[MUD-Dev] [NEC] 2.8: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (fwd)

[Marc Bowden]

--On Saturday, July 5, 2003 10:22 -0400 Michael Tresca
<talien at toast.net> wrote:
> J C Lawrence [mailto:claw at kanga.nu] posted on Thursday, July 03,
> 2003 7:22 AM

>> 3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the
>> things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either
>> join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher
>> levels.  There needs to be some kind of segmentation of
>> capabilities.  Now, the segmentation can be total -- you're in or
>> you're out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be
>> partial -- anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post,
>> non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to
>> moderate, you really have to have been around for a while.  It
>> has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some
>> users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need
>> to defend themselves.

> And this is my argument for why there must be a screen for users
> to ANY MMORPG with any theme whatsoever (that'd be all of them) if
> they wan to have a cohesive community.  The community needs a
> means of defending itself.  Who the people to defend against may
> vary, but usually it's a horde of pre-teen punks with lots of time
> on their hands.  Segmentation is critical in definding target
> markets and playerbases.  It's not about role-playing alone --
> that's just an extreme market segmentation and a complicated
> barrier to participation.  In can be anything, but it has to be
> defined vs.  "well as long as you can pay you can play."

It bears pointing out, if you haven't derived this result on your
own from the evidence or experience, that if you do NOT take steps
you'll end up with segmentation by default, into "hunters" and
"prey" (or more accurately, "people who are part of the dominant
group" and "everyone else".)

--
Marc Bowden - Soulsinger         Dreamshadow:The Legacy of the Three
  ryumo at umich.edu                                 209.48.36.2 3333
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