[MUD-Dev] Re: Mud reviewing

[diablo at best.com]

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

> 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.

We keep detailed stats on our usage, and over half of it comes from
characters who have played at least 200 hours. 25% comes from characters
who have played at least 500 hours, and 15% comes from the hardcore
addicts who have characters who have racked up at least 1000 hours. If a
player feels he has come anywhere near to exhausting the possibilities
after 200 hours, then we're doing something wrong. I would venture to
guess that the above figures would be much higher if we were a free mud
too (we give players the illusion that they can play for free by not
charging for on-line time. They eventually discover that to significantly
advance they have to pay us though.)

It seems to me that if a mud cannot hold the interest of players for any
significant amount of time, then that mud needs to get busy.

 
> 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.

This is a problem we run into a lot. So far we manage to solve it mostly
by simply talking to the offending parties and making them feel as if by
laying off the little ones, they are helping the world as a whole. Whether
this will continue to work or not, I don't know. I deleted a player the
other day for disobeying me twice after I ordered him to back off, but
this has only happened about 3 times in the last year and a half. I'd
guess that as the player base grows and as the administration,
particularly myself, as less time to deal directly with individual
players, this tactic will grow less and less effective.

The flip side of things is that often the little guys deserve to die.
Players often seem to think that the 1st Amendment of the US constitution
somehow extends into Achaea, and that they can insult bigger players with
no retribution. My experience has been, though, that it's pretty easy to
explain to little players who do this sort of thing that if they want to
survive, they just need to use common sense and not intentionally upset
those who can smack them around without a second thought.
--matt