CHAPTER 5

On Gods & Government

In This Instance

In MMOs from the Inside Out, I mentioned that there are actually two strategies for resetting “used” content. The more familiar one is respawning, whereby a resource or mob or puzzle is restored to some variation of its original state after a period of time. Sophisticated versions of this can involve spawning different things depending on the current world state (for example sheep instead of wolves).

The other strategy for resetting is the sudden reset, also known as the Groundhog Day approach. In this, it’s not individual content items (or linked collections of them) that are respawned, but the entire MMO. The advantage is that quests, puzzles, and game-like content can be far more complex and ...

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