I think one important question that needs to be asked is how each person measures success... Does success mean you have an enormous player base, at the potential cost of doing what you actually want to do in favor of what the mortals want you to do? What if they said they wanted some godly spells that do 10000 damage per cast for 5 mana, or they're going to go find some other insane mud that will give them that kind of power? Is success defined by the craftsmanship you put into the world you've created? If you based your mud on your own made up storyline, how deeply involved did you get with the details of the area maps, and how detailed did you get with different aspects of the story as to who's against who, where did this particular race evolve from, etc? If you based yours on a book or movie series, how close to the series did you truly remain, and in the process, did you scrap most of the more "fun" aspects of the game in order to enforce this predetermined roleplay, or did you give your mortals more choice in how they decided to play it out? Miserable failure or unsurpassed success is more a state of mind rather than an award that can be given or received... There are, of course, such rewards, being listed in top 10 lists or having rave reviews from players and sites like mudconnector and mudmagic... But then are also the intangible rewards of knowing that out of all of the <insert theme here> muds out there, yours is the *best*, even if the players don't really think so :)
I think a good admin should always be willing to take player and staff commentary in order to improve their mud; after all, giving in on some smaller issue may bring in more players overall to help share your vision of whatever world you've created... It's sort of supply and demand... you may not want to drop the price on your product because you won't make as much money, but if dropping the price of it a few bucks gets thousands more people to buy it, you can make more money in volume than in per-item sales :D Similarly, if you're willing to compromise on smaller aspects of your vision, you may attract a wider range of people that all come to enjoy the unaltered aspects of it... Personally, I code for the fun of it and for the experience... The only formal classes I've taken were Apple IIe BASIC in 8th grade, and Turbo Pascal in High School :D I learned by diving into the code, and I must have read through every single line of ROM at least 8-10 times in the decade I've been working with it... Recently I've taken up PHP for web programming, and it is so utterly close to C that I picked it up in a matter of a couple of weeks (plus is super easy to use for work with databases) :D Now I'm moving on to Javascript and ActionScript for Flash, and am probably going to move to Java from there... In response to Daniel's email that just came in while I was typing this, I've gotta say that I'm fairly positive that MUDs will never be as popular as the visual MMORPGs, just because people love their eye candy :D But at the same time, those games can never really offer the level of roleplay that you can get in a text-based world, and there are still thousands of people that are out for that aspect... Also, I think people are attracted to the chat-room-type feel of a MUD, being more of a social environment than in a visual-oriented game where you spend so much time running around the landscape that a lot of messages tend to scroll on by unnoticed, and you're generally only chatty with your small group of adventurers... Plus they don't have the immortal involvement you get on a lot of MUDs, with various quests and trivia games and random spellups, restores, etc... Players love that stuff :D So I think there will still be a place for MUDs for a long time to come... I do, however, think it would be an awesome idea to develop a freeware, open-source MMORPG and get it out there... It would definitely bring in more challenges for the coders, writing clients to handle a lot of the processing and take the load off of the servers, but it could be designed with all kinds of modern-day principles in mind, such as database usage, perhaps server load balancing and multithreading, and compression techniques to keep bandwidth usage at a minimum... Keep us posted if you do decide to do something along those lines :D Richard Lindsey. -----Original Message----- From: KJM [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:33 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Miserable Failure or Unsurpassed Success It seems like the way to success is to have players already on the mud. I can't tell you how many people I've seen come on look around, see no-one, and leave. I've seen mediocre muds with tons of players. I code my mud for the fun of it, because it seems no matter how much I advertise or have my (small but loyal) players vote for us, my playerbase doesn't get any bigger. Do it for yourself. Enjoy this little piece of world you can call your own. And if you get people to enjoy it too, great! If not, sit back in a world where you can be called a god and relax :P Sure, I'd love to have more People stop by and play but I'm not going to let that get too me (too much) :P hehe The hardest part of coding/running a mud is getting people to come and play. -K (AKA Thalor) Crimson Gate Crimsongate.kyndig.com 4555 >>>>-----Original Message----- >>>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On >>>>Behalf Of Daniel O'Neal >>>>Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 9:21 AM >>>>To: [email protected] >>>>Subject: RE: Miserable Failure or Unsurpassed Success >>>> >>>>This is a hard question honestly. Personally I'm going the >>>>"start with stock, rip everything I don't like out and fix >>>>that, and add tons of features to it". To be honest, I did >>>>tons of research, checked out the big muds to find what I >>>>liked about them, and checked around to see what the >>>>players liked. From there, I started implementing on Rom >>>>(flavor of my choice, easiest to change imho). >>>> >>>>Treat the mud as a marketable service, treat it like you >>>>want to make money off it, even if you never will. >>>>Consider advertising, via mudmagic, top mudsites, etc. >>>> >>>> >>>>-----Original Message----- >>>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On >>>>Behalf Of Jesse >>>>Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 8:34 AM >>>>To: [email protected] >>>>Subject: Miserable Failure or Unsurpassed Success >>>> >>>> >>>>Features are great, and coding them can be a lot of fun... >>>>but what good is a feature-rich MUD when most of the >>>>features are rarely (or never) used? >>>> >>>>Most of us on this are the admin of a MUD (maybe even more >>>>than just one). >>>>Some of us run successful games while others just code for >>>>fun and don't care if there's a dedicated player base. My >>>>question is: >>>> >>>>What is it that separates a successful game from an >>>>unsuccessful one? >>>> >>>>Do you start with a stock system, attract a player base, >>>>and then modify the game democratically based on what the >>>>players want? Or do you design everything, release it as >>>>playable, and hope that people like it? Another question, >>>>also: In what timeframe can a MUD be considered to be a >>>>success, or a failure (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, >>>>5 years, 10 years)? >>>> >>>>Someone should write a guide called: 10 Steps to a Successful MUD >>>> >>>> >>>>-----Original Message----- >>>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On >>>>Behalf Of Valnir >>>>Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 9:07 AM >>>>To: [email protected] >>>>Subject: Re: Re[2]: Quiet >>>> >>>>I actually created a throwing option for our MUD sometime >>>>last year, but it wasn't used much. In the last month I >>>>updated it to allow mobs the ability to throw objects at >>>>characters also, and also enabled the ability for >>>>characters to throw objects into the next room, and thru >>>>portals. The object >>>> >>>>has to be of an exploding nature though, and it causes room damage. >>>> >>>>- Valnir >>>> >>>>-- >>>>ROM mailing list >>>>[email protected] >>>>Unsubscribe here ->>> >>>>http://www.rom.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rom >>>> >>>> >>>>-- >>>>ROM mailing list >>>>[email protected] >>>>Unsubscribe here ->>> >>>>http://www.rom.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rom -- ROM mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe here ->>> http://www.rom.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rom
