[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[David Bennett]

On 2/17/00, at 11:28 AM, Matthew Mihaly wrote: 

>I've found that generally, people who are motivated to run free muds are
>motivated only to do the 'fun' stuff, ie actually creating the world. They
>often have little motivation for things like comprehensive help files,
>good customer service (well, player service I suppose), and so on. I'm
>sure there are exceptions, but they are few and far between.

I don't think they are nessessarily few and far between.  Several people
recognise the importance of help files, I even wrote an article on it once:
http://imaginaryrealities.imaginary.com/volume1/issue1/game_design.html

Althought if Aristotle is listening he could do with fixing up his help
files... :)

Places like Genesis, Discworld, Batmud and most of the other bigger
successful muds have pretty comprehensive help files.  Partly because it
reduces the number of questions creators have to answer :)  Some places
even have formalised methods of dealing with player problems (ie: Liaisons
on Discworld).

In this case I think you are comparing apples and oranges, there are less
pay muds and the startup curve is much higher.  There are lots of free muds
and the startup curve is a lot less.  Therefor it will almost always follow
that more of the free muds will have bad docs.  However, if you look at the
more successful of the free muds and compare those with the pay muds (which
is a better comparison) I think you will find that they have very
comprehensive documentation.  As much as I have seen on any pay mud anyway.

Good luck!
David.



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