not think it is practical. No matter how little emphasis (in power) you place on gear relative to innate spellcasting abilities or sword techniques, you will still have problems. Suppose gear does have little emphasis relative to other sources of power. It seems that if you have 2 different levels of powered gear, however small they may be, you will still have the same problem, albeit on a smaller scale. I am leaning more towards a solution that addresses the 'reap what you sow' approach. I may implement something where only the player themselves can loot their own corpses. After 30 min realtime, the corpse+eq just get dested. That may be one solution which addresses the issues of fairness here.

I disagree: there is a point where the "problem" becomes small enough to be neglible. If a level 3 character who is completely without any equipment of any kind can defeat a level 1 character who is equipped with the best equipment in the game, it simply isn'ta problem any more if level 1 characters get access to the best equipment in the game, because they can't do anything useful with it.

If you don't like that particular compromise then there are plenty of variations that might give you a more comfortable solution. For example, you could have the difference that quality equipment actually makes strongly dependent on the skill of the user. Thus, for example, a Sword Of Suspiciously Great Destruction wielded by someone whose edged weapons skill is only 5% might give only a 1% bonus to damage, but the same sword wielded by someone who has a 95% skill in edged weapons might give a 100% bonus to damage. Now, if you insist, you can have equipment which grants enormous powers to high-level users but is of little or no use to passing low-level characters who might loot it.

Or you could simply prevent low-level characters from using high-powered equipment. For example, if equipment produces some form of magical radiation in direct proportion to its power, there may be a total radiation level that any one character can tolerate which increases with character level. Thus, a medium level character could use one super-powered item and a lot of useless crap, or several medium-powered items, but not both. High-levels characters could use several high-powered items (but probably not one in every slot). Low-level characters wouldn't be able to use high-powered equipment at all. (I think KaVir's MUD uses a system rather like this).

Or you could introduce equipment rental and maintenance costs that are sufficiently high on high-powered items that only a high-level character can afford to maintain them.

Or high-powered weapons could simply shatter in the hands of low-level characters.

There are all sorts of possibilities.

Yeah, I thought it might be implied, however, no they are not appointed as a guide. (There were, the guild Pholtus, but they were non PK and were newbie helpers). Sorry for that confusion.

I was using it more as an example, as I tried to clarify, that if we allow for certain realisms, and certain unequivocal ramifications (perma-death) things like this become pretty important. Even a non-Pk perma death game can become such through abstract killing. I wouldnt term this as greifing so much as part of the game.

I said I personally do not like Perma Death, but I know of people who do, and they just simply prefer it. So far I think the ideas have been really neat, and inspired some lines of thinking for me to use.

-Syn

I really like this idea of tying hitroll and damroll-like bonuses to skills for weapons. This makes in-game sense. I think I will combine that with my existing solution of eq-condition-degradation. So should a L1 acquire a L50 piece of eq, s/he will not be able to maintain it for long, as the cost to repair it will be prohibitive.

most people stay non-permadeath but will try a permadeath character at least once (we have a highscore permadeath listing whos got the highest before they've been wiped out)