I don't know if there was already a respond thread to this article, anyway couldnt find it, so here is mine:
I am missing the aim of this article a bit I think, but it seems that the writer would like to have the 'survival of the fittest' implemented in online games or games like Oblivion.
I really disagree on this making a better gaming challenge:
Suppose a X number of players enter the world. They quickly find out that one particular species is easy to kill and another species can quickly kill them, so they try to avoid those.
What happens next: easy species gets extinct, killer species is flourishing, while preying on the human players for food. X number of players ragequit.
Anyway, ecology explained like this would just sound like evolution to me.
Last but not least, we are screwing up the real world's ecology, now we think we are advanced enough to create a artificial ecology? Yes thats easy with 3 or 4 species, but a real ecology would have MANY species all interacting with eachother at a certain level.
About Monster Ecology article
Guildmaster Cain
Avarre