Scenario: During a stable period, the head admin of beta mud A decides to put all the newer admins in a single taskforce as an experimental team-building project.  The taskforce includes a broad range of admins, from coders to builders to RP enforcers and everything between.  

Their assignment is to plan a major innovation, not just in terms of their mud, but by the standards of the mudding community as a whole.  Anything they were doing before the taskforce was created has been put on hold.  They will not return to their normal duties until their plan is complete.

As a player on this beta mud, you are pretty much content with the current plans.  But considering they are going to plan this major innovation anyway, and spend who knows how long doing so, then which of the above choices would you prefer they spend their time thinking about?

Edit: Argh!  The poll doesn't accept bold tags, and it won't let me edit.  It was supposed to look sooooo pretty.  *curses*

In terms of answering the actual question "Where do you value progressive innovation most" I went for a null-vote, as I consider the third and fourth points to be flip sides of the same coin, and thus equally important. I consider the first point to be either slightly more or slightly less important than the third and fourth points, depending on the style of the individual mud.

The second point - the rules and policies - are a very tiny point in comparison to the others. But for the others, your poll would be a bit like asking what's the most important - an administrator, a coder, or a builder. Obviously in most muds you need them all.

However in answer to the content of your post itself, a group of new admin are likely to have very little experience, so any task I might assign them would be likely to reflect that fact. Getting them to investigate the IC world would be a good choice, because it wouldn't require any mudding experience. Another possibility would be to get them to familiarise themselves with say 10 or 20 muds which I consider innovative, and then get together and share (and build on) their new-found knowledge in an attempt to work out what sort of direction the ground-breaking muds are moving in terms of features. Obviously they could only really do this for the visible code, so that's where the focus would lie in such a scenario.

Not really.  Obviously a mud needs people in all of those positions, but each of their duties do not necessarily require the same amount of effort put into "major innovations" to create a certain amount of interest among incoming players.  Moreover, the preferences of individual players of the mud will vary: for instance roleplayers might tend towards the mud's world, while gamers might tend towards code.  Finally, if great advances have been made in one aspect over the mud community as a whole, players may tend away from that aspect towards the others, even if the others aren't quite as important to them overall.

While you could look at each of those factors as a matter of importance to some specific goal, I'm not prepared to generalize those factors as overall importance just yet -- even if we were to assume that anything admin, builders, or coders do is a "major innovation".  This poll only consider importance from a player's perspective.  But what is important to a player is not necessarily what is important to the staff or to the mud community as a whole.

In my opinion, none of these sides of the Mud can be put one above other, the trick is to get a good balance of all of these sides (except maybe IC text might be less important in not rp-enforced Mud). If you have strong code, lots of areas, varied equipment, but weakly written and/or maintaned laws - the Mud hardly will be enjoyable, I believe. If you have great "visible code", but weak inner code - Mud will most probably be laggy and crashy, hence it also will be quite unpleasant to play.

Have you ever been a new player on a mud without adequate help files? I don't know how exactly how important they are compared to everything else, but I surely wouldn't call them unimportant.

Well you asked about progressive innovation, I didn't really consider helpfiles a part of any progressive innovation. But yes, I do consider helpfiles along with a useful website vitally important in general.

My penis.

What? You did ask where I valued progressive innovation the most.

-D

He doesn't need "progressive growth", he needs "divine intervention" instead if he ever wants some results.

Aren't you like, banned or something, Seth?

I could have sworn you were. Or something.

-D

Apparently I'm not.

Stranger things have happened though...

Actually, Dulan, YOU were the one who posted a rather twinkish reply to a serious question. It seems a bit paradoxical to me, that a person who has allegedly made it his task in life to persecute twinks on the boards, obviously finds it totally acceptable to spam the same boards with trollish posts himself.

Actually, Molly, it was making a reference to a very specific point (Progressive innovation? Ain't gonna happen.), was not intended to be serious (Something you would term a "joke"), as well as poking fun at a certain person.

Of course, you yourself never got it. As usual.

Le sigh.

As for you, Sethie-poo: I find it interesting that you "just happen" use the nicknames that someone who harassed a female implementor of a MUD I once played, and also have a very similar typing style. If you are the same guy, you'd likely recognize the "MAN-CHASINGS!". Heh. That was amusing - but, from what I've observed on these boards, you did not get the point of all that. Eeesh.

-D

I love it when someone throws around accusations at you just because you happen to have a similiar online nickname. Perhaps the name Ingham is from a well known game called Heroes of Might and Magic 3? Next time, think before acusing someone of random stuff. That, and for the love of God, don't share you non-heterosexual "Man-chasing" escapades with us. There are people who might take offense or find it disturbing, like yours truely.

Edit:

Whoops, forgot this account is still using my old "Ingham" nickname. *backspaces the bit about Seth being a common nickname due to Egyptian mythology reference* I could have sworn I regged Seth though... What the heck?