[MUD-Dev] Remote client connection

[Patrick Dughi]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Kyle Leithoff wrote:
> 
> Is this something which could be used to make a world more persistent? 
> Rather than have a character removed to storage when a player logs out,
> would it be feasible to allow updates to be sent via a pager or cell
> phone of what's happening to a character, then allow that player to
> modify the characters behaviour through the cell phone?  I guess working
> somewhat like stock trading and the updates you can receive now.
> 
> Would this be something that you'd want to do?  Would the added
> resources to support this outweigh the niftyness of the feature?  This,
> from what I can see, would only add to the average connection time of
> players.
> 
> Finally, would players use such a feature?  Obviously, with a text mud,
> it's far more useful, as a player could nearly operate as if from an
> actually PC.  For graphical muds, this would be far more limiting to
> certain situations.  Perhaps after the characters finished a certain
> task, the player is notified and can opt to change tasks.

Perhaps a better link could be found at:
http://pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,16698,00.html

	Which discusses the fact that they're not just burst tranmissions,
but capable of actual two-way communication.  Though why you'd want a
chatroom on your phone when you could just make it a partyline.........

	Neat idea, from my 'hey i'm a geek' standpoint.  

	Something nagging in the back of my head though tells me that it
will never really fly.  I don't have reliable stats infront of me, but I
think the market for play-by-cellphone-muds really isn't that big.

	Going with the bang for the buck; your dev time is better spent
catering to the other 99.99% of people who will never use this phone
system due to; no cell phone capable of it, disinterest in the technology,
disinterest in the mud (ie, a non-fanatical player).  

	Another way to look at it is in features;  A cell phone display is
not the place for doing anything other than issuing short commands,
perhaps requesting statistics.  I don't think it's realistic to expect
that a user would be able to interact well with your environment in such a
limited way.  You will end up putting forth decent effort, and getting
very little out to the players.  If your game is so popular that it could
justify having cell phone contact, I'm going to bet that the things that
make your game popular are not going to be accessable.

	Last, if you haven't seen the cell phone games lately, they
fiercely competite with my atari 2600 with the black and white monitor. Of
course, I turn the volume off the Atari to make it more fair.  If you want
to compare features, at least the atari had a keyboard to type with.  You
don't know how annoying it is to even put 3 initials into a phone using a
SAW technology (SAW; Spinning alphabet wheel, "The Onion" satire paper,
somewhere probably in spring of 95-96).  I shudder to think of a mud
interface using text.  Having a mud interface then, based on multiple
choice would be an affront to the whole idea of RPG's as a whole.

Summary; Looks cool, but phones are better used to call people. Not muds.
	

						PjD





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