[MUD-Dev] Admins as Mortals twist

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 30 Dec 1999, msew wrote:

> At 08:29 AM 11/24/99 -0800, Sellers, Michael wrote:
> >The point of this is to avoid the cults of personality (or anti-cults)
> >surrounding specific admins: "I'm looking for so-and-so; he likes me." Or,
> >"Forget it, I'm not talking to AdminX, he's not fair and has it in for me."
> >This also makes it possible to deal with admin turnover without any visible
> >effects in the game.  And when problems arise, it makes it easier to yank
> >one problem admin out for a while, and to deal with the players with a
> >united front.
> 
> 
> I recall on a mud I played on where there was one god whom EVERYONE was 
> scared of.  Black and White and never "understanding" at all.  This is the 
> law and I don't care about any mitigating circumstances not even on christmas!
> 
> And there were many other gods whom were much nicer.

> Whether this can scale to a game with 1000s of players on at once is the 
> real question.
> 
> Possibly having "guide sects"  where you have the Judges that are the B&W 
> and they are used as a final straw to decide stuff.
> 
> Shrug, I personally think the faceless admin team is a bad idea.  You 
> quickly get to the us (players) vs them (admin)
> 

Achaea revolves heavily around admins with personality. The admins double
as Gods who take players, guilds, and cities under their wings, according
to the philosophy of those players, guilds, and cities and how they fit
with the sphere of influence that the God has chosen (Goddess of
Knowledge, God of War, etc). Works great in a small game. I am,
unfortunately, convinced that this was a mistake, because scaling it to a
larger game, particularly if we start splitting shards off of Achaea, is
going to be a serious problem. The bar has to be _much_ higher in terms of
the people you get to play this sort of admin, and staffing these
positions in large game may well prove to be impossible.
--matt




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