> Some people have responded with, "have one port for
> players and one port for builders". Well, why not just make
> it so players cannot enter a zone during construction (that's what
> we do), thus eliminating people getting items that have yet to
> be approved. Also, in show zones, change it so that you can see
> which zones are being built versus which zones are open.
>
> I think an advantage to this is that over time is it makes it easier on the
> person who would have to reboot the mud to add the zones (actually causing
> more disruption) and you will have more immortal interaction with your
> current
> player base (some people might argue that that is bad).
Tom has a couple of good points, less reboots and more immortal/mortal
interaction. I'll contend, from experience (although we don't CURRENTLY
run a building port, I am heavily in favor of it) that running a building
port is the way to go.
I'll first point out that we do have a way of determining connected zones
vs unconnected zones, and even a way of zone-locking, so that only people
listed in the zone can do anything (like walk around or even at look) in a
zone, for those truely paranoid builders. We also stop mortals from
summoning mobs out of unconnected zones (by accident OR on purpose).
Some points for a building port:
1. You don't have to trust your imms as much. On QS, I feel an immortal
is a position of HUGE trust, and don't give them out very often. Builders
are the easiest position to get, and the easiest to lose. I have had
builders do things like:
a. be blatant, kill mobs, log on their mort, give them the eq.
b. be sneaky, kill mobs, put the eq on a mob their mort could kil that was
WAY out of the way, and left for 12 hours.
c. be REALLY sneaky, and just change the exp on one certain mob to be
insanely high, and then zset a bunch of them to load in a certain zone.
Kill them all off, undo the zset.
These ranged from imms I had trusted for quite a while to things done the
first night of immdom when they thought the impls (and our log files) were
asleep. Maybe I need to be more careful in awarding imms, maybe power is
just that corrupting, I dunno, but a builder port would have solved all of
these problems.
2. Mud stability. I can't speak for Oasis, although I understand it is
pretty damn stable these days, we used it back in the pre-george days and
it was a crash machine. We currently use Obuild, and have some strange
linked list problems I am pretty sure can be traced back to medit, but I
havent proven that yet. In the mean time, we suffer the odd crash every
few days that doesn't happen if we don't have any active builders. Before
we found a few strange things it was a bit more often than that.
3. You mention mortal/immortal interaction. This has been a topic on my
mind recently. This can be a good thing, or this can be a bad thing, I
think it depends on the atmoshpere you want your mud to have. There is
another list out there, the MUD-DEV list, that has some phenomenally
experienced admins on it, and the topic is mostly mud development and
styles, and more 'meta' topics than just coding. Anyway, I digress,
right now we have sort of split our immortals into 2 areas of influence.
The building imms are encouraged to interact with mortals only if they
want to run a quest or otherwise get input as to zone development. The PR
imms are Questmasters and Enforcers. They are encouraged to chat with the
players and proactively (and reactively) interact with the morts. These
are by no mean strict rules, just to say, if you want to sit around and
chat with the morts, do it in your mort. This works fairly well, and our
problems, while they seem frequent are probably more a sign of longevity
than malicoius imms.
All this to say, I prefer two ports. Depending on your setup, your
preferences, and your desired mud flavor, do what you like ;)
But having OLC will widen the selection of people who can build for you,
and probably reduce the brainache of getting a hand written zone to work.
-Ghost Shaidan
Implementor of Questionable Sanity
qs.mudservices.com 4000
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