12/12/99 - Latest News

Hero's Journey and Kewl Doods
Berendir @ 4:52 pm EST

Hero's Journey is a Role Playing Game thats currently in development, by Simutronics, the company that created the text based games Dragonrealms, and GemstoneIII.

I found the following off the Hero's Journey Vault. It addresses the concerns players have about Hero's Journey being turned into a game dominated by Kewl Doods.

...which translated from 31337 reads "MUDs and the kewl dude effect". It was proposed that text-based MUDs don't attract lamers the way popular graphical based massively multiplayer games do, but the facts say otherwise:

As to the difference between MUD's and graphical RPG's...well, I don't know any other way to say it but, you're wrong. You seem to be basing your claim on the small MUD's (say, 50-150 players) that abound on the net, and the doods are indeed rather rare there (not a large enough audience, and a very high GM/player ratio). This isn't true of either of our two larger games, GemStone III or DragonRealms.

When we moved to AOL, and especially when AOL went flat-rate, we most certainly -did- attract huge numbers of kewl doods (as in hundreds or thousands of such characters a month). And yes, we were not expecting them, nor were we well prepared for them at that time (nor was -any- online RPG, considering we were the first to hit those kind of numbers). However, that was several years ago...and I'll put our tools, skills, and experience in handling this crowd up against -any- game company at this point in time (or at any other, for that matter). We still get them, but those who are as obvious (or oblivious) as those on UO or EQ don't last very long at all. ;)

FWIW, hunting troublemakers in our games has been my favorite hobby for the last two or three years, and I have -no- worries about the dewds running away with HJ...it just ain't gonna happen, because we won't let it. My personal fear is that we'll do it too well, and I'll have to find a new hobby (j/k). ;)