[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is supposed to be playing, anyway? (Was: PK Again)

[Miroslav Silovic]

Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com> writes:

> Yes, a wide choice of skills is great, but skills like musical instruments 
> are just plain stupid. What the hell does this add to the game?
> 
> 	>play lute
> 	You play your lute.
> 
> Yes, it's nice being able to run some form of bard who carries around a 
> musical instrument, but does a 'play lute' command REALLY enhance the 
> experience for anyone? What's wrong with ',plays his lute merrily, skipping 
> about the marketplace' instead of a social command?

On Xyllomer MUD, for example, there is a bard guild, and they do have
musical instrument skills. The trick is that there is also a songbook
objects. You spend a few hours writing the actual song, and then
showing it off to the people in the inns. While spammy, many people
actually /like/ writing poetry (particularily about the recent events,
as bards are supposed to do), and many more in fact /like/ listening
to it.

> > Well that 12 year old is going to have a hard time with my place.  For a
> > start - he'll only be able to have one account.
> 
> Pray tell, how exactly do you intend to enforce that? I have several dozen 
> shell accounts, each with an associated e-mail address, and it's trivial 
> for me to create more. Any hacker worth his salt can have several hundred 
> with little difficulty.

The easiest way to ban 12 years old is to introduce a long and
involved application process that requires sending detailed character
background and history to some email address. Note that there are
several 100+ players MUSHes (100+ players connected at the same time,
during evenings) that enforce this without player loss. In fact, it's
a good way to gain players - those that do apply have a good way to
know that the place will be relatively idiot-free.

> > If he destroys it (as
> > opposed to being killed) it won't be able to get another account for a 
> fixed
> > amount of time, that I've not decided.
> 
> So if I decide I don't like this character, and I decide to delete it, you 
> kick me off the game? That really sucks. If I really like the game, and 
> just want to start a new character, what POSSIBLE rationale would convince 
> me to come back after several days when you say 'sorry, you just threw away 
> a perfectly good character, you can't have another one until date X'? A 
> message like that would really hack me off, and I'd go play elsewhere.

This is a strawman - you'd do this exactly like every seasoned player
would do on any MUD in existance - you'd ask for an admin favor.

> > All of us (and I imagine I speak for all of us) are trying to create a 
> game
> > that we as players would want to play.  Who cares if Biff the 12 year old
> > doesn't like it, there are plenty of muds out there that do play like he
> > wants.  And if they don't, then he (like we are) can write his own.
> 
> All of us are PROGRAMMERS. We are by definition *not* the average player. 
> And this attitude is exactly the type of arrogance that pisses me off about 
> MUD development, because your market is too specific and too narrow and as 
> far as I'm concerned it makes you the single worst type of MUD admin on the 
> face of the planet. I'd like to design a flexible and easy to use game that 
> middling numbers of people (say 50 at a time) will log onto and enjoy. I 
> don't need hundreds of people online; that's just too crowded.

Relax. Take a deep breath. Count to 10. Turn off your computer. Go to
sleep.

We reserve the right to choose our player base. My own choice excludes
12 years old, on the grounds that IMHO a MUD can't host 12 years olds
together with a reasonable number of mentally sound 30 years old and I
choose to favor the latter group. YMMV.

> > The easiest way to make sure you can cater
> > for almost everyone is to get rid of the powergamers
> 
> This is just plain offensive. Try replacing 'powergamers' with your 
> favorite social, ethnic, or religious group. Maybe 'gays', 'blacks', or 
> 'Jews'. I'm not even going to dignify it with a response.

I am. Saying that someone is a 'black' says nothing about his or her
psychology. Saying that someone is a powergamer is a purely
psychological qualification and therefore very relevant. And since
powergamers have huge influence on the atmosphere of the game, and
since they tend to band together to the exclusion of the other player
types, I see nothing wrong with kicking them off. Again, MUSHes have
developed very good mechanism of self-regulation to deal with this
problem.

> > >       Natural language processing is BAD. Bad bad bad, I hate it and 
> it's a
> > > big pain to implement which takes time away from more useful things 
> like
> > > documenting the commands (which becomes impossible in NLP *anyway*).
> >
> > NLP has been the easiest part of my mud to write so far, but then I don't
> > have "commands", I have verbs and the verb works the same way it does in
> > real life.
> 
> What if English isn't my native language? What if my vocabulary isn't quite 
> as good as yours? How do you handle verbs that have multiple meanings?

What if I am illiterate? What if I am stupid? One possible answer: Go
play Quake or something.

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