[MUD-Dev] Player-admins, was wimping/wiping and the big blind spot

[rayzam]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter" <malaprop at malaprop.org>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 6:51 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Player-admins, was wimping/wiping and the big blind
spot


> Brian Green wrote:
> >> > Peter: 'Ugh, how can you code if you don't know what's fun?'
> >>         I have to raise a complaint against this mindset, as I've
> >>  encountered it many times in the past and found it to be poorly
> concieved.
> >
[SNIP]

> >The ideal situation would be to play your game exhaustively.  Play
> every
> >race/class combination in every area using every possible skill.
> >Obviously, unless your MUD is extremely limited (or, you have given up
> >the need to sleep and are independently wealthy), then this is
> >impossible.  So, most people settle for playing a subset of the game
> and
> >judging it from there.

> This wasn't what I meant. If you do that, you'll end up chasing your
> tail fixing things you percieve as problems that your players don't give
> a care about. Almost every admin plays their muds enough, sometimes too
> much. The problem with an admin playing their own mud is that they know
> everything. They'll know when they'll get that next skill, how tough the
> mob hiding the basement is, where to get eq.

    Why does an admin need to make a persistant character? Why not make a
test character. Since you know all the inside secrets, create a character,
clearly labelled as a test character [i.e. Raytest], set it up to be
whatever level/class/skills/spells/etc you want to try out, clone up the eq
you want. Test it out.  Change it to another race/level/class/etc as
appropriate. This lets you test out anything in your game. But without the
issue of having a long built up character, interacting  with non wiz-staff
players, and from the advantage of knowing the game from the inside out.

   Assuming you know how your game works, you can succeed at it better,
faster with more goodies [eq/quests/points/whatever is used to note
achievement], than others. In my opinion that makes it unfair to be
considered a 'player', hence the category tester, playtester, whatnot. And
the test characters should be specifically ignored from the achievement
lists. I.e., we have a top player [based on experience only] list, test
characters aren't on it. Or the top questors, or the top explorers. Anything
that actually compares player vs player.

    It's true that its a huge time commitment to try to play every
combination, but thats only if you work up from teh bottom. Take a snapshot
of any situation you want to know about from the player's perspective. And
that'll also help keep from biasing the game towards the character you are
progressing, because your progression no longer has a measurement or an
investment in time.

    Rayzam
    www.retromud.org





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