[MUD-Dev] Text Parsing

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Greg Miller wrote:

> Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> > So have a backup system then. We've got a newbie channel on which only
> > newbies, Gods, players who are approved as mentors, and Guides can speak.
> > Guides are two characters shared by experienced players who exist solely to
> > help newbies. We give them X number of credits for every hour that someone
> > plays a Guide.
> 
> Speaking of which, I assume everyone's heard about the AOL lawsuit...
> Are you worried about being sued (assuming the credits aren't worth
> minimum wage, I'd have to worry about the fallout, at least for those of
> us accepting money and operating inside the US)?

I haven't actually. Could you elaborate? That's potentially fairly serious
for a number of pay games if I understand the gist of what you are saying.
(Achaea, Simutronics, and Avalon, at least, all have people doing 'work'
who don't get paid the equivalent of minimum wage).

> 
> > step in the right direction. It's a lot better than players telling newbies
> > to sod off.
> 
> Indeed, I've noticed a lot of the latter on the PK muds I play
> off-and-on... Players demand a far greater level of intelligence than
> people in general tend to have, and verbally abuse them when they show
> they don't have it, or ask for help.

Yeah, although there is a lot of PK in Achaea, and our players are
generally extremely helpful. I think a lot of it is because we have
visible and active Gods, who set the mood and tone of the game. We are
friendly and nice to newbies for the most part, so the mortals ape us and
act the same way. Setting the general mood of the game this way is quite
effective, I've found, though maybe that's because we're not a
particularly large game (I'm not sure how easy it would be to influence
this sort of thing with 1000 people on at once).

> 
> > Yeah, I agree, beating up squirrels and rabbits is boring. Our solution was
> > to put creatures that are perceived as legitimately weak in our newbie
> > areas, like pixies, kobolds, imps, hellcats, firesprites, etc.
> 
> Another approach I've seen and liked was the "Commodities Exchange" on
> Ancient Anguish (ancient.anguish.org 2222), where newbies can buy a map
> and earn money and XP by delivering packages to many of the important
> places on the mud.

Cool. That method has the side-effect of forcing the newbies to learn
their way around too.
--matt




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