[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[David Bennett]

On 2/15/00, at 2:24 PM, Matthew Mihaly wrote: 

>I disagree. I think it's pretty damn clear that commercial muds are, on
>the average, FAR higher quality than free ones. I would like to see it

Because there are less of them?  Do you have some sort of useful heuristic
here?  There are (and have been) several high quality free muds available.
I don't think it matters much if the stock mud is free of commerical, if
people don't put in effort it won't be anything interesting.  I don't think
people would put in any more effort if they were writing a commerical as
compared to free mud.  Although it does (in some ways) change the
relationship with the players, this is both a positive and negative thing.

>The solution is
>attracting quality people who have the energy, ability, and money to
>produce quality content. This is what happened with cable television. I

Muds (and games in general) are always going to be a low paid field, so in
general the people that end up in this sort of field are people starting
out thinking it will be fun.  Or people who cannot get employed elsewhere
:)  Although there are a few fanatics that stick with it.

I disagree about Cable giving better content.  Even though I do watch the
cable channels (free to air reception is pretty useless where I live,
mountains and all that), I quite often find myself browsing all 200
channels and not finding anything that looks in vaguely worth watching.
Where do I find most of my interesting programs?  BBC America, and when I
was in Australia the ABC, which are both Government run, not for profit,
channels.

>On the other hand, I believe that making it
>easier for entrepreneurs to create commercial muds would produce more
>commercial muds which will nearly always be of significantly
>higher quality than your average free mud. That the profit motive is a
>very good and very strong motivator is pretty obvious. Someone using a
>stock base to start a commercial mud would be forced to really gussy it
>up, or no one is going to pay. He could, of course, code one from scratch,
>but this is a much more difficult thing to do. 

Plus the fact that muds have low profit margins anyway (like all games),
until you get to a reasonable distribution size.

Fluff!
David.



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