[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud reviewing

[diablo at best.com]

On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

I wrote: 
> >It's not whether they liked them or not that concerns me. They're not my
> >customers and I haven't had any customers come tell me "I came to Achaea
> >because I read a positive review on X".
> 
> From your own perspective, as a player, how long does it take you to decide
> whether a MUD is worth playing? What makes the difference between a good MUD
> and a bad MUD for *you*? (It's probably completely unproductive to try and
> nail down what exactly a good or bad MUD is across the board. Maybe it would
> be more productive here than elsewhere, but then again maybe not.)

>From my perspective as a player (and again, I emphasize _my_ perspective),
the amount of time it takes varies considerably. If I log into a mud and
see a single stock room, stock ability, spell, that's all I need to see,
and I just leave. If it is a fully custom mud, I'd say it would take at
least 100 hours to give an accurate opinion of it. Having said this, it
would, in fact, take a lot less time if the mud were going to get a bad
review. For instance, if I see an area in the mud that is the parking lot
at a metallica concert (and yes, I have actually seen this kind of crap in
fantasy muds), I immediately can discern that the owners of the mud do not
take the world seriously, and treat it as a game of trivial
proportions rather than a world. In that case, however long it took me to
find something like that is enough time to decide that it's not for me. To
give a good review though, I feel that I would have to play a
_significant_ amount of time, in order to see a good portion of the game.

--matt
"Induction sucks."