[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud websites

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Greg Munt wrote:
> 
> How important are they?

VERY IMPORTANT, in my humble opinion. You may add the 'may' modifier to
everything below.

> How relevant are they to telnet-only games?
> (Particularly to stock muds, where all or most of its features are known by
> almost all of its players.)

Correction: old players. Every new player comes in complete ignorance
about the command system (there are many different ones), local rules,
local IC history, information about areas, objects, races, classes, you
name it.

> What are their goals, and are they achieved?

Goals: the bait for those who don't play yet, and the replacement for
the help (and possibly bulletin board) system within a MUD, thus
decreasing the server complexity and load.

> Do mud administrators provide what users want?

I'd want that.

> Are mud websites just a bandwagon, or do they achieve some purpose that is
> beneficial to the mud?

They _may_. I'd moved the help system out of the server, completely.

> My perspective is that mud websites, as a medium, are wholly under- and
> mis-used.

Not all of them, though - what I can remember right now is
www.retromud.org, with their detailed docs on everything in the MUD.

[side line]

Not without some quirks, if this is a right word for this context - they
used to have a whole lot (I mean A LOT) of HTML documents describing the
skills, spells etc. and the careful examination revealed that they were
handcrafted, surprisingly - almost all of documents contained some
unique formatting elements... Since it was of some interest to me (and I
had some time on my hands) I downloaded almost all of them and filtered
through the script to unify and renice them, which gave me the clear
understanding that probably the best way to have those documents created
and maintained is to have some basic form which may be used to
[dynamically] create whatever you need now, would it be the telnet
output in the MUD client or the fancy HTML page on the Web (the second
case is better, though - it can be pre-formatted, thus not consuming the
server power, and contain hyperlinks).

[end side line]

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are