[MUD-Dev] Player Accounts on a Non-Commercial MUD

[John Buehler]

Tand'a-ur writes:
> John Buehler wrote:

>> Interesting notion.  By declaring the specific charity that you
>> would be donating their payment to, you'd attract a somewhat more
>> focused group of players.  Personally, the idea of acting as a
>> middleman to give to a charity whose agenda I disagreed with
>> would cause me some serious ethical problems.

> The MUD is a diku deriv (was swr2 before i ripped it up into
> something new). If any of you are familiar with the type you know
> that it attracts basically almost the absolute worst of the
> mudding community. I just want to limit the total number of
> characters everyone has, and create more sense of advancement
> through these accounts.

> I dont want people to have multiple accounts because I want to
> limit their number of characters, and I dont want them to get the
> goodies from their accounts multiple times.

> For over two years ive been trying to turn one of the worst (imo)
> mud types into a decent mud...

> At this point ive put too much effort into the MUD to start from
> scratch. Ill do it someday but that is a someday where I have more
> time.

If you want your players to do something, you have to figure out how
to get them to *want* to do what you want them to do.  Simple
restrictions will only produce more vehement objections.  The way
that this is generally articulated on this list is to point out that
no matter how you obfuscate your systems, players will reverse
engineer them.  That's because the current crop of players want to
reverse engineer your systems.  My opinion is that if players had
something else interesting to do, they wouldn't reverse engineer the
systems so much.  Some certainly would, but reverse engineering is a
mainstream occupation for players these days.  That's one way to get
them to *want* to do things other than reverse engineer your
systems.

I don't have an answer to the problem of getting players to want to
advance through a single character.  That would suggest that even
other players' characters shouldn't be involved either, which is
rather counterproductive in a multiplayer environment.  Perhaps
something like only one character of each race, and races can't help
each other.

JB

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