The Mud

[maxum]

If you have been following on the discussions you might have noticed I mentioned a Havok distribution based mud.

82.131.65.166 : 7777

This is hosted by my friend Drongo, and he did most of the code fixes. I helped out with code where I could and did a lot of balance type changes. As neither of us had played Havok, and the distributable is in a terrible state, we took it and run in directions we figured might work. It was never play tested and as far as I know has never had more than three people on it at once.

Some changes from Havok I made that I probably did not document:

Most races gain something on level, as opposed to just on creation
eg Drow gain 2 mana per level.

A lot of skills got moved to main class, thus a Mu/Cl will play different to a Cl/Mu.

Sorcs - the whole spell indexes got rewritten, time to mem is based on char level, spell level, and skill percent. Mana shield makes sorcs fun.

Humans dual class instead of multi, first class sets main class skills and hp.

Poly mobs increase level with player, a lvl 50 poly troll is stronger than a level 30. Complete rework of poly, some attributes vary a little based on race, some are set.

Weapon speeds function, based on weapon proficiency.

Rent redone, everything costs something.

Poison damage is based on level, it hurts.

Brew and scribe function. Blank scrolls or empty potion bottles are hard to come by and don't rent.

Player files are stored in a SQL database.

Spelling converted to British English.

QP can be gained during normal play (same manner as empty scrolls and potion bottles) and can be used to purchase attribute boosts, prices based on class.

All classes can gain multiple attacks, when fighting best class is used.
Clerics cap out at 1.6.

Some original things in the code that never worked have been fixed. Eg weapons can grant extra attacks.

Complete re-numbering and rebalance of every zone, room, item and mob. This was a huge undertaking, but is really only noticeable behind the scenes.


The server has its pros and cons. It is hosted in Europe so might not be as fast as expected for American players. We have no domain name so sometimes the IP can change, but not often. Low zone numbers, and mostly stock Havok, although all files pass a spell checker now. On the plus side, at least two people have write access (myself included) so updates can occur.

[Fury]

The rent rework alone is enough to ensure that I'll never be popping in on this one. Part of what makes Havok so good is the ability to have no rent at all. We understood there that rent turns something you do for fun into a job. Congrats on the work that you've put into it, and thank you for working to give people more options. To me, this sounds more ilke a completely different mud loosely based on old (neary 10 years, in fact) Havok code and not like Havok at all.

[drongo]

Well, you can always play for fun using some non-exclusive items that are good and low-rent. But there must be fun for others too. Exclusive items should be either hard-to-rent (so they can eventually get back to game) or non-exclusive (so it loads and everyone else can get it).
And although I'm the type that hates rent, I must admit high-rent items should exist too.

[Fury]

You misunderstand. I wasn't saying that high rent kept me from considering it, I was saying that the fact that it was "reworked" instead of being removed completely is the issue. Why would I go from one mud with rent to another?

This "exclusive item, high rent" mentality is borrowed from SD and it's no good. Havok had no such items, and you could reduce your rent on all items to 0. A proper item system of tiered rarity is a fine example of a vastly superior system that wouldn't have rent. You have the mob load one of several versions of the same item type, with scaling rarity. The most rare version might have an extremely low chance to spawn but have the best stats, etc.

Regardless of any claims of exclusive item redistribution, etc, the only real purpose of rent on muds is to force an appearance of increased population by forcing people to turn a game that they play for fun into a job. To be perfectly honest, the only people that I have ever come across who found it fun for a mud to have a system of high rent and exclusive items were the hand full of people who were immature enough to gain a perverse pleasure at hoarding every "exclusive" item that they could collect to prevent other players from using them.. and then gloating over it. That is what SD was like, in the end.

[maxum]

You need to think on that a bit more Fury.

What do these things all have in common?
Gear damage in Diablo series.
House cut in auction house, Path of Exile, Neverwinter, Diablo.
Rent in Shadowdale.

[Fury]

Jun 8, 2013 16:10:21 GMT -5 maxum said:

You need to think on that a bit more Fury.

What do these things all have in common?
Gear damage in Diablo series.
House cut in auction house, Path of Exile, Neverwinter, Diablo.
Rent in Shadowdale.

they're all uninspired money sinks.. except the rent in SD serves dual purpose of turning the game into a job where you end up logging on to make rent and in the end just stop caring

[maxum]

Uninspired money sinks? Maybe but there is a requirement for a money sink in all these games. If you can come up with an inspiring one that hasn't been tried I would be interested to hear about it.
A money sink is required to take gold out of the game, keep inflation to a manageable level. It needs to work without constant management, and at all player levels the game is likely to operate with.
Auction cuts only function in games with high player count and high item turnover. Item durability feels more like a tax, and would take a vast amount of code and player testing to balance it on a sd code based mud. It also scales more towards players who are playing rather than players who are idling or hoarding.
For various reasons, when I was playing with the code I decided that the most viable options for SD code was either rent, or scheduled pwipes. Scheduled pwipes have a lot of disadvantages, specially for less frequent social players.
Rent only gets charged when you are not playing, so it encourages people to play more. I wont say reward, but penalises less. It also discourages people from renting uniques for a long time, specially when they are not getting frequent use out of them.
What I disliked about sdmud rent, was that it scaled rather badly. With the 4k worn drop off, items were either low rent, or very high rent. The people who played casually ignored rent, where the serious players had extreme rent amounts.
With the rework I did, I dropped the high value items way down, but added rent to all, or near all items. Sanc potions have a rent of 1-10 coins per day, hopefully making people think about if they really want 200+ squid pots. Uniques float more around the 4k-10k mark, making them more affordable. The rent drop off for worn items is 50%, rather than a set amount. This move rents from the 30 - 500k a day sdmud to a more gradual 1k-20k. This should remove the chore of golding for rent to some degree, while still taking gold from play.
I could go into depth about some of the changes, and why, but if having any rent puts you off playing you need to convince me of a viable alternate method to suck gold from play.

[Fury]

qp was rare enough when sd was highly populated and dragon cards, etc were common occurrences.. and few people still then had more than a single piece of quest gear. there's currently no viable means of getting it, especially for those social players that don't happen to be around on the rare occasion a higher level immort might actually be around, feel like doing something questy, and actually doing it.

what about purchasing qp with gold? or some sort of automated quest function that requires gold to purchase a quest to do? It would give people more to do than level alts and occasionally grab a piece of gear or two. It would allow for expanding what's in the quest store, as well, giving people more options of things to consider.. perhaps temporary xp boost potion? improving an existing piece of gear in some way? there are any number of options that would open up that way. i'm sure that people would enjoy being able to restring their items or make them artifact so they can't be destroyed. that's more things that could be done with qp and it could all be automated.

how about a coded version of Seth? not for summons but for buffs.. where you purchase them for a fee - say buffs at level 51, perhaps? Or the ability to buy automated corpse retrieval so that the next time you die, your corpse will go to a special room for you to get your things.

Just some things that I have always considered immeasurably better than rent or item durability, etc. The auction one isn't exactly inspired, but it doesn't bother me half as much as the other two.

[lestat]

I think the idea of 'rent' is vastly outdated. I understand the general concept behind 'money sinks', and agree there needs to be some purpose A) for money and B) a system to drain the money to prevent dramatic inflation.

However, on SD, rent was a tool to eventually redistribute items. It has become a disincentive to play, currently. For example - on Auda right now I have a decent kit. Logging on to grind cash to maintain it sucks. It's making me feel like as soon as I run out of my current cash stash, I'm going to let rent expire and step away from the game.

If the system were different, where there was no rent but the good items either A) loaded with decreasing rarity the more that existed or B) always loaded but the level of stats was random making the 'uber' items exceedingly rare, I can imagine continuing to play, logging on to check to see if any of the cool rares loaded (in the case of A) or to clear bosses to see if the item had good stats (in the case of B).

If you layered on top of this some mechanic where you could buy restrings for vast amounts of gold, people could (over time) create customized gear sets that fit their gearing goals AND could make the set look like they wanted it to AND would create a massive gold sink while creating incentive to still log on and grind gold.

In the above scenario, I could imagine working on my characters and playing a ton more.

[maxum]

Are we still talking about Themud, or back on SD?
TheMud has automated qp systems in place, % chance to load etc. Rent amounts really were moved to make it a secondary.

[Fury]

I only know about your "TheMud" (that name.. ok then...) of what you've said.. but I think it comes down to, in general, that rent of any kind is beyond antiquated and ends up being one of the larger reasons that people leave muds completely. I know it's been a major factor every time that I've come back to SD, spent a week or so, then just got to the point of remembering why I left because you either have godly gear and the game becomes a boring chore, or you have rentless gear and you're barely a shadow of what you could be if you enjoyed doing chores.

A scaling rent system is still a rent system, and it doesn't give me any incentive to feel any different about it. At the absolute best, it feels like someone said "There's this massive gaping wound bleeding all over the place.. I could stitch it up and heal the wound, but I kinda like blood so I'll just use this Band-Aid instead."

There are a nearly endless number of things that one could come up with to give people things to do with gold that encourage them to spend it. Different things will interest different people, so it's best to either not make any of them mandatory or make some of them be related to things that people will want to do anyway, like gain QP for quest gear, etc.

[erpel]

is this Havok based mud still up?

Mar 31, 2013 20:13:11 GMT -5 maxum said:

If you have been following on the discussions you might have noticed I mentioned a Havok distribution based mud.

82.131.65.166 : 7777

This is hosted by my friend Drongo, and he did most of the code fixes. I helped out with code where I could and did a lot of balance type changes. As neither of us had played Havok, and the distributable is in a terrible state, we took it and run in directions we figured might work. It was never play tested and as far as I know has never had more than three people on it at once.

Some changes from Havok I made that I probably did not document:

Most races gain something on level, as opposed to just on creation
eg Drow gain 2 mana per level.

A lot of skills got moved to main class, thus a Mu/Cl will play different to a Cl/Mu.

Sorcs - the whole spell indexes got rewritten, time to mem is based on char level, spell level, and skill percent. Mana shield makes sorcs fun.

Humans dual class instead of multi, first class sets main class skills and hp.

Poly mobs increase level with player, a lvl 50 poly troll is stronger than a level 30. Complete rework of poly, some attributes vary a little based on race, some are set.

Weapon speeds function, based on weapon proficiency.

Rent redone, everything costs something.

Poison damage is based on level, it hurts.

Brew and scribe function. Blank scrolls or empty potion bottles are hard to come by and don't rent.

Player files are stored in a SQL database.

Spelling converted to British English.

QP can be gained during normal play (same manner as empty scrolls and potion bottles) and can be used to purchase attribute boosts, prices based on class.

All classes can gain multiple attacks, when fighting best class is used.
Clerics cap out at 1.6.

Some original things in the code that never worked have been fixed. Eg weapons can grant extra attacks.

Complete re-numbering and rebalance of every zone, room, item and mob. This was a huge undertaking, but is really only noticeable behind the scenes.


The server has its pros and cons. It is hosted in Europe so might not be as fast as expected for American players. We have no domain name so sometimes the IP can change, but not often. Low zone numbers, and mostly stock Havok, although all files pass a spell checker now. On the plus side, at least two people have write access (myself included) so updates can occur.