[MUD-Dev] volunteers

[Timothy Dang]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2001 the_logos at www.achaea.com wrote:

> Ahh, I think you misunderstand me.

No, I don't, but apparently I don't make myself clear. And maybe I
chose a bad example. Or at least I think I understand. When you say he
wants to pay to do building, I assume there's no administrative/GM
authority which would follow the building?

> What I meant was that a player had approached me about paying us in
> order to build things like areas, which don't benefit him or his
> character any more than any other character.  It's like someone
> offering to pay Verant to be a Guide in Everquest.

What I was talking about was people paying to create content, though
possibly with a twist. Of course, somebody buying an item customized
for themself is creating content, but not exactly what I had in
mind. You could treat all creating content to be the same in terms of
your administration, or treat the _buying_for_me_ type of content
differently.

First, (many) admins think player-added content would be a boon to
their MUDs. However the costs in admin time of making sure that the
content isn't crap is too high.

Second, players want to add content, and are willing to pay for the
privilege.

So, those two make me think the problems can be resolved by charging
the players for the administrative cost of filtering out the crap. Of
course, this does create the new problem of trying to tell people
their ideas don't work without pissing off your customers.

The twist was that, although typically, one would expet the new
content to be open to everybody, it needn't be. Perhaps for additional
fees, you could give the creator(s) additional in-game intellectual
property rights. These could be time-limited, limited by some secret,
or unlimited.

So, maybe there's a secret to getting through the mountain pass which
only the creator knows and passes out carefully to people he likes,
but eventually gets out to everyone. Or, if it's a type of craftable
item, perhaps only the creator's character knows how to make the item,
giving them a monopoly (for whatever that's worth).

------------------------------
Timothy O'Neill Dang / Cretog8
520-884-7261
One monkey don't stop no show.

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev