On Wed, 29 Dec 1999, Joshua R. Moore wrote:
>
> It did take a TON of resources. it really is not feasable when you take into
> account the server load, and the lines that develop, and DID devolop, along
> with all the cries of dungeon stealer, line cutter, ETC. was not a fun time.
> I was a game master in the Realm from about December 96 until january 98,
> and was friends with the devolpers throughout alpha and beta
I'd agree with this. With the current state of the art, you
really cannot support this type of play-density (one party per
dungeon) at $10/mo. A viable alternative at present is
setting up your own server and inviting only your friends to
play.
I don't think spawning a new copy of a dungeon for each party
is the solution. I think the long-term solution is to just
make the game world so large that the players-per-zone density
(using the term "zone" loosely) is low enough that running
into another party in a dungeon is a rarity. To discourage
camping, you could tweak down the spawn rates, and make
finding the "boss" mob that drops the nice items contingent on
your party killing enough of the "trash" mobs (with random
variances of course). So to get the nice item, you have to
find the "boss." To get the "boss" you have to clear the
trash. To clear the trash, you have to sweep through the
dungeon because sitting in one place waiting for a respawn
would take too long.
You'd also need to tweak the AI to discourage pull-camping.
The reason it works in EQ is because the mob AI is
predictable, and IMHO once it's predictable, it's not AI
anymore. Better AI would also let the dungeon deal with
massive raids (i.e. people think it's too hard to do it in a
small party so bring in 30 friends to clear everything
easily). Instead of the mobs fighting, they see the army, run
away, and build their own army.
Anyways, the really worrying thing about all this is that in
real life, in a typical food chain, the "prey" has about 10x
the biomass of the "predator." And that's for predators
killing only for sustinence. If that translates over to
online RPGs (and you could probably come up with a good
argument that it doesn't), you're talking about the server
needing to control at least 10x as many NPCs as PCs.
Of course, if you assume we're at about a 1:1 ratio of NPCs
and PCs right now, and Moore's Law says that in about 5 years
computers will be 10x faster...
--
John H. Kim
kim@...