Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
THE BOTTOM LINE ON PLAYER KILLING
You cannot please ever ybody, so you will benefit from deciding whom you want to
please and tailoring your environment to them. In a game that allows player kill-
ing, a certain number of players will inevitably abuse the system, exploiting their
superior strength to victimize weaker ones without ever putting themselves at risk.
You can't please them without also providing them with victims who won't be
pleased, so it's not worth trying. Ultimately, you need to bear two things in mind:
It's a fantasy world. That means it's supposed to be enjoyable, escapist enter-
tainment. People don't fantasize about being harassed, bullied, or abused. A fair
contest among consenting players is one thing; perpetual harassment or an
ambush by a gang is quite another.
People pay to play. This makes your world distinctly different from the real
world. The real world doesn't owe us anything; we survive as best we can. But as a
game provider, you've taken the players' money, so you have obligations to them.
Just exactly what those obligations are is open to debate, of course, but if players
don't feel that you are meeting your obligations, they will leave.
PLAYER EXPECTATIONS
Players have higher expectations of the virtual world than of the real world. For example,
players expect all labor to result in profit; they expect life to be fair; they expect to be
protected from aggression before the fact, not just having to seek redress after the fact;
they expect problems to be resolved quickly; and they expect that their integrity will be
assumed to be beyond reproach. In other words, they expect too much, and you will not
be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage their expectations.
The Nature of Time
In a single-player computer game, you maintain a great deal of control over the
relationship between game time and real time. Most games run at many times the
speed of real time, and a player often experiences a simulated day in a game world
in an hour or less of real time. You can also hand over control of the speed of time
to the player when you want to; it's not uncommon for players in combat flight
simulators to speed up time when flying to and from the combat zones and then
slow down to real time again when they get there. Finally, you can skip time
entirely—useful during periods when the player's avatar sleeps. You can blank the
screen for a moment and then put up a text message that says, “8 hours later… ,”
and continue with the game.
But you can't use any of these options in multiplayer games. You obviously can't
allow some players to move through time at different speeds than others, and you
can't skip time unless you force all players to skip that time together. Although
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