Running a free, text-based online roleplaying game comes with many rewards, and many challenges. Almost ten years ago, when Adam and I first embarked upon our grand plan to create FiranMUX, we faced a blank slate in game design. We had policy and code decisions to make, and most of the choices we made were the right ones. We tend to approach everything with a positive 'try-it-and-see' attitude, which has helped turn us into the successful long-running game that we are today.
But sometimes, when you 'try-it-and-see', you see that it just doesn't work. We've made mistakes. We've even made a few mistakes that can't be fixed without throwing away ten years of work and starting from scratch. In the interest of sharing knowledge and sparing others from repeating mistakes we've made, here's a list of things we'd do differently if we had it all to do over again.
1. Roads
Ancient Persia was the inspiration for the design of our main city. Anarinuell is city of walls within walls. Each district is designed to be easily sealed off if it falls during an invasion, or in case of civil rebellion. This design has saved the Firan people on numerous occasions during real play time. But with gates and walls also come the roads to facilitate travel between districts, and when we began laying out the grid for FiranMUX, we decided not to assume the roads, but to actually build them.
The result? About a hundred rooms that are used for no purpose other than travel. A hundred extra rooms for players to walk through just to get to where they want to go. Had we to do it over again, we would collapse the size of the city by removing most, if not all of the roads, and writing them into the descriptions of rooms that the roads passed by or through.
2. D-Space
We chose d-space for FiranMUX because we wanted to build a land-based economy. Many of our nobles would want to visit their lands outside the city walls. Many of our farmers would want to go play with the farming code. We wanted an expanse without all the rooms and exits. We also wanted the game laid out in a grid so that our plans for a 'walk-to' command could be implemented, whereby a player could type in a destination, and the game would route their character and literally walk them through every room on the way to where they wanted to go.
When this command works, it's a way cool feature of our game. But due to the complexity of the code, it breaks all the time. Moreover, we ended up fixing hundreds of rooms on the grid to reduce lag anyway, so we ended up getting the complex burdens of d-space without its benefits. If we had it to do over again, we'd let people imagine the expanse of land and build as necessary.
3. An Anonymous Complaint System
When we were younger and more gullible about such things, we thought it prudent to install an anonymous complaint system for players who might be too intimidated to air their grievances publicly. Rightly, or wrongly, players always assume that they are going to face retribution from staff if they speak their minds, so we thought allowing them to do so in a "safe" way would help foster a sense of trust and communication.
Such a system does exactly the opposite.
When we received about twenty-five vitriolic and completely destructive comments within the first week of having the system in place, we were completely demoralized. We had not realized that, when freed from the responsibility of being associated with your own statements, perhaps it is human nature to say things like "You should leave your spouse" etcetera.
By the time a player on our game came to us and asked us why we hadn't addressed all his complaints, the damage had already been done. Even though about twenty of the twenty-five comments were from the same player, the mood of the place had changed, and not for the better. In the end, we realized that if a player isn't willing to stand behind his or her idea, then that idea is not important enough to listen to.
4. Gate Tolls
Nobody is poor on FiranMUX. That's a problem for priests and priestesses whose life mission it is to help the poor, and for criminals who want to make a living loan sharking. It robs them of excellent roleplaying opportunities. This and a thousand other reasons explain why having poor characters on a game will benefit your theme. But making characters poor is the hard part.
Adam and I don't like the idea of making it hard for characters to make money. Players like to see some return for their work. It's hard enough to make money in real life. So we attacked the problem from the other side. We decided to make life more expensive for characters in the Firan world.
One way we were successful in doing this was at the Bath House. Firan is based on ancient Greco-Roman ideal in which the Bath House is extremely important. Many of our most famous scenes have taken place in the bath house--intrigues, violence, scheming, and seduction. Because of this, players are willing to pay almost any price to get a bath. We thought extending this idea to the gates and roads would be helpful in transferring the wealth of our mush citizens.
But here, we were wrong. Players are willing to spend money on the baths, because there is a great deal of value added. Paying to travel the grid, however, was not as enticing. Players simply stayed in their rooms rather than pay the tolls at the gates, and this, in turn, reduced roleplaying on the game overall. We're still looking for ways to impoverish some of our characters, but we now know that gate and road tolls are not the way to go.
5. Monarchy
The thematic system of government on FiranMUX is a Republic. But the Firan Republic is made up of eight small monarchies, led by a sort of High King figure. We thought that having nine different leaders on the game would lead to diversity, and prevent the stagnation that sometimes occurs on games where there's a single player playing the ruler, year after year.
To some extent, we have been successful in that unexpected characters have taken power, and no heir to the throne can consider themselves completely out of contention. However, if Adam and I ever build another game, our theme will have at its core, a democracy.
Why? Because leaders get burned out. The constant demands on their time eventually sap the pleasure out of roleplay, and they would like to turn the reigns over to someone else for a while. But on a game like Firan, where bloodlines are everything, that can't happen. And even when it can, a leader can only choose a relative or heir to their own throne to fill in. When the player of a clan leader decides to give up his or her character, the staff has to scour the game for players who could fit the role. Our choices are often limited.
My guess is that on a game where leaders can be elected democratically by the playerbase, turnover is less of an issue, and there will always be new blood to fill leadership positions. Moreover, the threat of being removed from power by player consensus ought to make leader characters more responsive to their fellow players. That's our theory, anyway.
And there you have it. Five mistakes we've already made for you—and that's just the start. We could write a never-ending series. Hopefully we've all learned our lessons!
