Multi-User Dungeon Pioneer Interviewed

Thanks to Stratics for posting an interview with Richard Bartle, the co-creator of the original text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) environment. This chat with Bartle, who is also renowned for writing Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs, an early exploration of the effects of PKing (player killing) on virtual worlds, discusses the current crop of MMORPGs and their likely longevity: "Sooner or later a major world WILL be closed down, but I think they are far more stable then many players realise." Bartle's website also contains a treasure trove of early writings on MUDs, both by Bartle himself and other pioneers, and it's interesting to contrast this new interview with a 1995-era interview with Bartle, in which he foreshadows this new era of graphical MMORPGs.

Comments

Re:"HCSD" is good but ...

[KDan]

I disagree 100%. What's very important is to make absolutely certain that a player who's careful and quick enough can avoid being pk'ed - that there are no ways that you can be pk'ed without any warning. Ie, give every player a fair chance of getting out of it alive no matter how good the pk'er is.

However, making the pk onerous is a requirement for there to be pk's at all! For instance, in Diablo 2 (not hardcore mode though) there is no pkilling. It's all a joke, because you don't lose anything except a little bit of xp and some gold, so no one really cares about being pk'ed. On this mud I used to play, though, where you lost everything you were carrying, not to mention 1/3 of a level of xp (and there were only 30 levels overall, so that was a lot), and with the possiblity of losing stats points if you lost a level, dying *really* mattered. That gave you a very good motivation to:
1) Form groups of trusted players that you knew weren't going to pk you.
2) Be very aware of what other groups/clans/lone assholes were known to pk randomly so that you could get away quickly if you met them.
3) Never leave your character sitting on his ass in the wilderness - only do that in 'safe rooms' like the inn and the guilds and such, cause otherwise even a clueless newbie could kill you.
4) Always carry the essential stuff to get away from anywhere quick (ie several scrolls of recall, and wear a lucky charm to prevent other people from summoning you).

These all made the game much more fun, because there was an element of risk. I never saw a single person complain that this mud was not balanced pk-wise, though at some points in the faraway past (before I started playing it) it had some unbalances such as a clan taking over the fountain of a major city and charging coins to allow people to fill their waterskins, on penalty of death. Even that was referred to by all with some fondness though.

Even when I got pk'ed, I could always point the finger to one point where I panicked and didn't do the right thing or didn't know the right thing, and fucked up. I had the means to avoid pk. That's how it should be balanced.

Daniel