[MUD-Dev] Community Relations

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2000 10:59:41 -0800 
F Randall Farmer <randy at communities.com> wrote:

> A question: In what way do you manifest yourself as the immortal?

My general preference: Never do.  Never have a presence in the game
as an admin or "immortal".  Never have an identity in the game that
can be isolated or identified as functioning as an admin.  You can
of course have various "tester" characters that you mess with as an
admin (checking say that various functions work as designed), but
they need to be obvious drones and not actually "player characters"
that compete with or fuction either as competition for players or as
targets for appeals.

While it is possible to manage having a player character that is
known to be run by an admin, and to keep the roles and activities of
each sufficiently different in-game, I've found that the people
capable of doing such are vanishingly rare.  Given a known admin
player character, accusations of favourtism, preferential treatment,
hobby horsing, bias, vendetta, and all the other sorts of unpleasant
politiking and human emotion and reaction will almost certainly
occur, and worse, are indefensible.

  It is easy to accuse someone of being biased.

  It is next to impossible to prove that one is not.

My preference is to keep all Admin/Immortal communications OOB as
concerns the game.  It can be in email, via a weblog or board of
some sort, IRC, whatever, but always in a form and venue outside of
the MUD itself.  There were recently a few comments between Raph an
myself on this area in reference to Raph's position as Designer
Dragon on UOL, and how his abstraction from the game helped his
position there.  The following is one of my posts on the area.  You
should be able to find others both by thread and picking keywords:

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/1999Q4/msg00473.html

> [Of course, I've never built a combat-mud like most of you here
> seem to build.]

At one point MUD-Dev had a strong population of Talker/Tiny-clan
authors/users.  Unfortunately we scared/ran 'em off.  I regret this.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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