How much Information to put on a MUD Website
 

MUD websites, clearly, need to have some amount of information to encourage people to play. However, I don't know if I would want a website that takes the adventure out of playing. What is should be on, and what should not be on a good MUD website??

Re: How much Information to put on a MUD Website
 

The answer is entirely based upon the genre and style of your game. Some muds almost have to have some kind of manual, maps, breakdown of items, weapons, armour and perhaps help files. While others might have none of this, being fully found in the game itself. It is balanced by what your goals and player goals are.

Re: How much Information to put on a MUD Website
 

Personally, I would want to see at the very least, a list of commands, with linked helpfiles, and hopefully categorized neatly by subject. Such as...

Aggressive Commands:

attack
bash
hit
kick
kill
ninja-thrust
slash

Defensive Commands:

block
disengage
flee
parry
roll

And so on and so forth, with every single game command that requires the *player* to know syntax...whether the character knows it or not.

Re: How much Information to put on a MUD Website
 

On the flipside though, if you don't distribute base information in a place where everyone can see it then two things happen (at least they did at wot when I was active there).

1) - the 'knowledge' gets held by few people, who, because they possess it, become special, leet. Good in moderation but it can get out of hand (it did at wot)
2) - rumours, innuendoes and complete falsehoods start getting believed. Some of the theories that people swore blindly to at wot were hilarious. Like holding such and so doll upped your backstab success. puh-leaase :)

It's a happy medium, I always believed that more was better but I also liked to encourage players . In order to have that you have to leave something for them to write about :) It makes 'em feel special and gives them a role in the pattern of things.

Nass

Btw hi guys, I haven't been around a while, too busy freaking working now that I'm all grown up!

Re: How much Information to put on a MUD Website
 

Good documentation is important in any MUD, and it can be handy for this documentation to be visible on your website. In particular, important things to have on your website are those involved in character planning/generation. People who come to your page for the first time are, hopefully, getting ready to play, or at least considering it. If character generation is more than choosing a name, as it is with many, but not all MUDs, information on how to go about that generation, details about classes, races, statistics, etc, should be readily accessible on the page. Without that, it's all-too-easy to get into a game for the first time, be faced with a list of choices of some kind, and have no idea what to choose or where to go, only to end up doing something really ignorant and ruining your first character attempt ("Wait, you mean I should have rolled wisdom for a spellblade? I thought it was purely an int thing, and what do you mean my unicorn doesn't have any hands to wield the sword!?") Similarly, you may find it easier to organize certain kinds of information for quick-reference on a website, where they can be navigated with hyperlinks, rather than within the MUD itself, where manually typing out helpfiles is the norm. A website probably shouldn't be a substitute for good in-game documentation of anything, but it certainly can help as a secondary source for it.

Aside from that, I agree with what NW said here. It varies based on your MUD. If there are puzzles to be solved, dungeons to be explored, quests to be worked through, and half the fun is solving/exploring/working through them, don't spoil that for everyone, but if it's a pure PK MUD where everyone's just there to twink out, minmax, and take on the world, then by all means, give them the study material to know how to do it.

Oh, and a wiki is not a substitute for a webpage, though it may be a supplement.
-Kereth