[MUD-Dev] Questions about my MUD design

[Peter Harkins]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 12:32:26PM +0100, Christer Enfors wrote:

>   2) As is probably obvious to most of you, this is one of those
>   over-ambitions projects that are never finished. I know, I've
>   been there before. What can I do to overcome this obstacle? One
>   thing I will probably do is aim for an early public alpha, when
>   only the most basic features are implemented. If I get even just
>   a few players into the MUD, I think their feedback will help
>   keep me motivated. Or would that be a bad idea? Will I just make
>   a poor first impression by allowing players into a half-finished
>   MUD?

Yeah, it seems really obvious to me -- what you've written is eerily
similar to the description of the mud I'm an admin on. We're going
for an almost identical feature list of a dynamic world (even with
ascii art), player creation and a non-combat emphasis; so I'll write
about what we've done and how opening early for alpha has affected
us.

It is, without a doubt, ambitious and will take a long time. We
started with LPC, creating a mudlib from scratch. Taking into
account "Plan to throw one away -- you will anyways" with the fact
that the coders who started the project were young and inexperienced
enough to not quite know what they were getting into, we've been
coding for about 6.5 years at this point, and beta (defined as "a
playable game") is finally within reach.

So we're in alpha, with a working world that's not yet a playable
game.  Being in alpha has been pretty good -- it's great to have
some people wandering around occasionally, especially for
recruitment purposes (it's how I ended up joining the project, in
fact). Having people on is very useful for bughunting, too: it's
hard to notice bugs in your own code, and it's nice to have someone
to pass a project off to when you get frustrated.

It's got some downsides -- the only people who spend much time on a
mud that almost-sorta works are newbies to mudding. They'll
generally be enthusiastic but largely clueless. Spending time
teaching them the basics of mudding isn't how we'd prefer to spend
our time right now. A politely discouraging note on login about how
we're not playable yet doesn't seem to help much, I am beginning to
believe that over 90% of players don't read opening messages,
*sigh*. When an experienced player connects, they generally realize
within a few minutes to hours that we're not playable and take off,
which is a little depressing to see.

I don't think we're driving away players permanently with a negative
first impression. We get, let's see, about five or six visitors a
week, which doesn't make me think we even have the potential to put
that much bad press out there. There's a lot of gamers, and we've
only seen a few. We'll drop them an e-mail when we hit beta (and
yes, we're up front about it, we hate spammers too.)

It's also frustrating that the people that tend to be attracted to
coding on an unestablished mud are the ones either with no
experience at all or very odd ideas. We've realized we lose a lot of
time to shifting into "train the newbie" mode rather than coding
mode, so we're working on spotting beginning coders early (and
deciding how and which of the existing ones to grandfather
in). We're also trying to screen out the people with the odd ideas
-- we know what we want, and we're not going to turn this train
around for someone who wants something different. Dealing with new
coders and integrating differing visions... well, that's something
every mud has to deal with.  Trying to code at a moving target is an
excellent way to never finish.

All things considered, I'd say that opening for alpha was a good
thing for us. The infusion of talent (and warm bodies to talk to) is
helpful and is what has kept the project going. The feedback is, in
some ways, really a lifeline. It's frustrating to have to spend time
on clueless or rude players, but I try to look at it as good
practice for when we launch. (It's not always easy -- just had to
ban our first griefer for emoting a rape scene last night.) 
Recruitment of wizards is really, really good, but I wish we'd known
a while ago how to better separate out the people who'll require a
lot of handholding and/or disappear entirely after a few weeks.

--

Peter Harkins, "Malap" on Walraven/Simud (simud.org)

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