[MUD-Dev] Help and Reference Systems Study

[Colin Coghill]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 10:17:36AM -0500, Peter wrote:
> 
> 	That sounds good and useful, but I've seen a trend where the amount of 
> documentation a user new to a mud reads is exactly inverse to how much 
> they play muds. New players just want to jump into it, old players want 
> to know what the scene is and how things work so they can fit in. This 
> isn't absolute or conclusive, just my general oberservation.

Ok, I seem to have missed the original post, but here's my 2c...

I've never really used to think much about documentation and help files
for MUDs, since because I started with the old text-based adventures, the
transition to MUDs was easy and required very little other than the
list of commands available.

However, I recently tried playing a DragonRealms (A commercial Simutronics 
MUD), and while I can see it's a great game with a wonderful world, I
simply can't figure out how to make my character do stuff...

As far as I can tell, there is almost no useful in-game help... if I
type a command with incorrect syntax, or ask for help on a command,
it doesn't tell me what the correct syntax is or how to use it.

To me, this has made a seemingly excellent game almost completely
unplayable...

And it's not the only one.

I know this kind of thing is a far cry from pages and pages of game
history upon login, but I think it's a bit more important.

- Colin



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