Re: Legends

From: gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)

Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 00:00:00 +0000

In article <1995Jun15.135647.1882@leeds.ac.uk>,
Dean Johnson <phy6drhj@ast.leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

>This is a typical "customer" point of view.  Perhaps you should think
>a little more about what goes into running a PBM game.  See below.
>Yes, I am a customer, NOT a GM.

It's a customer point of view, but it also makes economic sense for a
commercial moderation company.

The #1 variable cost in most PBM games is paying someone to type the
orders in.  The #2 variable cost is generally printing/mailing the
turn result. PBEM games reduce both of these costs so much that they
generally offer unlimited orders. This is true of both commercial and
free games. Olympia, for example, costs $2.50 per turn, and you can
write as many orders as you can for the nobles you've got. I often
write a bunch of quick orders instead of a few long ones; no way I
could do the same thing in a snail-mail game.

For PBsnailMail games offering play-by-disk, these two costs become
constant (but still large), so you can also offer unlimited orders if
you wish. I don't know if any companies do this, but it does make
economic sense, especially if players are attracted to games that
offer "fixed" costs. I've always liked games like that.

For PBsnailmail games that operate totally on paper, you can still
design them so that either positions are limited in how many orders
they can enter, or so that the cost is the average of the number of
orders/size of printout that all the players get. This means that the
small players subsidize the big players, but that's what some
customers want.

-- greg

References

Re: Legends
gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Sun, 04 Jun 1995 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Legends
phy6drhj@ast.leeds.ac.uk (Dean Johnson)
Thu, 15 Jun 1995 00:00:00 +0000