[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud reviewing

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Cink <ranthor at earthlink.net>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Wednesday, January 27, 1999 6:06 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Mud reviewing


>At 02:59 PM 1/26/99 -0800, matt(diablo at best.com) wrote:
>
>>Unless you play for at least a
>>couple hundred hours, your review is, imho, akin to reviewing a movie
>>without bothering to watch the whole thing.
>
>You have to figure, with
>the number of muds out there, that there's virtually no reviewers who
>are going to have that kind of time to spend on a review. I would consider
>4 hours a good amount of time to spend reviewing a mud.

You might also want to consider whether ANY player, whether writing a review
or not, is going to spend a couple hundred hours reviewing your MUD.
Basically, your game has to be fun from the beginning, stay fun till the
end, and still be fun if you start over. Not an easy task.

My way of handling this has been to take the classless/skillless MUD a
little further. All new characters are identical, and the skills and
knowledge that are useful in the game reside in the player -- not the
character. So not only can you log on, have a good time, and get better...
you operate at that higher level as soon as you log into *another* game
running the same server, too. Ideally, this ends up creating a compelling
environment that allows the player to play at his expected level on any
game; in practice, it creates some hefty barriers for new players.

IOW, it solves one problem I have with many MUDs, but it still doesn't
address another problem which is as bad or worse. How can you protect the
small fry from the big boys without the big boys feeling like their actions
are restricted and without the small fry being completely secure from
punitive action by other players? I don't want Big John to stomp on Little
Joe, but Big John demands that I allow him to stomp on whoever he likes and
Little John shouldn't be able to thumb his nose at Big John without fear of
reprisal. I need to make big-guy/little-guy fights not *impossible*, but
distasteful.

| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com
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