[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Christopher Allen]

"Michael Tresca" <talien at toast.net>:

> Which ultimately goes back to the feasibility and expense of the
> "close, personal MUD-touch" on a MMORPG. Sounds like you tried,
> anyway, which I applaud.

> Here's the question: with a larger budget, would it still be
> valuable to devote staff to cultivating the community?

> After a certain point, I imagine it's too late.  The community you
> have is what you've got, unless you're willing to start canceling
> accounts and knocking players off, which is a bad business
> decision all around.

We over-staffed deliberately at the launch of Castle Marrach, and
educated them in advance in the "traditions" and "culture" that we
wanted to have in the game. In addition, we limited the first weeks
to no more then 50 new beta testers per day.

As a consequence, the traditions and culture have caught on, and
have grown considerably on the base we set. At this point, we have
no internal staff directly responsible for Castle Marrach, it is all
run by paying players.

Thus my advice is that if you can afford it, staff strongly at the
beginning and consider limiting your first set of users until they
are educated and can teach by example subsequent new users.

Do be careful though -- we also over-staffed too long. We did pull
back some after a couple of months, but we should have pulled out
completely sooner. By not doing so, it discouraged the leaders among
our players from taking charge. We eventually worked this out, but
it did cause some problems.

-- Christopher Allen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..



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