unforum

[rose]

re:mu

[Rolerbe]

I was only active in PCX in the very early months, so some brief context would help -- what are the 'recent issues' from PCX as you see them?

In any event, with scale comes complexity in communications. Separating the wheat from the chaff and structured summaries by the player base becomes as critical to the effort as the raw content provided by the PM's. Where the player base is called on to act in some coordinated way then some organization structure becomes an inevitable requirement. This certainly changes the character of play from the smaller args where anarchy is still sufficient. The big ones can still be fun, just a different kind of fun.

As the size of the arg grows and the nature of the play changes, some players will fade out. I think one big issue that is still being worked out is, given that players will fade out, how to keep the big arg's accessible to new players? I, for one, would be daunted and deterred by the thought of jumping back in to PCX and crawling my way back to the current action.

[vpisteve]

I think what we're talking about here really is scaleability.

A well-designed game should be just as accessible, fun and satisfying to a massive audience as to a small one. There are countless small, but very important, rulesets that can and should be put into place to make sure this is the case.

So yeah, an ARG can "be too big," (which, for some games might only be a couple dozen players, due to the above-mentioned scaleability issues) but if it gets that way, it a design flaw by the PMs, not the fault of the players or ARG as a whole.

And yeah. Mu.

[Wolf]

Um...moo.

[Ashin]

[Giskard]

[rose]

[European Chris]