[MUD-Dev] UO's External Chat Programs [was 'Wild west']

[Koster]

My first try at this and one other post were bounced back because of a 
local config error, so this is a resend.

----------
From: 	Koster, Raph
Sent: 	Monday, January 05, 1998 6:35 PM
To: 	'mud-dev at null.net'
Subject: 	RE: [MUD-Dev]  UO's External Chat Programs [was 'Wild west'] 

On Saturday, December 27, 1997 9:23 AM, Greg 
Munt[SMTP:greg at uni-corn.demon.co.uk] wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Dec 1997, JC Lawrence wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 21 Dec 1997 20:55:03 PST8PDT stad <Ola> wrote:
> >
> > > ...and use external programs for chatting...
> >
> > Yup, I wouldn't be surprised if that proved popular.  I'd be very
> > interested in Raph's commentary on the effects of the various 
external
> > chat programs used with UOL.

Well, there's a few observations there:

1) They're widely used by those who are savvy. But not by those who 
are novices to the world of Internet gaming. IRC is a black art to the 
vast majority of the mass market audience...

2) ICQ (and IRC too) are deadly tools in the hands of the 
unscrupulous. With an ICQ #, a playerkiller can determine an IP# and 
use ping o' death or other nasty tactics to knock you offline, and 
then dispose of you in the game whilst you are rebooting or 
reconnecting.

3) the overall effects are what you might imagine from servers that 
support it as part of the game: tighter community, better 
coordination, much spam, decreased sense of mystery and fictional 
immersion, etc. But since it's a segmented and limited audience, and 
it's not on our server, the effects (positive and negative) haven't 
been as large as they are on an integrated system.

> Can someone give me more details on this, or a reference? Was this
> something I missed whilst I was in America (Aug-Nov)? Would these
> external chat programs be discussed on the UO website? (Is there one 
- I
> assume so?)

To my knowledge, there is only one such program being written 
specifically for UO, and it is integrated with a map tool. It's also 
not yet available (I only know about it because the fellow writing it 
is a UO fan site maintainer). Most folks use standard IRC and ICQ.

The UO website is at http://www.owo.com if that is what you were 
asking for.

-Raph