[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is suppo

[Adam Wiggins]

[Caliban:]
> On Fri, 19 Sep 1997 20:50:57 PST8PDT, clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:
> >>Hardcopy and local copies  are important. But as the game's designer,
> >>or as one of its primary  founding players, you won't understand
> >>it... it's easy, see, not that much  at all.
> >
> >No.  While I'll acknowledge that some players like this sort of thing
> >and find them useful (which set appears to closely map to certain game
> >types), many (more?) don't.  This suggests that the question is one of
> >target market rather than generic usefulness.
> 
> Every new player needs to learn his way around the game. Therefore,
> documentation is necessary. It is trivial to implement that
> documentation in printable form and then zip it up on an FTP site, but
> next to no one does it. So it's generally possible to browse through it
> online, but nowhere else. Since the investment is minor and the benefit
> is (in at least my opinion) major, why is this a bone of contention?

Good question.  Arctic makes the public parts of their help files availible
online: since their help is well-written, gramatically correct, and informative,
I consider this sort of a point of attraction for anyone who hasn't played
the mud but is browsing their web site.  Also, they have 'help' about various
areas and races in the game...one could easily spend hours getting familiar
with the game world before actually logging on.
Of course, roughyl 30% of the help files are not accessable here, since you
can only get help on skills and spells that your character has.  Thus you
can't get help on antimagic shell from the website, and in fact very few
characters will ever get to see the help page on that particular spell, since
it's so difficult to come by.

> >Consider:
> >
> >  How many DIKU/LP/etc players have you seen complaining about lacking
> >documentation for players?
> 
> Just about all of them who don't have a long history of playing. In
> other words, new players. I know there aren't many these days, and I
> would attribute that to the aforementioned LACK OF DOCUMENTATION.

Actually, I didn't get around to using help files for my first few weeks of
mudding.  The whole thing was so new that I basically learned things by
putting around, typing different commands, watching what they did.  Also
watching others and trying to guess how they did things.

Now, being much more jaded, I log on and immediately start perusing the help
files.  If they are inadequate or the mud doesn't sound very interesting from
reading them, I log off.  So I consider good help to be more of an
attraction to old mud-types rather than true newbies, although I've gone out of
my way to create a few 'getting started' pages for them on our mud.