Aspects of this enquiry seem applicable to my project too.

For example my current problem with the "grinder" type seems to lie in the type of economics / demographics / ecology used. Specifically, at the high level leader level of play I envisioned some kind of supply and demand restricting the spawning of large scale strategic armies. (Admittedly things might be somewhat different if one actually teams up enough players that a large scale strategic army composed exclusively of individual played characters can be constructed.)

It was thus that I somewhat arbitrarily picked "Freeciv" for "large scale" (large compared to a town but mostly limited to one planet at a time) operations. Building large scale "units" has an economics behind it.

However the also somewhat arbitrarily picked "Crossfire RPG" I contemplate using for the "grinder" (hack and slash, dungeon crawling, individual character action) aspect happens to be based economically on a somewhat "MUD" like autospawn system where there is basically an endless supply of monsters to kill, with said monsters miraculously "re-spawning" in ways that seem extremely arbitrary.

I wonder which comes first, the necessity to supply endless numbers of monsters to kill deriving from the ability of characters to individually kill vast numbers of monsters or the arbitrary creation-from-nothing of endless hordes of monsters leading to the characters having to be able to individually slay a ridiculous number of monsters?

I thus am facing a supply and demand problem. How many individual played characters of what level with what equipment should it take to eliminate a nation's entire force ("unit") of archers that took them ten years to recruit train equip and deploy?

The default system used by "Crossfire" (and most MUDs, it seems) would make it technically easy to simply have archers spawn wherever the nation's "unit" of archers is currently deployed and simply not bother to keep count. In fact the system is not even designed or intended, by default, to keep count at all. Players could slay millions or billions of the nation's archers without ever causing a shortage of archers let alone actually wiping out the nation's "unit of archers".

How this kind of problem is resolved is likely to make a lot of difference in the various tiers of players' perceptions of the game...

"You sound like one of those crazy cultists who believe in 'the planet known as Earth'. Knowing you're type next you'll be claiming to actually be *from* Earth..."

Maybe so. When you put it that way though it seems to me that the so called non-roleplayers are actually more determinedly playing the role they have chosen than the so called roleplayers are.

But it is partly because I suspected such "crazy cultists" might come along that I designed my timeline to intersect with ours.

Not everyone doesn't believe in Earth. Some are actually concerned about what is going to happen on Earth, because devastation is supposedly going to happen there. Even if Earth *is* mythical, it is the myth most cultures are based on, so allowing even a mythical Earth to be devastated because some cult or other's vision of the future calls for such devastation is maybe not a great idea.

This is a very specific milieu designed with the possibility of non-roleplayers in mind, but this three tiers idea too assumes such crazies probably will happen along from time to time.

Maybe in some milieus they might be seen as demoniacally possessed by Earth elementals or something.

In the approach I am using it might get even more tiresome to try to convince them not to devastate Earth than it would be to convince them to shut up about Earth.

In the "Between the Worlds" add-on for Wesnoth version 1.8 one of the dialogue options for a player is to claim they are not really there at all (even that the whole place they are currently in is not real either), that what the characters they are talking to are seeing is merely an avatar that they are projecting into that world. The reaction of the others is basically ah, I see, you must be a Hacker then eh or using Hacker technology. Cool. Now where we, oh yeah... on with the mission/campaign.

But we can record the fact they are claiming to be just a player playing a game, so when the newer versions of Wesnoth start allowing players to move on from the single-player campaign into a persistent world we could if we chose preferentially place them with other people who make the same claims about the nonreality of the world and their avatar within the world.

Maybe the suggestions of some kind of enforcement might even make some sense? Afterall, if it is a MMORPG rather than some other kind of MMO why should the RP Gamers be the ones to leave? They are the ones the game is for, presumably? Those who do not want to RP Game might be better served by some non-RP Game?


[Edited by - markm on December 23, 2010 4:25:05 AM]