(no title) Time limits?

[s001gmu at nova.wright.edu]

On Sat, 14 Mar 1998 mud-dev at null.net wrote:

<just a note to the list owner... this arrived kinda strange... addressed
to just me and the one other guy on the list at my site.  99+% of all
messages arrive tagged to the mud-dev list, not me personally.  Just
letting ya know.  :)  >

> From: cimri <cimri1 at gte.net>
> Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin
> Subject: Varying Time Commitment Levels: what's an admin to do?
> Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 15:27:33 -0800
> 
> Hey all,

Hi.  Welcome aboard.
 
> What do you do, or should you do, if anything, about the people who
> can play 10-15 hours every day vs those who can spend maybe 1-2 hours
> a day playing your MUD?

A must under-pondered dilema.  :)  Most solutions I hear of are similar
to:

*shrug*  who cares?

;)

[...]
 
> Anyway, I'm throwing the general questions out to the group, with my
> own preliminary thoughts:
> 
> 1. muds tend to reward activity of some kind with something (exp,   
> levels, eq, knowledge, powers, skills, whatever)

How else can you run a game?  Reward intention?

> 2. generally speaking, the more time you spend, the more of these
>    goodies you get
> 3. so, people who play more often, or longer get more goodies

True and True.

> Now this is, in and of itself, not necessarily a problem, but

Very true.

[meany with time vs cool ppl w/o ... ]
 
> Okay, I hope that illustrates the situation, be it a real or
> imagined problem.  I've recently read something which brought
> to mind a very simple resolution:

mayhaps a little over-simple...
 
> Why not have a couple of different muds with different time limits
> on them?  I mean, the 'hour a day' mud and the '20 hour a week' mud
> and the 'all-out frequent-flyer get a life? mudding IS life!' mud.
> Players could play in any they wished, but would be restricted to
> total time spent in the first two muds.  Then if you don't like the
> idea of bonehead the mudder somehow 'getting ahead' of you by
> playing all day and night, then you go into the hour a day or
> other limited mud.  

I don't think I would want to tax my server by putting up 3 muds, or 5 or
however many you end up with (why 3? :)

My oppinions tend towards the, "when it becomes a problem, I'll deal with
it."  One simple solution is to make a large part of the game very
difficult to do solo.  This GREATLY cuts down on the frequent-fliers, as
the odds that all their buds can be on 15+ a day gets slimmer and slimmer
the more ppl you add.

Several of my good friends are not frequent fliers, but they certainly
more than make up for it with skill.  In most muds that I know of, raw
time commitment may get you up faster, but in the end, skill pays off.  It
may take a little longer, but the skilled players get up to the high
levels too, and then they generally kick the butts of all the
frequent-fliers.

The people to be truely feared are those with skill AND a piss-load of
time.  >-)

-Greg