[MUD-Dev2] The Great Mud Survey

[Nicholas Koranda]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2007 14:15:28 -0600, "John Arras" <johnarras at gmail.com>
said:

Snip...

> I don't think a perfect game exists anyway. Asking for a poll of
> players like asking whether skills or classes are better, or even framing
> a
> debate in terms of X vs. Y when X and Y are just examples of some Z that
> serves a purpose in the game.
> 
> What I would like to see is not a survey of players or developers or
> whatever, but another attempt at a Wiki like Agora a few years ago (which
> seems to have died). The idea would be to list the ideas that people have
> had for doing certain things and discuss how the parts of these games
> relate
> to each other and give examples of how things have been done and how they
> might be altered to do new things. The goal would be to encourage people
> to
> always look for combinations of variations of methods of doing things
> instead of just looking for the One True Way of doing things. Is anyone
> interested in giving the wiki idea another shot?

I have thought of this idea before, to even a higher level as well.  For
instance, having a site that has project level categories and also
module level categories.

Each project level entry would contain the ideas/themes/background
stories/genres for a virtual world that all can comment on.  A person
can post their project with a description of each item of a project
level entry (theme/genre/background story.)  Others could add commments
to them to offer advice or further depth.

The module level entries would be lower level items for a MUD/MMO that
when combined with many others, form the "engine" of the MMO.  These
items are things such as combat systems, PvP/non-PvP systems,
social/chat tools, crafting systems, newbie friendly tools
(intros/tutorials), real money systems, microtransaction systems, etc.

The format of the site could be wiki like you suggested or a more
structured (less free form) format.

The one thing that this kind of site would not address directly (at
least as proposed here) is the interaction of each of these module level
entries when combined into a full engine.  For instance, a crafting
system can effect an NPC vendor system and vice versa depending on which
systems/implementations are used.