Communication

of !FaerieM<nop>!UD's Goals to its Players

This is a fairly important problem because much of the success of FaerieMUD will depend on the contributions of those who play the game. Some games which have apparently been designed to depend on player action to enhance the game environment have failed to communicate that to their players (at least at first).

An example is <i>Star Wars: Galaxies</i> (at least according to one review I read) which has tightly interlocking professions. In other words, one profession needs something from another profession which in turn needs something from a third profession...and so on.

If players don't know that they should communicate such needs to produce quests for other players and the game depends on such communication to generate the quests which will make the game interesting for the players, then finding the fun will be hard.

I suspect FaerieMUD as currently envisioned will avoid some of these problems. The fact that we will have !NP<nop>Cs populating the less-likely-to-be-popular guilds (like the Potters Guild, for instance) means that players won't have to populate every niche of the quest-producing ecology before quests will be generated. The fact that we intend to use the SimKingdom idea to produce an on-going story economy at the start means a culture will exist right from the outset.

On the other hand, the degree to which FaerieMUD will rely on players making a creative contribution is currently envisioned to be quite high. This means getting people into the spirit will be particularly important. So I think the communication of our goals to new players will be particularly important even though we shouldn't face the exact problems seen in <i>SW:G</i>.

I have personally found some online games to be somewhat disconcerting when I first entered them. After character generation, I found myself materializing in some area (presumably newbie-friendly). But I never knew exactly what was expected of me. If I just walked up to the first person I met and asked what was going on, would I be immediately branded as a newbie and find myself despised/attacked/pranked? Or did everybody expect me to come up and demand, "Show me somewhere I can kill something"?

I think a couple of things can be done which will help this situation, some of them we're already planning and some are enhancements to things we've already decided. For one thing, I think we can use the ideas we've already come up with for character generation to make the character generation process as close as possible to actually playing the game. This will allow players to become familiar with the interface because they will be using that interface to generate their character. It will also give them some idea what the expectations are for their behavior once they are actually in the FaerieMUD world. In addition, the experience immediately after entry into the actual FaerieMUD world can be tailored to communicate (via the character's family) the expectations of the world. And the family should have plenty of low-risk chore-quests on which they can send the newbie.

— Scotus - 07 Aug 2003