[DGD] Current state of MUD-dom

[Stephen Schmidt]

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004, Jas wrote:
> I've come to realize that a text-based game really needs three layers of
> game management / support staff:  (1) administrative types to manage the
> game, keep the other staff on task, and deal with the day-to-day issues;
> (2) programmer types to code the game; and (3) artisitic/creative types
> ("artsy fartsies") to provide grammatically-correct and coherent content.

Once the OLC content was done, you wouldn't need (2) anymore.

> Sometimes these roles can co-exist in the same individual, but my
> experience has been that very few people possess all three at the same
> proficiency levels.

I know of at least one mud that reached the 100+ players at a time,
300+ people per day, and stayed there for at least five years, that
never had a person on staff with even two of those skills. (One
person arguably had (2) and (3) but his content was so far outside
the theme of the mud that I'd veto him from (3).)

But then you all have to get along (all have to follow the admin's
lead, pretty much) and that takes special people. It's what
eventually did the place in - the troika of the head admin, the
head coder, and the head artsy-fartsy (who was actually the
person in overall charge) had to step down and their cohesion
couldn't be reproduced. (But that's an old story ;)

> I think the old TMI-2 mudlib (for the MudOS driver) was a decent example
> of what I'm talking about.  It wasn't really ready to open the second
> you untarred it, but it had enough structure to encourage a programming
> team to build the house from something more than just a concrete foundation.

Having been there :)  I'd point out that TMI always had a low
market share, because people looking to download for the first
time noticed that TMI didn't offer much content to start from
and competing libs offered more. People who used TMI-2 generally
had experience on other libs. This was good, but it causes a bit
of a bootstrapping problem - you have to get started on something
else.

Steve


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