| MUDs, UO and Roleplay |
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| MUDs, UO and Roleplay |
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Stat loss. Those two words strike fear into the heart of every PK in the game. To understand why stat loss was put into the game, you need to analyze the past of Ultima Online in an objective manner.
Originally, the ability to kill an opponent in UO was a way for the players to police themselves. It was a survival of the fittest plan, where those people who bothered you could be killed by you. However, you could also be killed by people you weren't bothering, or kill people who weren't bothering you. The system did not try to divine intent, which is impossible for a game to do.
Those who did not wish to be killed could stay in towns, which were basically safe areas. The problem, of course, was that towns were not very interesting places. Other than buying things from the NPC vendors, the only thing to do in town was bank. Even the bank was a paranoia zone, because while murdering was outlawed in towns, sneaky thieves could steal with very little worry of being caught. Players were more wide-eyed and paranoid than a mob stool pigeon on crack in the Sopranos house. At that time, you had to yell "guards" for a thief to be caught, unless an NPC noticed it and yelled for you. Thus many people created the macro "Vendor, buy, bank, guards!" Even towns weren't safety zones, and UO was basically a PvP world.
So what did a PvP world really mean? Basically, it boiled down to might makes right. As most of you know, in UO, might is equal to time. The time you invest in your character usually means your character will become better (usually being the operative word, since some people don't spend their time on character growth). Thus those with more time to spend in the world could pretty much beat on (gank / r0xx0r) those who spent less time in the world, or those just entering the world. This, of course, created some pretty severe problems. As the game matured, you started to whittle down your playerbase because new players could not join the game without spending a majority of the time looking at a screen with more black and white than the first season of Gilligan's Island. Some new players were tenacious and willing to stick it out, but many weren't. Even older players got tired of getting beat on because they could not exact retribution.
Why could they not exact retribution? Kal Ort Por. The recall spell basically allowed any person intent on killing another to escape with less mana than it cost to begin the fight in the first place. By the time word that PKs were around reached the eyes of an anti (someone who enjoyed hunting PKs), the murderers would be gone, leaving only a pile of bodies and some "OoooO Oo Ooing" ghosts to mark that they had ever been in the area.
How bad was it really? Well, since I was a GM in the "old" days, I can tell you that one or two PKs could cause 200 calls in one night. Imagine that every call takes five minutes to answer on average. That is 16 man hours. Basically, one guy could cost you four headcount for the evening, and a lot of pissed off people. It didn't matter that killing was part of the game, and should not have necessitated a GM call; people called into the queue anyway. It didn't matter if most people were reasonable and wouldn't kill everyone in sight; it only took one dedicated sociopath to create havoc.
At the time, the dev team responded with the new reputation system. They were under constraints to use a small amount of memory when creating a system to stem the flow of murderers. The idea of innocents=blue / and murderers=red was the plan they came up with. Still, players learned to skirt this system and use the boundaries to exploit every possible loophole. Eventually the system had to be modified to plug the holes, and the complexity grew. If players did actually become Red, they could make another character, and simply use that character to bank and go to town for them. (Townie mules.) Really, being a murderer wasn't hard; it was quite easy. There were still no consequences that could not be avoided. Thus the idea of stat loss came up. Those who remember the early stages of UO may remember that stat loss was actually an original penalty for dying. Of course, realities of the internet changed the original design as people died due to lag, or at times, bugs. It was felt that loss of items and stats was too severe. However, the idea of stat loss was brought back up as a way to curb murder. People were voluntarily murdering other people, so it stood to reason that if they continued along that path, they would have to pay the penalty. What this really stopped were those people who went out and murdered, at will, any moving target. With the new system, if the PK died, they could not simply go back out and be at the top of their game. Basically, stat loss was effective at reducing the number of sociopaths from the game by costing them time. Still, even this did not really give those players who wanted nothing to do with murderers a place of reprieve. This is why Trammel was introduced. Trammel gave those people who did not like murdering a place to be safe. (Note: This is by no means a complete history and some motivations and facts have been left out in the name of brevity, which Cynthe would remind me is a good thing.)
Finally we get to the question that many have asked: why not remove stat loss on Felucca, since the introduction of Trammel allowed people to escape murderers? Right now, Felucca is still a place people can go to explore and socialize, and they can feel reasonably assured that they won't get ganked ten seconds after stepping through the Facet Gate, leaving them staring at a black and white screen. Many people still have their homes and towns in Felucca. Removing stat loss would change all of this. The same problems that existed in UO before the split exist now. If we removed stat loss, we would simply be subjecting Felucca to the old times where people were free to kill everyone in sight. That means that very few people would ever go to Felucca. Far fewer than go there now. Felucca would become a wasteland of no visitors and the space there would be wasted.
I am now going to express my personal opinion on the subject. This in no way implies that any of the things I mention are going to implemented in UO at any time. So if you quote me out of context, you suck.? The problem wasn't the game mechanics of the system, the issue is that player to player interactions are social and require social fixes, not mechanical ones. Murdering was allowed for at least these two reasons:
- It served as a form of player justice, something Tyrant might call the punch in the nose factor. You are far less likely to be a taunting moron if someone can end your foul mouth with a sword in the head. Taunting is somewhat less annoying when it is only OOOOoooOOOO.
- It gave people a reason to band together. When you have a threat to your existence in the form of a sociopath, the way to solve it is to group together to get rid of the sociopath.
#1 failed because the outlaws grew stronger faster than those who were devoted to justice. #2 failed because people could not band together to form a posse if outlaws could always get away. What is incumbent to be done in the future is to look at social methods for solving social problems.
What kind of social methods? For instance, if someone is bothering you, rather than killing them, you could "tag" them with an opinion. Of course, that opinion could be given in a positive light as well as a negative. People who are thought of highly would have a little bit more say in your reputation, just as those who are thought of negatively would have less say or none.
Your reputation should carry over with you across any character on that shard. Your actions impact the community, therefore you should be subject to all of your actions in that community. You can't escape your reputation. Of course, all of this would have to be tracked carefully, so a guild of griefers couldn't tag any one person they didn't like and make them suffer. And even more importantly, getting a good reputation should have rewards associated with it. Being Honorable is a really good thing.
Frankly, I feel combat should be moved into another place all together. Combat should be a badge of honor. Imagine a situation where you could only complete certain quests, gain items, etc. if you had Valor. Now imagine that Valor could only be gained if you agreed to participate in PvP. The more you win, the more Valor you receive. To gain more Valor, you would always have to take on people with greater or equal Valor. You could not take on someone with no Valor. The idea would be to encourage PvP without necessitating it, and to decouple it from one's social reputation.
Another possible solution would be to make PvP combat more similar to PvM in tactics, so when players do try out PvP, it won't be something they can't be competitive at because they don't understand undocumented tricks. An example of an undocumented trick is trapped pouches. No PvP player worth their salt leaves home without them, yet many players don't even know why they would have them. Some console games do a great job of this, educating people into tactics gradually. Of course, this means monsters would have to use the same tactics players use.
So there are some ideas as to what can be done in the future. As I said, before stat loss could ever be removed, it would be crucial to have a better system in place. Just removing stat loss would not make Felucca into the great land of yesteryear. It would turn it into a ghostland. The ideal I hold is that one day there would be no more split, per se. The Virtues would bind the people and would reward good behavior. But I'm definitely an old school virtue nut.
The issues Sage brings up are, as he says, social issues, not technical issues. The players who caused the problems that Sage refers to are known as griefers in some Internet circles. We have very little trouble on Redwall MUCK, Nameless MUCK and the other realms Limitless Knowledge Association hosts is for two big reasons in my opinion:
In short, I don't think we have the griefer problem that UO does by our design and our intent. I also think our MUCKS place a high priority on social interaction among players rather than attempting to manage social issues with technical solutions. Interaction on a MUCK in general is managed by consent between players... staffers as such are having less and less to have to manage as players are given more ability to decide how that interaction takes place. The server itself does very little to control interaction as a MUD would need to. 'Score' is kept by playing an interesting character that others want to interact with. Petty lords and gods find themselves in the universe they created for themselves totally alone with nobody to be lord and god over. There are many, many failed MUCKs. On Nameless MUCK alone, there are many, many failed Genres. There are a few very successful exceptions like RedwallMUCK and Arcania. I think there are lessons to be learned from both the successes and the failures.
I have a dream for NMC, something I'd like to see happen. I would like...
I have other things I'd like to see, those are hilights off the top of my head. I don't think NMC is going to get us all the way there, but it's a start. That's why I'm on the project, that's some of what I'm looking for with NMC. Things like ICQ, MUCK, UO... those exist because some one person not only had an idea, but was determined to keep at it until that idea came to light. I don't have the skill to make this 'Island' type software come into existance... yet... but I'm determined to keep at it until I see all I want happen. I don't care who puts the parts together. I don't care who is more competant than I am at making it happen. I have no interest in glory, someone else can have that. I just want to see in place the things I mentioned above, and perhaps a bit more. Details of how we get there are just details. So now you can see something of my personal vision, something of what I want.
A final note to this essay: with Otter's permission, I am exploring the option of using Ultima Offline eXperiment (UOX) to create a 'Private Shard' on Limitless. There are a few hurdles to work out, but the largest among them is locating one person who understands Sage's comments above and UO History, and who has a vision for what a UO Shard could be given the chance to make it happen. Limitless has the resources to host one. I'd like to put the uox technology to use and explore the potential of actually implimenting it into NMC at some future date. I'm not going to have my needs and wants with this met Chief Wizzing a shard any more than I would as Chief Wiz of a MUCK or GenreMaster on Nameless. I am, however, looking for the right Lord or Lady who can show Sage how the job ought to be done. I'm not interested in someone who can give it the ol' college try. I want someone to sell me a vision of UO the way he or she would do it.
As far as visions go, you now have my vision for NMC. I think the ultimate solution to Sages social problems with UO lie in what we are doing and the future I want to bring about. To paraphrase UO's trademark... Are you with me?
--Romaq