[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "Kristen Koster" <kkoster at austin.rr.com>

> I'm much preferring to read the higher signal to noise posts in
> this thread that are actually debating the why's of people
> preferring one playstyle to another and the technical aspects of
> choosing one over the other. Unfortunately, they're getting fewer
> and farther between.

It's hard to keep signal high without making the discussion
inaccessible to people.

I have personally found that whenever I try to start a thread about
something I find interesting, it somehow turns into something I find
annoying -- usually complaints about how I am being too general, too
specific, or too verbose. Occasionally, the political correctness of
my terms becomes the focus, like when I try to discuss the idea that
boys and girls like different kinds of games. That idea always falls
apart, because I say something like:

  "Girls tend to prefer games which allow you to noncompetitively
  create persistent objects."

Then I receive a series of reasonably equivalent responses.

  - Not all girls like that kind of thing.
  - Some boys like that kind of thing.
  - That's not the only thing girls like.
  - Every game has persistent objects.
  - If it's noncompetitive, it's not a game.
  - You should just say "girls like to make things".
  - (etc.)

While all of these things are (arguably) correct, none of them say
anything interesting; they just whine about what has already been
said and whether it was said properly. So all these things do is
detract from the original question, which *I* think has some signal,
and they end up being nothing but noise.

The only way I've found to really prevent this is to write in such a
thickly academic fashion that the vast majority of people can't
understand what the hell you're saying -- but if the discussion
isn't for everyone's consumption, why have it here? I mean, we're
all here to discuss interesting questions, so I get rather confused
when people choose to argue about whether I'm asking the right
question; I expect them to be more interested in its implications
than its delivery.

Which leads me to something that can potentially be considered
actual signal! (Ooh, imagine that.) When discussing why decisions
were made, players always seem to view the world as something they
can hold hostage with the bugaboo of "people won't buy that". No
matter how many powerful technical compulsions for a feature exist,
they always seem to think that it will all go away and they can get
their way with "you just want more money, but now lots of people
won't buy your software so you're wrong".

But isn't it *normal* that lots of people won't buy your software? 
How much weight does it really carry for a potential user to say
"I'm not going to buy your software"? Does anyone even care? 
Personally, I always assume that someone saying "I'm not going to
buy your software" is really saying "this is the excuse I am going
to use to justify pirating your software" -- he was never going to
buy it anyway, and he just wanted a reason to pretend it's
politically motivated instead of being stuck admitting that he's a
thief.  The SCS/MCS debate on SWG, for example, is garnering a lot
of indignant "well now I won't buy it" responses... and yet, even
after saying they won't buy the software, people are remaining
active in their PAs and talking about what they're going to do in
the game. (The situation is even more prevalent in communities where
you are altering a system that is already "live".)

Is this overly cynical? Should I assume that the users who say they
won't buy and yet continue to discuss how they will play are, in
actuality, just impulsive hotheads who actually *will* buy the game
and never meant they wouldn't? (And even if I did, how likely is it
that a person like that is going to be a problem player?) What
patterns are other people seeing in this kind of user community
behavior?


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