[MUD-Dev] Trouble Makers or Regular Citizens

[Jon A. Lambert]

J C Lawrence wrote:
>
>looking back on Lorry's rant, and my own memories pf (the fairly
>anarchic) SX MUD from thos days, yes, the administration was
>capricious, disproportionate, and uber-violent.  It was also
>generally predictable at a gross level of capriciousness:
>
>  High level players, and in particular wizards were not to be
>trifled with.
<snip>
> The trick was that none of
>them could be relied on to be so pleasant at any particular time,
>and that determining when was a "good time" was a black art
>(remember, those were the very early days of text-only
>communications, long before emoticons and other standarised/iconic
>emotional communication forms).  Thus one tended to an overly ornate
>formality, a rather tentatively petitioning and apologetic approach,
>and the very very best manners you could come up with without
>seeming fawning or overly familiar.  

The exact same administrative phenomenon existed in the commercial
world in the heydays of the mainframe among the gatekeepers of the 
ivory tower.  I could take the above and replace 'wizard' with 'systems 
programmer' or 'operator', and 'player' with 'user'.   Even management 
had to tolerate the ivory tower staff's capricious nature.  Today distributed 
computing, PCs, and a vast labor pool have pretty much killed it off.  
You still see it in small DP shops, though not very often in large shops. 
 
I think the administration model that Lorry described is pretty much
dead today.  That is as a means to "success" expressed as 'a large
playerbase'.   Could the success of these earlier muds be partly
attributed to the notion that players just had few to no places to go?
I think you'll continue to see this type of administration in small muds,
but rarer in huge muds.  Perhaps then only as a tongue in cheek 
retro-feature, like "Come grovel before our wizards". 

Stock muds and the Mud Connector have taken the bite out of Lorry's
wizards.   ;-)

--
--*     Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD Email: jlsysinc at nospam.ix.netcom.com     *--
--*     Mud Server Developer's Page <http://jlsysinc.home.netcom.com>      *--
--* "No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." Thomas Jefferson *--





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