BatMUD has been up from 1990 which makes it one of the oldest muds that are active still today. During this 20...21..crap, what year is it now? During this 20-25 years we have had more than 400 developers contributing to this game. This has yielded many areas, guilds, quests, monsters, items and lots of content that have been seen to enter the game as well as leaving the game. In most cases (yeah I know the exceptions to the rule) content code leaves the game only when it becomes obsolete or gets replaced by something else.

As a content coder, I believe that every project should have some purpose to fulfill. I'll give you an example. If you have an area, it should often have some sort of quest. The quest makes the area have something that isn't mindless hack'n'slash. It gives the players the opportunity to explore, get in touch with the feel of the area and through that the feel of the game world. An area with a quest is much better than an area which doesn't have anything. If you have a guild, it would be nice if it had much more than just skills or spells to train. In BatMUD we often call this additional stuff as "reputation", but for me reputation is often an award that you grant to players for their activity. Should reputation always grow or go up is of course another thing that I'm not particularly addressing here.

For me, a lot of the content I create has a concept of "recycling". By recycling I don't mean that I copy things from my old projects and just dress it again to something else. That's not me. One of the things that I like the most is to come up with completely new stuff that nobody has done before. This means technically and content wise. That's the one thing that I mostly enjoy and coding is just something boring that I have to do in comparison

So what means recycling? This means that I plan to create content that reuses itself in some ways. I believe that everything should have some sort of meaning whether it is giving a player a reason to go back to some area that he hasn't visited for two years or keeping him/her busy with guild related activity. I like quests as much as the next person and they do have their place, especially area quests and level quests. With area/level quests the fact is that they get done by hundreds of players year after year. Of course if same player was forced to repeat the same quests every reinc, it would become very tiresome and with our quest difficulty, agonizingly hard too.

But what about guild quests? I take the bard for example which is an excellent guild. It has the "known by heart"-song system where you need to learn the spells. It's a little bit difficult for a newbie and takes some time and I've even heard of it called as boring, but it is activity. Bards also have different kinds of bard level quests which you need to complete, either writing a book or organizing a play in Shadowkeep's Amphitheatre. Actually these book writing and playwriting quests are arguably one of the best: it contributes to BatMUD's content and offers a great task that is very bard like and doesn't really involve killing anything. Bards are one of those older guilds that were ahead of their time. Nowadays many newer guilds can offer similar vast content, but with nuns (which are even more vast) bards were probably the second most interesting guild in the game when counting only the older guilds.

I realize that I digress, so I'll now get back to the concept of recycling. Once you are done with KBH and bard quests, what is left? You may create bard instruments once every three days and you will also gain bardic might by casting spells. The thing is there is content, but you've done with it. Now there's not much to do. I was looking for things to do, but I do understand that some people just want to get these things done so that you can "now play the game". Neither of these are wrong way to play, but I'm just a person who wants his guild to offer stuff and I'm often opted to create content which I'd personally enjoy as well.

So recycling is my thing. I like to rely on things that require players to maintain activity to get better. I also like the concept that nothing is eternal, but that you can get benefits that help you reasonable amount of time so that your activity wouldn't have gone to waste. Take for example the new chaos swords that the Kharim guild has: They are not eternal, they will eventually destroy themselves (none have yet) but many people think it's a relatively sound investment (although they argue about the soundness of the whole weaponsmith system, but that's completely another discussion )

The reason why I recycle some stuff is that I want the same piece of code being used again by someone. Maybe not now, not tomorrow, but maybe in 4 years when your sword turns to dust.

When asked, I have often stated my opinion what I think of our current equipment system. While writing this, please notice that I'm in no way actively trying to introduce the following system, because I realize it's not what most of the people would want and there probably isn't too much support for it. So with that disclaimer being written, I really think that every piece of equipment should deteriorate through time, in maybe time span of 5 years in real life. The reasoning behind this is simple 1) I think it would boost economy and sales of equipment 2) It would allow us to rethink the concept of mobprots 3) I don't believe there should be one "must have item" per slot. I think it would be better if there was more variety and everybody wouldn't simply have the chance to have the best ones always.

But I cannot emphasize this enough, I'm not attempting to introduce this system, but I do like the concept in theory.

Let's evaluate the concept of recycling how it shows in my projects, shall we? I leave a few empty lines after this question so you can visualize your answer here:






Came up with an answer? Did you say yes? Good, then read forward! Below there are few things that are examples of recycling:

- Kharim swords aren't eternal. If they would be, in theory person wouldn't need to use the smith once they get a sword they're satisfied with.
- Some tzarakk trophies disappear in reincarnation. If they didn't, there wouldn't be trophy related things to do, which would make trophy crafting skill quite useless for some people too.
- You may lose Kharim memories in reincarnation. This will make it worthwhile to track down memory monsters if you happen to lose any.
- The key system was originally designed so that you would lose some percentages during time if you had high enough adaptations. This is not enforced for..let's say mercy reasons. But in all honesty I never expected anyone to have all adaptations divine, which explains the high failure rates in training.

These are just a few examples. Also don't get me wrong. I'm not really planning any concept merely based on this recycling idea. This is just an extra idea that I often introduce to minor systems to keep activity to maximum.

What I've learned with reputation systems is that they shouldn't grow infinitely because they are prone to cause balancing problems in the future. Luckily I'm not seriously struggling with those issues at the moment with Kharims, but that is just one thing that I need to plan better with the evil priests.

That's all for now. Hmm, speaking of recycling, did I remember to take my trash out..