Diku model of game design

T1 gear or Ony spots could be bought, because by that time most raiding guilds had both on farm. Gevlon would be running around in blues or starter epics in , regardless of how often he used an auction house mod. Tobold, The problem is not "unfair competition. That is, is doable but not by everyone. Take any kind of hobby, from gardening to painting or collecting coins: the more time you invest the bigger the reward.

Even when mentioning skill, what is skill without practice? People should get over themselves, I think. I could understand a P4C pay for content game.

After all, if I don't have time to raid, for example, why should I pay for maintaining raid zones. I find this P4C idea silly for a number of reasons, but ok. It makes some sense. When peeps start speaking about "unfair advantage" from those who have "too much" time I just laugh. First because it's laughable that people always try to buy their way into things which is sad.

And sadder still is the fact that an adult married, with kids a career and not as much free time to spare, still wants to compete with the kid or unemployed person. Compete for what???

A quick note to the "9 cents per hour model". I really, really have no clue about the "majority" of players, but when I look around in my guild and people on my friendslist, with raiding and stuff I'd say you get h per day you are online. If you play more on the weekend, it just about evens out to that. Games based on micro transactions are a money sink and, I believe, intentionally designed to frustrate the player towards paying for "advantages".

They are full of mindless grinding mechanics, no real path towards progression short of buying it, and offer metric tons of "cosmetic" things to spend money on that really don't affect the game at all. Where this approach would shine is invigorating games like World of Warcraft by allowing players to get to the new, exciting content without slogging through mounds of old content the company never intends to improve.

The refer-a-friend program is the start of something to address this, but is needlessly complicated and often requires someone to purchase another account and spend more money.

Likewise for the ability to insta-roll a level 55 toon, thereby skipping much of the old world content that offers nothing to existing players. Doing so requires that a player have a character of sufficient level already which somewhat deters brand new players from just skipping to the end.

It's not without it's flaws since people can use someone else's account to insta-roll a DK and play that it's obvious who they are. So, I think that Blizzard could make even more money and build more interest in the game by offering players the ability to bypass much of the old game and it's endless grinds and repetitive content through micro transactions.

It must be done with care and balanced so it's not abused. Runes of Magic has announced that it is going to introduce an official exchange where players can exchange in game currency for item shop currency diamonds. It is a development of an earlier game I developed called Dark Coast. Inspired by one of my favourite games Britannia , I have made a Fantasy board game called Hy Breasil.

The resulting game is Studiespillet. In Danish. Ages ago, on a challenge of designing a Chess variant on a board with exactly 39 positions, I made a very minimalistic hexagonal Chess variant. As far as quests — again, same applies.

YMMV of course. I played LPs considerably less than Dikus, but my sense of them was that they had highly uneven feature sets, because of mudlib differences. When I started playing muds, many LPs did not yet have persistence for equipment.

And an awful lot of them were never finished, as you say. Finally, many of them ended up playing basically like Dikus anyway. In Dikus, templates were strength and weakness. LPs, it was the mudlib architecture. In a MUD, you can ask for help without everyone insulting you.

No, you actually get help with the systems, features, mechanics, etc. This question of what a DikuMUD is has come up in several conversations lately and this page is a great link to give people to explain that. Neat timing, Raph! The first is more an argument over whether any MMO can accurately be labeled a descendant of the DikuMUD, and what that means… The latter is a more interesting discussion about whether or not the industry has effectively plumbed the maximum depth of the well of what can be done with the Diku model.

I just wanted to point out that, thanks largely to the effort of one developer, you can run a clean and modern Nightmare-derived mudlib, Dead Souls, on unix and Windows.

Pretty sure Batmud is bigger than Discworld but not positive. For instance, I once compared the idle times how long since a player last entered a command on Achaea to Shangri-la. The longest idle time any of the online Achaea players had was 24 minutes. The average idle time on Shangri-la was 26 minutes. The big thing about LP muds for me was that in the — timeframe most of them did not persist much of the character record and that was a huge turn off for me.

I never really looked back so I have little idea how they developed into the latter half of the s. Lack of persistent state drove me away. Nearly all, if not all, Dikus had it on the other hand. What about you with more playing experience than I? What do you want out of a non-DIKU […]. Apart from anything […]. The community and social systems are a major reason that players are happy to play […]. Es war der perfekte Sturm. Keine Konkurrenz, ein solides Produkt […]. It was World of Warcraft however that really popularized […].

I am really really jealous Researchers work on procedural fun I wish someone who has a good memory of these things and was there, would document that the key game design features of a DIKU are, if everyone is going to refer to MMOs as DIKU derivatives.

Morgan Ramsay says:. January 10, at am. Ryan Hart says:. Muckbeast says:. Yoru says:. Daniel Speed says:. Tim says:. Solok says:. Raph says:. David Sahlin says:. That was before my time. January 10, at pm. Richard Bartle says:. Kevin Simmons says:. John Garder says:. Mike Rozak says:. Bret says:. Lydia Leong Amberyl says:. January 11, at am. John Albano says:.

KevinMc says:. George Oliver says:. Matt Mihaly says:. Derek Licciardi says:. January 11, at pm. An excellent point.

Tykre Viesille says:. January 12, at am. Bonedead says:. January 13, at am. January 14, at pm. Ending the Endgame? January 16, at am. The aim is to produce a highly detailed, yet exciting and addictive game for the players whilst minimising the need for Staff Control. The Project includes everything from Fast based Space battles to hand-to-hand combat on the ground, as well as maximising the involvement of players in the game by allowing them to run Factions, Manage Planets, Organise Spaceship Battlegroups and Command Squads of NPC Troops.

The Aedon MUD server is a test bed implementationon of what we me and some other guys that don't have time to write code but much time to discuss ideas about mudding think would be a nice server for both players and developers.

Aedon supports or will support global and local commands, online building, rules, stacked parsers and more. Development is characterized by long sleeps interrupted by bursts of activity leading to the implementation of some new feature discussed the night before.

The system will allow full customization of nearly everything, with only the barest of rules combat, basic spell systems, etc. Bluemud is a project to architect and build a mud server and driver. We have several main goals while doing this. The first is to implement the server and driver in Java using Jython, and extend the ideas from the Varium project to create a solid mud server that is both easy to maintain and gives the in-game developers a lot of freedom for creativity allowing them to create a rich world environment.

We're going to code the driver and server components in Java taking advantage of Java security and strong typing. This allows folks to do in-game World development in Python in a safe and controlled manner.

The second goal is to produce a server and mudlib package that folks can install on their system and have a basic mud up and running in ten or fifteen minutes. We're using Jython which is a complete Python interpreter written in Java. Bluemud is very portable we're already running it on several environments from Linux to Windows and should work fine on many platforms.

We're not looking for contributors yet. We might rethink this after our alpha release. We hit a snag with code-level security which we are researching. This may cause a partial rearchitecture of the underlying code-base. We are not yet running a mud on top of the bluemud code-base. When we release our alpha we're thinking 2 months--pending when we fix our snag , we'll have an online tavern up and running.

We are still trying to stay true to our MUD roots, but we're trying to make the user interface as friendly as possible. So far, it features multi-threading, crash protection Each player runs in their own thread, and all exceptions from commands are caught before causing their thread to crash. The latest feature to be added is command line editing and history. I currently am the only active developer, and it's a lot of work for one person. I'm seeking experienced Java coders who would like to help out.

However, all objects, creatures, rooms, etc are still loaded into memory; this is not a DB-driven mud. MySQL is only used for saving data. The MUD itself is meant for developers, and will be free of combat systems, magic systems, classes, levels, affects, so that it will be an actual codeBASE for MUDs of any genre or design. The theme behind the design of the code was ease of use for builders and coders alike.

Therefore, the functions are very powerful and cut down on repetitive code. A very simple codebase started in C. It supports connections, and has minimal and functional versions of "say", "who", "halt", and "quit" commands. Calarey is a level-less and class-less system meant for serious, adult role players. Experience is still needed to gain skills to help players survive. It is a fork off ResortMUD. The goal is to provide the mudding community with a codebase capable of change and to adjust readily to different ideas.

The motive is to improve a somewhat stale climate in which many of the muds today have to flourish in. The more prominent aspects of the codebase are 1. Its dynamic design promotes the sharing of in-game elements and rules. The result should be a codebase that is easy, for an administrator, to create a fun role-play environment with. A fresh, stable, full featured fantasy MUD codebase with a classic look and feel. Features include everything observed in DikuMUD plus dozens of classes, and over spells, chants, prayers, songs, skills, and abilities.

ANSI support, plus tons of traps, pits, mazes, and zone types. MOBs that can fly, fall, speak, learn, climb, spellcast, follow, and stalk. There are languages, professional skills, storms, resources and more. Offline grid-based. With it you can create the layouts for complete areas in minutes. All data files are text based to help with easy maintenance. All area files are diku compatible, adding areas is particularly easy, the server will even renumber them on the fly when it loads them if its necessary Full C-like scripting language, complete with security so that you cant bring the mud down.