From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<SNIP>
If players are completely inactive, then the economy starts on a slow death
spiral. The amount of cash given over to MOBs when objects are extracted
should be enough to delay things, but not stop it.
Different types of MOBs having different uses, different types of stuff
available in shops at depends on who's killing what.
While this is hard to implement on a starting mud do to poor player turn
out, I completely support this type of system and have already put the code
in for my MUD, however to compensate for lack of players (No the MUD isn't
up yet) when it goes live you have to have a contingency plan ready to go
active based on your average player count and have the economy adjust
accordingly.
Also to make things a bit more realistic, I put in the ability for shop mobs
to have 'free will' when it comes to buying or selling an object based on a
lot of different factors and also if they do decide to buy/sell will base
the price on a wide variety of factors, for example Faction, Race,
Occupation, Luck, Charm, Economy, Is there a War going on and if so is
what's being sold/bought a high wartime commodity or a low end civilian
fruit toy, time of year, whether the item is currently in demand in another
part of the world (For my import/export code), and a few others as well.
However, while _no_ economy can ever be perfect, simply for the fact that
it's far to hard to emulate everything that could possibly happen, so you
have to either have a hard and strict economy that stays the same regardless
of what happens, or hope your player base works towards altering their
economy.
Balance of stuff available vs. player effort to keep raw supplies going in
(which should be the natural result of levelling up thru combat) isn't
bloody likely to be well balanced if one corpse equals one finished item.
...finding balance between input of raw material and output of finished
goods
is likely to be tricky. It's also likely to need rebalancing as number of
players goes up or down.
Addition of extra layers (grain going to meat raisers, brewers) would
likely
just be baroque, add too much code to an already complicated system. The
extra tweakability added would probably be minimal, BUT players might at
least get a kick out of watching the system run. (Follow a scavenger MOB
around on its' rounds, a trader, etc)
If you have reached the bottom of this post, and still think there's a
chance that I'm NOT a fruitcake... ask me who I play on what MUD.
Well I addressed some of this above, but game balance is always a highly
debatable topic. IMHO it's easy to achieve balance in ALL aspects of your
MUD.....if you take the time to figure it out and have a few good writers by
your side. (Fortunately I have one =D ) I feel for game balance you need to
take your entire game world into perspective and then break it all down to
the smallest level, figure out what would make the world tick, then add
responsibly from there. Just try not to get carried away because like, you
and I said above, you have to code what you create. Everything sounds
perfect on paper, it's a completely different story when your sitting at
your computer staring at a file and not have a clue as to what you should be
doing ( I know I've been there many a time, and still frequent that
imbecilic mode quite often ) But I learn best by trial and error, so that
works for me *shrugs*
John
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