2021/11/20 10:58, Fitzcarraldo: | Rated: Awful  | MUME's game design encourages antisocial behavior. More than any other game I have ever played. Being able to sleep, and therefore sun-kill and nearly 'delete' another player's character is an absurd ability in a game where you dump so much time into levelling your character. No other game would ever even consider implementing such an ability. This is part of what makes MUME so special, but is also just one feature in a set of game design choices that encourages emotional hostility between players.
The amount of time it takes to accomplish anything in the game, and how easy it is to lose any progress you have made, particularly due to other players, results in the cesspool that is ER. You can farm XP all day to get a level, then mobdie and lose that level due to 1 mistake. If that mistake is even partially due to someone in your group, that builds hostility and resentment between a group of players who are supposed to be the same side of the war. Also, it discourages veterans from grouping with newbies, and encourages elitist attitudes that make it harder for MUME to attract new players.
And then there's PK. I wasn't around back in the day when there were tons of players, but it seems to me that back then it didn't matter that PK was inherently totally imbalanced and unfair because you could always find some action, there were a variety of *targets* at wildly different skill levels, people played more casually and died a lot more. The power differences between individual characters back then probably just made for much more interesting PK situations, and could easily be negated the number of players participating.
Now in 2021, you have a handful of players left in the game overall, all of whom have been playing for years, on characters they have invested a lot of time in, and with nice equipment to lose. Most of the players left are more focused on leveling and minimizing risk. They are not going to willingly enter 'fair' PvP situation where they have a 50% chance of dying, and possibly getting all of their equipment looted or getting rekilled. This is the behavior the current game design encourages. The PKers we all admire the most (Snakr, Torkild, Dong, Cyndane, etc.), who actually take chances and do 1v1s against randos are playing against the grain, and in spite of the current state of game.
So most of the PK that still happens is when one or more players sees an opportunity where they have a significant advantage over *others*, i.e. overkills. Which results in more ill will between players. On top of this, there are so few players left, that everybody knows everybody, and enmities build up between particular individuals over perceived wrongs, and they act on this by treating each other worse by rekilling, gaccing, etc.
And asking for major feature changes seems pointless. No-one is developing MUME anymore. The only talented and industrious developer left is Jahara, and he doesn't even access to the C code. We have builders that add new zones, but these additions are really just more of the same, with slight quality improvements and no major changes to game mechanics.
MUME is a museum piece maintained by boomers reliving a fantasy of their past. Any _major_ changes would violate their memories of the perfect game that existed however many years ago, and are therefore never going to happen.
Playing MUME in 2021 is essentially like fucking a corpse. |
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