[MUD-Dev] [gods] Player Representatives? (fwd)

[Christoph Seifert]

I have read the forwarded messages with interest.
On the Realm of Magic, we had the so called "Council of Balance",
introduced at the end of 1994.
This council was there to give feedback on the game mechanics, rather
than the administration. To balance the opinions, one voted
representative from each class (warriors, thieves etc.) was in the
council discussing game mechanics with a higher admin, who was there
to give information on what is possible and what not.

The problems can be summarized as the following:
- the council had no power to enforce changes - though the members had
  this conception
- the council failed to communicate its usefulness to the rest of the
  players
- votes given in the votings were getting less and less (likely due to the
  first two points)
- the members of the council were not really motivated - getting on holiday
  or leaving for longer periods right after getting voted for (must have
  been some kind of Murphy)
- the members of the council were badly prepared for sessions i.e.
  administration had the work with making a schedule and enforcing it.
  Otherwise talks got endless without result. This is all common
  experience in real life as well. What was annoying was that members
  of the council were even too lame to give enough ideas for a
  discussion at times.
- as a kind of reimbursement for the time spend for the council, members
  of the council had homes which could not be stolen from. This probably
  attracted players for the wrong reason.
- motivated members of the council were likely to join the administration,
  so new members had to replace the "assets"

As the member of the council were not liasons in the first place, but
some people to present a (balanced) mortal view on the gameplay, there
seemed to be no big problem with those members being perceived as admin.

The old system was replaced though for the problems of having less
and less motivated players in the council and the low number of
people voting. With the new system, the administration votes for two
players to be in the new council of balance and the players vote
for two members of the administration. The experience so far is a good
one with much more dedicated members in the council. I might sound
like I am getting old, but my impression is that nowadays players
and people in general are getting less and less engaged in a community,
demanding more and more though. So I am afraid that the whole system
depends on attracting enough engaged people to the MUD.
The biggest problem stays though, that the more motivated representatives
are likely to become members of the administration soon enough, so
they are not an average representation of player view.
For this reason there are general mortal-administration meetings at times
to voice general problems. The experience there is, that many problems get
scratched, but none is really getting discussed and no decision is
done - again this is a real life experience as well (see above).
I still think that they are useful, as we get to hear a lot of opinions.

Reading the post of Stephanie Dray, I think it is not a too bad an idea
to code a complaint system. I would add the (encrypted) name to each entry
though - this way you could display the list online stating that the
following opinions are from person x, the following from person y and
so on. This would give you an overview of how many pissed off people
there are and wether the same opinion is stated by different people.
The anonymity is not 100%, but fair enough with using encrypted names I
think.

I agree with the opinion, that there is a problem, if you (have to) rely
on liasons alone.

Christoph



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev