[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[diablo at best.com]

On Sat, 13 Feb 1999, Steve Houchard wrote:

> I wasn't implying that anyone not building or coding wasn't doing anything
> useful.  When I said "...and a few more who are around constantly but who
> don't contribute much if anything useful..." I meant they REALLY don't
> contribute anything useful.  The people in question don't interact with
> mortals except to show off their admin powers and to try to impress them
> (and me) with their knowledge of technical topics and muds in general
> which I have found to be lacking in the past.  To sum up:  the people that
> I'm referring to are annoying to me because: 
>    A) they're on the admin staff because and only because they're friends
>       of someone with power, 
>    B) they don't contribute anything (with very minor exceptions) to the
>       game despite being around at least as much as I am, and
>    C) because they've proven a lack of knowledge on topics technical and
>       yet still try to impress me with their smarts.

Erk. That's an unenviable situation indeed. Cronyism never works. Look at
Malaysia!

 
> This is fine in the private sector where money is involved.  As someone
> mentioned in an earlier post, this is not representative of the types of
> muds that people have the most contact with (especially in this case).
> I've found that in the hobbyist sector good coders that are more or less
> "free agents" like myself and hard to come by for free.  Maybe you don't
> pay your coders and they stick around because you have something wonderful
> that they want to be a part of in which case I'd say you're very lucky.
> If they're proficient enough to do the myriad of tasks you might deem fit
> to throw their way in an efficient and expedient manner, I'd say you're
> even luckier.  Finding these people in "stock diku" land where the average
> player is age 15 and grammatical errors abound isn't as straightforward as
> you might think.  

Yeah, I stand corrected on my statement about this. I don't actually pay
my coder much (we are commercial, but we're new and no ones getting rich
off of Achaea at this point), but I was pretty lucky to find him I guess.
He volunteered for us for 5 months (not just messing around either,
but doing serious, quality work) before I decided that he was worth
paying. I will now consider myself lucky to have found someone as
dependable and generally competent as him. (He's a coder who can actaully
write a bit when he needs to!)

 
> > Most of our Gods know nothing about computers. It's not really relevent to
> > being a God, I think. Being a God is all about leading and motivating, not
> > about being able to code or whatever.
> 
> Chances are though that they don't go out of their way to impress you (or
> anyone else) with their knowledge of the system, how it works, or how the
> code is being written.  The next time you get a newbie asking you to be an
> admin, think of how fun it would be to deal with that person if you made
> them an admin--that's exactly the kind of person I deal with on a regular
> basis in my current assignment.    

Yikes. I ONCE gave in to a new player who pestered me and pestered me and
made promise after promise about how he could do all sorts of things for
us. Big mistake. He was deleted within about 10 days, mostly for being so
annoying that the rest of the Gods couldn't stand being around him (of
course he didn't do a thing in those 10 days either, except show off his
powers to the mortals).

Kick your friend in the arse, Steve, and tell him that if he ever wants a
quality game, he needs to tick off his friends and kick them out.

--matt