Robustness

Richard Bartle argues text-based online games are more robust than graphically based games: "Balance is less of an issue with fewer players."

This page has been set up for discussion of how we can keep FaerieMUD robust.

• Stillflame's SimCulture idea may also help with balance issues. If a city has a trait which indicates how many blacksmiths it should have and an AI which tries to correct toward this number, it will be easier to deal with problems like a whole bunch of NPC blacksmiths moving into the area.

• Many of FaerieMUD's main systems (combat, die-rolling, NPC AI, and maybe even things like verboseness of description) will have variables inserted in their algorithms which can be adjusted (even during play) to make tweaking balance in all the systems more easily accomplished.

• Richard Bartle claims that more and more Virtual Worlds are including analysis tools in the basic set of tools created before the world is even started. He describes these as tools to tell the programmers what is going on in the world. Since Stillflame's SimCultures (or SimKingdoms or SimVillages or SimGuilds) already have some of this functionality built in, maybe we can use them to serve this function as well.

See also Multi User Role Playing Environments

— Scotus - 17 Aug 2003