[MUD-Dev] The Player Wimping Guidebook

[ROBERT MCCAULEY]

On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:

> This I can accept as a valid reason. I'd never do it, as Achaea can
> progress forever (due to the fact that we're not tied into following a
> pre-existing storyline), but I can see why you would in that situation.
> I'm just surprised the players don't tell you to f*ck off and leave. I
> certainly would.

This is not written to the poster, but is a response in general.  I think
his assessment is dead on, and want to expand a bit on why I think so.

They do leave, and I think this is what leads to a belief among mud admins
that it's not such a bad thing.  If a mud wipes often enough that the
playerbase knows its coming, they're self-selecting a wipe-tolerant player
base.  I myself play on a mud which used to be a much more active
(read: bigger player base) place.  In the 8 years since then it's gone
through a number of wipes.  I don't know how many as I tired of them and
left for quite a while myself, but I feel confident it's over 4, and they
were sometimes <1 year apart.  Now they have a small playerbase which
actually *calls* for a player file wipe periodically (which they usually
don't get).  If they wipe tomorrow, 90%+ will stay only because the n% of
players (casual gamers?) who won't tolerate this sort of thing have left
as a result of previous wipes.

This is just like saying no one hates text based games because your
playerbase (I'll refrain from our because I'm one of the horde who's
nominally working on a design--I don't have a playerbase) is full of
people who like text games.  That's not true.  Most people, IMO, don't 
like text based games.  Muds are just self-selecting for people who like
text based games, as muds that wipe self-select players who tolerate it,
even though they may not do so deliberately.

Rob




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