[MUD-Dev] ADMIN: Effective progress methods for MUD-Dev (was Re: Better Combat (long))

[John Arras]

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, J C Lawrence wrote:

> For instance I've considered dedicating MUD-Dev one day per week
> to "What are the important problems/questions in the field?"  The
> idea is that on that day of the week only posts which addressed
> that question would be moderated.  A similar pattern could work
> for "Great Thoughts Time" (!tm).

This sounds like a great idea to me, but I recommend having more
infrequent discussions with long lead times so people can get up to
speed on a topic and try to think about it. A good method might be
posing a problem along with some resources that people can use to
get up to speed, as well as examples from real games. Then, for a
period of a few weeks to months, that could be the main special
topic to be discussed and worked on if people have time. Having
discussions on a topic one day a week won't be long enough because
things go on for several days at least and it might take a while to
compose a response. Less frequent discussions might be better. I
guess the main idea here is to encourage people to research the
issue to prepare to discuss it. I also think stopping the regular
list to only have posts on one topic is a bad idea.


The problem I find personally interesting is how to create content
more efficiently, and I think it's an important problem. There are
other important problems, but there are also some that I don't feel
are as important. I call these "interpolation" questions. They are
problems where there are a few or several major ways of approaching
the problem, and many ways to combine and use the details and
aspects of the major methods to try to get something new. My
canonical example of this is the skills vs. classes question. It
boils down to how to keep players from accessing all skills all at
once, and there are many methods that can be used to create these
restrictions (levels, classes, skill cap, practice, training, money,
quests, limited number of people can use it), but I don't think it
matters much how those details are combined. (Although a straight
class system is IMO pretty bad...) I might be wrong about the
interpolation problems, and perhaps someone will come up with some
radically new method to mete out skills, but I haven't seen anything
that wowed me in a long time.

John
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