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By Mark Damon Hughes <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>

   "I hear lots of people bitching about Ultima [Online]... Know what they're complaining about? Player Killers... Yup, seems like the Quake deathmatchers decided they wanted hundreds of player deathmatches badly enough to give up the 3D viewpoint, and now they run around in Ultima Online killing hapless adventurers afte they've spent HOURS building up their charactars strength, causing them to lose it all." -Shawn Swift (sswift#earthlink.net)

   Yes, big shock there. Who'd have thought it? Oh, right, anyone who's ever played a MUD that didn't disable PK (or restrict it to certain areas and victims).

   I ran into a seriously disturbing trend at CGDC: "Designers" saying "we want online multiplayer role-playing games", but then following it with "I've never played MUDs, they're stupid" or "We don't want it to be like MUDs". If you have human beings together with no consequences to their actions, of *COURSE* some of them will become psycho killers - they're detached from the virtual reality just as real-world psychopaths are detached from so-called "real reality". Oh, but don't bother asking people who've been dealing with that issue for 20 years with MUDs how they solved the problem (and in most cases, they HAVE - violators of rules usually get branded as criminals, and can be killed by anyone freely, or local police forces deal with them).

   For that matter, when they say they want "smart" NPCs and puzzles, they don't look at how pencil & paper RPGs and good MUDs deal with it (by having a human GM "possess" an NPC or manipulate reality), no, they obsess about AI and say "well, real RPGs aren't possible yet."

   Changing the lethality rate won't fix the PKers. They're always going to be there, no matter what rules you think you have (in one MUD I used to play on, PK was completely disabled... but you could charm a monster into attacking someone for you). You can only set up internal social fixes and a few sitebans and some GM manipulation.

   I also hear, over and over, "MMORPG" developers opposed to people chatting and hanging out, or coming up with their OWN stories, instead of actively playing the provided quests. That's what humans, at least social gamer humans, do when they're put together; once you provide enough emotional bandwidth for people to really connect, they're going to ignore mere machinery, because machines suck.

   It's ridiculous to imagine any other result, but somehow many people DO think that these swarms of players will all clamber through their obstacle course like grunts in basic training, and then get off without talking (in many cases, getting off is the reason people come to social environs, but that's another subject...)

   Finding NPC actors won't be difficult - people play MUDs now for free. You could pay them in free time, and it'd be sufficient. Pay them in xp usable for their own characters, and they'll flock to your system. Pay the best ones minimum wage for doing what they want to do on their free time (hopefully - some will let school, work, and meat relationships drop in favor of spending more time in a world they like better than this "real" one) anyway, and you'll have to get armed guards to hold them back.

   Natural intelligence (or even natural stupidity) beats AI in social situations. There isn't even any comparison. I'd as soon talk to my toaster as an AI, it'd likely be a better conversation.

   The best simulated personality I have EVER seen was Floyd in Steve Meretzky's _Planetfall_. Floyd was a hyperactive "6-year-old" with no attention span, a rather more limited problem set than general conversation, and still his only really brilliant moments are entirely pre-scripted, and no conversation was possible. That's the best that's been done. Most NPCs are so shallow light passes through them.

   Computers are fine for beating chess grandmasters and running automated factories, but they're pretty lousy human beings.

   Socializing in MMORPGs is not just chatting any more than pencil & paper RPGs are, it's in-character chatting, and they'll make their own entertainment if you give them the tools and some starting points. Play some MUDs (you can find good roleplaying environments on any kind of MUD - I'm traditionally a Diku/Circle fan, but MUSH/MUSE/MUX systems are more often RP-intensive - many Dikus and LPs are KTATTS games) and read Vernor Vinge's _True Names_.