Member Discussions

Hello, I'm a builder/qimm/enforcer, and I go by the name of Bayne.I'm new to TMC, but I've been mudding for quite some time.
Anyways, I was building the other night, and I asked my administrator, "We have a lot of areas, will we stop building eventually?" and he says yes, a mud can't be to big or to small, or else players may get confused, so we will stop building and you will be transfered to a qimm. That seemed kinda dumb to me, I don't think a mud should ever stop growing, unless of course your out of vnum's, but I've never heard of that happening, so it should never be a problem. So I want your opinions on this, should a mud ever stop growing? Player-wise/area-wise/immortal-wise? Thanks for your time!
-- Bayne --

I think your admin is pretty wise. A lot of MUDs hit a pitfall of crushing under their own weight. Look at some of the most popular MMOs and games, you'll notice simplicity.

Do players really want 9,000,000 skills and spells or a small subset of very fun and refined skills? Same with areas. They each need to have a reason to exist and be part of the world, not to just be filler to space to, more important, cities.

I think a finished MUD is something that is sadly underestimated. There is a lot of fun to be had in a game that won't suddenly change-up on you. The only thing, however, is once you hit a good point, releasing new content can be nice to treat like 'expansions'. However, like I said, this is just so you can really refine those areas or whatever content is being added.

I think my point boils down to a lot of crappy areas doesn't make a MUD better and once you fit a nice section of your world in place, you can work on its lore and immersion.

That can be ok, I guess.

But if you've covered all the areas you need, putting in new areas that cover slightly differing level ranges provides more options and varied equipment. Instead of following the area-list downwards, you might be able to pick and choose as you please.

More content, more equipment, more entertainment.

I think a Mud that stops growing slowly dies.

It's the new things added that usually spark the most interest with the players, and that goes for both code and zones.

My own Mud currently has over 60000 rooms in over 260 zones, and we have no plans to ever stop developing. Then again, our building standards are pretty high, meaning that building is a comparatively painstaking and slow process here. So in spite of having several productive and very competent builders, we usually only add 3-5 new zones per year.

Possibly things are different for a pure PK or pure RP Mud, where the world has to be smaller for the players to find each other. But a game for explorers and Questors can never be too big in my opinion.

On my game, our areas are following a rather specific level plan and overall layout in relation to a MUD-wide storyline that will consist of dozens of individual quests that all drive toward the same end. There are various forks in it for alignment, race, class, etc. to maximize the replayability of it (it is optional).

So, we are designing and building our world according to this plan, and we are also planning and designing our classes a specific way to. Certainly, we will reach a point to where our MUD is "finished" in that the world is complete according to the story and the classes are complete according to our planned skill lists.

However, that aside, I feel that a MUD can always be deeper. I don't think making the world 'bigger' per say may be the way to go, we have our world very specifically designed, but once we finish it, I think there is always room for hidden area, additional 'parts' of existing areas... ways to really make the game incredibly deep to where the player always has somewhere to explore.

Hypothetically it may be possible to "run out of room" (not vnum wise, design wise) to where adding anything else would just clutter, but if you actually have building standards and your areas are quality, I don't see that ever, realistically, being a problem.

If we ever reach that problem, then I think the solution would be to start working on alternate dimensions, timelines, or new worlds entirely for the players to explore.

I think once a player has seen and done everything, and there's no chance of anything new cropping up, they'll leave. The promise of new areas and new things to experience, I think, is what keeps people coming back to MUDs and what has always separated the genre from more static games.

If your mud is based in realistic geography or in books where the lands have "an end", then you will eventually reach a limit where you cannot create more zones. But after all land is created, as someone stated before, it is just a matter of refine the zones built before. And doing that, to reach perfection, it is a more specific way of building but still exist alot of work for builders. And in this point of view, as I never saw any MUD that couldnt make more improvements, and I play a MUD for more than 10 years, I guess there is no end to build.

"We have a lot of areas, will we stop building eventually?"

Build until your eyes bleed, and your finger break.

If an admin is truly concerned about excessive
complexity, areas can be retired, or new "continents"
or "worlds" can be set up where less popular
areas can live out their years.

But a mud is like a shark, it has to keep moving
or it dies.

Except those weird mexican cave sharks, but that's
a special case.

Oh and I think nurse sharks, I think they can like,
stay still for a while.

But other than that, *exactly* like a shark.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

I worked on a MUD that stopped adding in new areas, actually, new anything. It went from 30+ people online at a time to 1-5 people online, mostly bots, in less then 6 months. It was essentially dead.

With my mud, I believe in never stopping the building, the new content. Once one world is complete, we'll be adding in realms where more "advanced" beings will be accessible, as well as chaotic planes of the elements, etc. For us, its a way to explore "the possibilities". Once those are done, we'll be adding different worlds, with different "rules" and mechanics so it doesn't become too much like the original world... Not just different/additional races/classes, but things may work in different ways completely (different technological times, one where magic doesn't exist, etc)

Even in a Mud where the land geographically have an 'end', there will always be room for more zones, if the general layout is made in an intelligent way.

Basically there are three types of zones in a Mud.
1. 'Travel' zones or 'space' zones, for instance roads, forests, plains, mountains, prairie, rivers, lakes, sea, air, space etc. - (which in many Muds, but not all are done as grids).
2. 'Center' zones, like cities, villages, small islands, large castles, graveyards, cave complexes, or more detailed nature spots, like a grove, etc.
3. 'Indoors' zones, which would be the interiors of manors and castles, dungeons, temples, churches, tombs, towers, caves etc. We even have 'miniature' zones, where you for instance have to magically shrink to enter a pixie sized world.
Typically the first type of zone is the less detailed and the third the most, when it comes to depth, extra descriptions, hidden treasures and other secrets etc.

In our Mud we talk of different scales; while a 'travel' area might have a room size of 1000x1000 m, the room in a 'center' area would be around 20x20 m and an 'indoors' room might be 5x5 m or even smaller. (This of course assumes that the Mud is room based, those who use a coordinate system have other conditions).

Generally you enter type 2 zones from type 1, and type 3 zones from either type 2 or type 1. This is done by going up or down from the main 'world', or by entering some kind of portal, to deal with the different scales of the map. What might be just a small spot on the General map, could be a 500 room city, once you entered the gates.

By 'intelligent layout' I mean that the space areas must be designed to give room for a lot of those entrances - (meaning that they cannot be too small in the first place, although there would always be the option of expanding a forest or add some stretch of mileage to a road).

Now, even if your main world is geographically 'finished', there will always be room to add another village, another castle, another dungeon etc., which each could hold their own unique set of mobs, quests and other challenges.

As someone already mentioned, there will also be a constant need of updating the old zones, adding new detail and new quests. In an old Mud like ours, there is a tendency of the oldest zones not nearly being up to the quality of the newest ones, regardless of who the Builder is. This is because our building standards have improved a lot over the years, and the OLC has been expanded with many new features that the older zones lack, since these features were not available back then. So, even though building a new zone is a lot more fun than updating an old one, we try to go through a number of the oldest zones every year, giving them a total overhaul OLC-wise and adding at least one major new quest and some interesting new objects to each. Whenever one of the older zones is updated like that, it gets announced in the same way that we announce new zones, and players, who haven't visited those old zones in years, all rush there to investigate.

To end this rant I totally agree with Crat's statement. Muds are like sharks. If we stop swimming, we sink.

I built for a mud that created a huge plotline revolving around the discovery of a new part of the planet. That city/area had its own hunting areas, temples, shops, and introduced the implementation of a skillset that had been sorely lacking for almost 10 years.

After the completion of the plotline/discovery, and after everything calmed back down to normal, it ended up being the least-chosen area to gen for new characters. The people who had multi characters, stopped playing the one in the new area. Mostly that area was a ghost-town, with people going to visit once in awhile to pick up items they couldn't get anywhere else in the game. They're pick them up in enormous batches so they wouldn't have to go again for another 6 months.

Moral of the story: don't create huge game world areas that exist just to roll out a skillset. Once everyone finds out about the new skills, they won't feel any need to go to your new area anymore. Create huge game world areas because they make sense. Create them because they fit the world. Have people discover -smaller- things, maybe even lots of them. If the world is "finished" - as in, the 3 cities you wanted, the 20 wilderness areas, the 2 water zones. Maybe up in the forest is a HUGE series of treehouses, connecting to each other. 20, 30 "rooms" worth of treehouses, some treehouses having 3 rooms in them. Some sort of lost civilization - not rolling anything new out, not some new race players can pick. But rather, something old, something ancient. A few bits of treasure here and there, a puzzle or two to solve, an NPC who needs something from the area...danger of falling, maybe one or two of the treehouses doesn't have a floor, with a difficult climb-check for the drop back to the ground.

Maybe another area would be an underground series of caverns on the side of the mountain, discovered by pushing away some underbrush. A great hiding place for assassins, but nothing anyone could claim as permanent residence because of the "really bad thing" that lives nearby.

There are lots of ways to expand a game, without actually expanding it. You don't need new cities, you don't need new oceans. You don't need new forests; once you have mapped out the planet itself, really all you need to do, is to add a few smaller but significant areas that they can discover, that are interesting areas that stand on their own merit, rather than as a tool to showcase something else.

I think a lot of development work can still be done, without making the
game-world too unwieldy. Add a new quest, make a mobile more interactive,
increase the range of products sold in a shop... respond to all the entries in
the "bugs" list, add extradescs so that a player in a forest isn't told "You don't
see that here." when they type "look trees"... it's a never ending job, enriching
existing areas. And I'd much rather have builders working on small
improvements than on their 'grand projects' that promise 400 rooms, and
never get completed.

It's important that there should be an implicit promise that a mortal can
someday become a builder, and that the game world will have something new
for you to explore, every couple of months. I second the shark analogy.

These games are designed to be good for a few years, to be sold in the current market, and intending to draw in new players while resigned to giving up the old once they've done it all.

I don't know about your mud, but ours is being designed to last. Finished products will garner a set total of sales, but we are in it for the long haul. If we want people playing this game 10, 20 years from now, it can't simply end.

When an imm joins our team and makes a contribution, they are buying into the privilege of joining us in a collaborative ongoing creative project. They can add as much as theylike so long as they meet our standards. They are welcome and encouraged to contribute as much as they like.