[MUD-Dev] Small scale commercial text MUDs

[Matt Mihaly]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, Derek Licciardi wrote:

> Matt Mihaly wrote:
 
>> Seriously, if you're not going to aim high, you don't _need_ a
>> great driver. Content, content, content. I can tell you right now
>> that not a single accolade Achaea has ever gotten has a bit to do
>> with our technology. Although I have a very competent CTO now, I
>> had to teach myself to program (badly) to originally write Achaea,
>> and the code and the technology is sub-standard. Does it matter at
>> the scale we operate? Some, but it's not crucial. Content makes a
>> good MUD, not technology.
 
> That and gameplay.  Content and Gameplay have to be the two most
> significant factors.  I consider content in this regard, both player
> community interaction (because ultimately the designers of the game
> have promoted the creation of that content even though they may not
> have authored it.) and NPC/game system content.

Nod, I was using content to include gameplay as well.

> As long as the content is easy to view, absorb and use in the
> gameplay of the MUD, you will have a successful MUD.  My only
> thought about the technology is that there is a minimum level that
> must be achieved to be successful.  A MUD that has good content and
> gameplay but isn't fast enough or stable will not fare well.  While
> the tolerable/comfortable expectations of user has risen over the
> past few years, it is not so extremely high as to provide a barrier
> to entry that cannot be overcome by the aspiring commercial MUD
> developer.  In sharp contrast to this, I must add that the major
> graphical MUDs are experiencing the exact opposite trend in that the
> entry level technology has doubled or even tripled in the past two
> years and will continue to for the next few years.  Consider that
> the cost of producing a quality MMORPG now is somewhere in the 8-10
> million range and you can see that growth.  The original graphical
> muds were a few million at the most, some even less.(Meridian 59...)

You need a stable system, yes, but trust me, if it required great
technology, Achaea wouldn't exist, as when I started it, it was just
me, and I didn't know jack about what I was doing
technologically. Granted, it's created some extra work since then, and
it would be BETTER if everything was best-practices technology-wise.

--matt

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