Member Discussions

I'm considering designing some new feature/event for the MUD that would allow a player to participate in this event once every real day. This would encourage players to sign on at least once a day.

Has anyone done something like this? How did it turn out?

4 Dimensions has quests that can only be done once per day (as in only one player per day can do it), and that can only be done once per day per player. Not sure if they've had much effect on how active the playerbase though as 4 Dimension's playerbase has been rather dead for quite some time.

The problem is that different people live in different time zones, which means it might not be viable for some players to participate.

My solution was to run an event every 6 hours, but only count your first game of the day for the high score table. It seems to work out quite well.

Well I didn't mean an Imm held quest or anything. This would be all handled by the code. Like every player gets one token every day if they don't have one, and can use it to start some sort of special event/quest.

Ah, so you don't necessarily want people to log on together at the same time? In that case it should work fine...but IMO it's worth trying to get people to log on at the same time if possible, as they're more likely to hang around afterwards if there are other people to interact with.

True, I wonder if increasing the reward during 8pm-10pm would help. Or maybe I should just code in a different "quest" for that time frame.

On one MUD (Rock 2: Crashed Plane), there was a team arena. Everyone interested in participating would stand in the waiting room, and when the arena started it would divide everyone randomly into two teams with headquarters in different areas of the arena map, and you'd duke it out until a certain number of kills.

Arena matches were mostly scheduled events run by admins, but you could also get a one-time-use "golden ruler" key (usually given out as a quest reward) that would allow players to start their own matches. Admin-run matches often had prizes for the winning team, and player-run matches were just for fun (or improving your win ratio) if you had some friends around.

Back to the original topic, you might be able to structure some kind of daily event with multiple people pooling their tokens to take part in the event cooperatively.

If it were some kind of unique quest with somewhat unique rewards, you could use the token system to prevent people from playing it over and over again. Or even just some kind of item that you don't want people to get too much of.