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

[Shawn L Johnston]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:

> That depends on what you consider success. I, personally, have never given
> a damn when playing muds about being the top explorer or top questor or
> having the most xp, etc etc. Those all seem like relatively trivial
> accomplishments compared with what I view as the most desired commodity:
> the respect of other players. I am sure I'm not alone in this either.
> Achaea's most respected players have never been the ones who were
> quantifiably the 'best'. They weren't the top ranked in xp, they didn't
> know the most quests, etc. They did, however, win the respect of the
> playerbase for their eloquence, their strength of personality, their
> maturity and intelligence, and so on. These have only ever been
> quantifiable (in Achaea at least) in the sense that these players
> _usually_ were the most visible and successful politicians. Many of them
> were not even competent at PvP combat (which is a matter of, among other
> things, actually having skill in Achaea rather than just a function of who
> has the best equipment and the most xp).

As a player of the now deceased Dark Sun Online, I'd have to agree that in a
mud the greatest accomplishment a player can have is the respect of his/her
fellow players - which is something incredibly difficult to accomplish and
probably won't be accomplished with an admin ran test character.

I would advocate however that admins and developers do play the games work
with and do make their presence seen and known fairly frequently. Dark Sun
suffered terribly in its last two years from what many players saw as
neglect by its admins, this contributed to the opinion that the admins did
not actually care about the game or the players - only the money they were
being paid. An opinion that wasn't quite true, but perception leads to
reality.

Shawn




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