On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Patrick Dughi wrote: > Least, I think it was muddev.. my mind is slipping lately It was. > I usually pay visits to most muds that even briefly catch my > attention, just a 'look and see' sort of thing, and sad to say that > the majority of circles fail in one of several ways: > > [snip descriptions of StockMUD, HuhMUD, and XeroxMUD (no, not Lambda)] We're basically talking about signal-to-noise ratio for muds, and I don't believe it's something that should specifically concern us more than it should any others. A high number of "substandard" products (i.e., noise) is endemic. Bad television outnumbers the good; bad books outnumber the good; bad movies outnumber the good; bad ideas outnumber the good. You might see a seemingly disproportionate number of bad CircleMUDs (depending upon your particular standards) out there. I think at least part of it is natural. And the rest is the same thing we see with web pages: if it's easy enough to put together and easy enough to publish, a lot of people will publish crap. So it's at least partly due to CircleMUD being easy enough to use for beginners. This is a side effect and, IMHO, an acceptable one because there's some people that have good ideas and manage to put together a good Mud only because the server was easy enough for them to use. Anyway, the truly terrible muds tend to extinguish in weeks, a handful stick around and about 60% of those, I would venture, get better as administrators stick with it and figure things out. I think, if we ignored the rapid influx of bad muds, we would find that there is the fairly standard proportion of signal-to-noise here as there is elsewhere. Preparation is easy to skip if you're anxious and you don't have to do anything but take a few hours to get it up. Once the novelty of that wears off, the administration generally shows its true promise or dies off. > ... are actually causing the vast populations of potential players to > skip my mud, simply because it's the same brand as theirs? Maybe. I don't think so. On the surface it seems like a fairly logical assertion. Beneath that, I doubt its validity. People, if they're interested in trying something, will try it. If they have a bad initial experience with one element of a vast array, they'll probably try another element and another and another, until they find something that hooks them. Despite being fairly cynical, I tend to believe people are capable enough of anology to realize that giving up on an entire class of Muds because of one bad experience with a particular implementation, design, or genre is pretty ridiculous. It'd be like someone giving up games based on any of the Quake "engines" because of Daikatana. > I guess it's something I ought to think about. Maybe. Maybe not. It's not something I'm ever going to concern myself with. I don't do this for the good of the world, anyway. -dak -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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