Basternae.org

The MUD Connector has an interesting review of Duris posted:

http://www.mudconnect.com/mud-bin/new_prev/review.cgi?rid=25705

I’ve always enjoyed Duris and still play it off and on (maybe half a dozen weeks a year), but it has always had so many flaws that I end up getting fed up and walking away after a while. Part of it is administrative, sure, but a lot of the problems are core game design — at the core it’s an excellent MUD, but so much of it is an unnecessarily frustrating mess that it doesn’t really have much longevity for me. I think it comes from the original philosophy of the design — the creators really didn’t differentiate between “difficult” and “irritating”.

For example (and I’m mainly referring to Duris from a few years ago because that’s what I know best):

Randomly killed by random-spawn unpredictable scan-track mobs in the underdark for no logical reason, or = annoying.

Instantly killed because you were attacked by a drunk orc when you try to leave the inn in your hometown and since you’re level 1, assisting guards one-shot you (and your class doesn’t have sneak) = annoying.

Getting killed in artifact-wielding players in low-level zones and having your corpse looted of spellbooks/totems that you are too poor to replace because you’rer a newbie = annoying.

Player-wiping because you want to refresh the player base, purge an overabundance of equipment, or replace the world maps, or cover up the fact that the game mechanics still need some work = annoying.

Needing to use your head to come up with a strategy to defeat mobs, complete a zone, or accomplish a task = difficult.

Being forced to rely on your wits and diligently reading room descriptions to solve quests or puzzles = difficult.

Optimizing your equipment and stat bonuses based on how you want to perform in combat and doing so by real combat experience rather than reading the source code = difficult.

Somehow they seem to think that and difficult are both beneficial. Difficult makes players keep playing because things aren’t too easy. Annoying makes them log in to WoW.

I still find it incredibly amusing that I was more-or-less programming for Duris during the 2000-2001 “arms race” with Basternae 2 — every time I added a feature or convenience command that was neat but didn’t affect game balance it would show up on Duris a week later.

Even so, I can’t really say I have anything against any of the admins of Duris. After all, I’ve never even met any of them (except Xyzom from old Duris, who I actually lived with for a while and worked on Illustrium Arcana with — nice enough fella but we haven’t kept in touch). All I can do is judge by their product, Duris: Land of Bloodlust, which needs some work.

Some of you may remember Raph from Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, or Everquest II. He also wrote a few articles for Imaginary Realities webzine (a webzine about MUDs for those of you who don’t know). The site was pretty active from 1998-2001, but at some point it vanished from the face of the Earth.

Well, Raph was nice enough to give permission to reprint his IR articles on FindMUD. They’re a good read, and still relevant today, so if you’re at all interested in MUD design you should read ‘em over.

Raph’s blog is also pretty interesting and updated fairly regularly. It’s worth becoming a regular reader.

One thing I’m surprised never made it into Basternae — bounties.  It’s only natural that you would be able to set a price on someone’s head in a PvP MUD.

So I implemented about 60% of a bounty system today.   There are still a few details to work out, but the core of the system is in place.

I’ve played on a handful of MUDs, and just about every one of them has regular player levels from 1 to 50, especially those from the family tree of Basternae. I’ve always thought that was just too many. Although the levels from 1 to 20 have usually been pretty quick and kind of fun, especially if you’re learning to play a new class, it soon starts to become a grind. Levels 30 to 40 always have been especially grind-y and really not very much fun.

The “exp grind” is a part of experience-level-based games. That’s not going to change anytime soon.

However, I’m finally getting rid of some of those extra levels. The level cap for Basternae 3 will be 40. All of the skills, spells, abilities, etc. have been compressed, so you’ll get new skills and spells every 4 levels instead of 5.

I’m not lowering mob levels, at least not yet, so some things will be a lot more challenging and downright dangerous. Mobs may need to be adjusted, and they might be fine how they are, but the trick with getting things balanced out is to make your major changes first so that the minor adjustments can be made around them as things settle into place.

Even with the decrease in number of levels, I’ve made experience level progress a lot steeper. Expect to need slightly more experience to get to level 40 than you needed to get to 50. The goal here is not to be able to get a character to level 40 in a day, or even under a week.

It’s generally been thought that there really isn’t much to the game until you hit level 50 (or 46, depending on your outlook). That’s one of the things I’m trying to change here.

Setting up hometown repop points for the various races and classes in Basternae 2 was a real pain.

We had, in code, a two-dimensional array that would be referenced to get the room number for each particular race/class combination. Any special cases where someone had a choice or more than one hometown had to be hand-coded. If an area was added or removed, the code would have to be touched. This invariably resulted either in zone admins editing code (a bad idea), or in zone admins waiting for a coder to add their changes (better idea, but slower).

I’ve created a way to automatically generate hometown lookups based on areas loaded and give a new player a choice of which hometown to take when they create a character. It’s simple enough in theory: each zone can list the races that can choose it as a hometown and lists the room numbers where the various classes respawn. When the zones load, the MUD builds a list and everything is spiffy, no code editing involved.

Behind the scenes it’s a little complex. I’m using a two-dimensional vector of lists that point to integers ( std::vector< std::vector< std::list<int *> * > * > ). The standard library is awesome and makes life much easier, but it can result in excessive punctiation, as seen in the previous sentence.

I really prefer moving as much as possible out of code and into configuration files. I mean, isn’t it silly to have to recompile to, say, make a troll mercenary spawn one room to the left?