[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, David Bennett wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 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).

Yep, but those muds are an extremely small segment of the free mud arena.

> 
> 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.

So, what you are saying is that the average commercial mud is of much
higher quality than the average text mud. That is exactly what I have been
saying and, mind-bogglingly, people have been disagreeing left and right,
as if they've never logged into another of the endless sequence of nearly
identical DIKUs.

--matt




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