[MUD-Dev] Advertising Thread

[Kristen Koster]

On Thursday, August 15, 2002, at 11:38  AM, Russ Whiteman wrote:

> I don't want you to feel I was attacking you, your design, or the
> game...it was just a perfect example to me that having designers
> who -are- familiar with the MUDding world doesn't mean the game
> design is going to be perfect.  And, conversely, having a good (or
> bad) game design doesn't necessarily mean that the game is going
> to do outstanding well (or poorly).  As much as I hate to admit
> it, marketing appears to be the king, when it comes to making a
> hugely successful game...

Also having any sort of design (good, bad, mediocre) doesn't mean
much when compared to the implementation of it. Which can kill a
successfully marketed game once the first people buy it and decide
it's crap and tell all their buddies not to buy it.

Another thing I can't say enough is that if the people implementing
a system don't grok it or the WHYs behind it, you're not going to
get what you're striving for either.

Just because several of us on the design and programming teams for
UO had MUD/MUSH experience, it didn't always mean that management or
the others on the team recognized it or accepted certain things that
have been proven time and again in the mud world.

I mean why would you need to make ALL whoozits and whatzits know how
to behave like whoozits and whatzits? You just special case every
one where you use it. Why would players CARE if all the blacksmiths
in the world were just cookie cutter copies. Why would they care if
ALL the NPCs were? Why are traffic patterns important in a
multiplayer game? Isn't it good enough that one person can walk
through there? So what if we waste over 75% of the land mass set up
here by making ALL the mountains impassable because someone made
them look like crap and now we don't want people to actually SEE
them and there isn't time to go back and fix them. Why do we need
boats when we've got moongates? So what if some of the cities and
another 1/3 of the remaining land mass are on islands that don't
have moongates.

Also, take the percentages of people with mud backgrounds early on
in the project 6/9 to the 8/40+ toward the end of the project where
there were muddled and splintered chains of command, warm but not
necessarily willing bodies thrown at the project and management
pushing it out the door.

And no, I didn't take your posts as attacking the game or the
design. But very few people know how the project went from the
ugly-stepsister project shoved away in some dark corner and mostly
ignored because it was only forecast to sell maybe 30K units
lifetime to one that was held up as the company's best hope where
everyone suddenly had an opinion and wanted their thumb in the pie.

I think the way the game turned out despite the internal politics of
the "team" structure and how it has evolved since it opened is
amazing.

-Kristen Koster       Kaige @ LegendMUD
www.legendmud.org     legendmud.org 9999


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