[MUD-Dev] player persistence

[Matthew Mihaly <diablo#best,com>]

One of Raph's 'Laws of Online Game Design' is to never trust the
client. Something just happened in Achaea that shouldn't have surprised
me, but did. When our players start out in the game, they get X amount of
tokens that they can use to learn skills, and X amount of a different kind
that can be, over some time, transformed into the tokens you use to raise
your skills. Anyway, to stop people from just creating newbies and
installing hitting the roulette tables, betting the tokens that are used
to learn skills, and then creating another one if they lose, until they
have massive winnings, I don't let people gamble until level 15. The first
20 levels are fairly easy to get through. If you knew tons of quests to
do, you could get there in an hour, but it probably took him generally 2
to 6 hours, depending on how busy the game was. Over and over, he got to
level 15, bet all his tokens on number 16, and then suicided (deleted
himself) when he lost. He did this for 6 straight days, 13 hours a
day, until finally he won, and got himself what would normally cost about
US $240 to buy. In retrospect, not plugging that loophole was stupid. I
knew it was there, I just didn't think anyone would have that kind of
persistentce. If there's a pot of gold at the end, at least some players
will endure nearly anything to get there.

--matt




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