Re: Eressea PBEM Info

From: "Enno Rehling" <enno@eressea-pbem.de>

Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2001 00:23:59 +0000

> > About 50 new players are  accepted every week....
> > Playing Eressea is free.

I forgot to mention http://eressea-pbem.de/statgraph.html - We have an
automatically generated overview of the game's growth :-)

> how can a game of that size be free? Don't get me wrong, i don't doubt it
> is - i'm just interested to know the mechanics. There must be an army of
> gms running it??

Ah, don't get me started... I'm proud of Eressea, because I like to think
we're offering close-to-professional service.

Let me say first that yes, Eressea is a huge amount of work for everyone
involved. It's a labour of love, if you will.

But it's not that bad: Eressea ist, with very few exceptions, completely
computer-moderated. All monsters are guided by AI scripts, there are hardly
any quests (in fact, we encourage players to come up with their own, but
that hardly ever happens). There is currently one quest going on, which also
involves little to no moderation after initial setup - we have active
objects that can react to predefined conditions like "player holding magic
item x enters building y". Most of the game is strategic combat, and there's
no need to moderate that. still, there's plenty of work:

What's taking most of the time is development and bug fixing (if you
develop, you will have to fix bugs). The game is in flow, meaning we adapt
the rules when we find that some parts are unbalanced, making it a game you
can actually play for several years.

New players are hand-seeded. that also takes some time, but there's no
algorithm that can come close when it comes to balancing the initial setup.

Bug reports, which are mostly players that haven't read the rules properly,
or don't understand some part of them, are filtered by a mailing list of
devoted players. actual bug reports are handled by the people who have
access to the source.  there is a FAQ that is open to changes from players,
so nothing that's any work for us. I plan to set up bugzilla one of these
days in order to streamline the bugfixing - we lose track of too many of the
minor bugs.

The documentation is kept by one person, who creates HTML and Latex source
files. From those, an automatic build generated ASCII, Postscript and PDF.
When we implemetn some changes, we try to add it to the appropriate section
in the docs.

Currently, there are 3-4 people that actively work on the game. We live in 2
different contries, 3 different cities, and we keep in contact through a
mailing list. We keep contact with the players through our newsserver &
mailinglists. We had a couple of player's gatherings (barbeques and little
bar-meetings) all over germany and austria over the last years, and those
tend to be a lot of fun. My tip for evryone who's working in this industry:
If you want devoted players, get to know them - community, I think, is a
very important thing.

Enno.
--
Enno Rehling                                 http://eressea.upb.de/~enno/
Programmer, Anarchy Online                 http://www.anarchy-online.com/
Funcom Oslo A/S                                    http://www.funcom.com/

References

Eressea PBEM Info
"Enno Rehling" <enno@eressea-pbem.de>
Sun, 07 Jan 2001 22:53:19 +0000
Re: Eressea PBEM Info
"neo" <david@dlsharrock.freeserve.co.uk>
Mon, 08 Jan 2001 23:29:35 +0000