Obvious troll-bait is always best ignored.

I can't say I know of any commercial mud zealots. I don't know of anyone here that's ever said "Free muds are wrong and muds should never be free."

On the other hand, I've definitely heard at least one person (one of the two Zealots I mentioned before) say that he thinks commercial muds are flat-out wrong because "Muds were meant to be free." (A ridiculous statement of course, but then, that's what one expects from a zealot.)

--matt

Oh, it was troll-bait alrighty. Of course, the only people who need feel threatened are the Zealots and Priests, neither of whom exactly ask to be taken seriously anyway.

--matt

You get "zealots" for all types of mud. Flame any mud, and they'll come back at you, because they think their mud is "the best". After loyalty to the individual mud comes loyalty to the codebase - flame a ROM mud on the basis of its codebase, and the other ROM mudders will respond. Advertise yourself as an LPmud owner and flame Diku muds, and you'll find Diku proponents responding in kind - but watch both sides join together when a MUSH proponent starts throwing around words like "hack and slash" and "real roleplaying". Check out the graphical mudders flaming text muds, and you'll see the text mudders hit back with remarks about "eye candy" and "books vs TV". Commercial and non-commercial is just another one of the many divides, and I've seen more than one poster claiming that commercial muds are always "much better" than free muds (cos if you've got to pay, it MUST be better, right?).

There have always been different factions (and factions within factions) within the mud community for as long as I can remember, and I suspect there always will be. Apart from a few closed-minded individuals (from ALL factions of mudding), most of us are able to get along, most of the time. But posts like your original one in this thread are the sort of thing which keep the pot simmering, so to speak.

But who do you think they'd attack when threatened? Commercial muds. And who do you think will respond to those attacks? The commercial mud "Zealots" and "Priests". And that's the sort of thing that will escalate, because most people will try and defend their own muds and end up getting dragged into the flaming.

And a quick response to one of your earlier statements:

I know of at least one commercial mud which is run like that.

I couldn't agree more. Well, I might go two.

But hey, any publicity is good publicity, I guess.

Yeah, we do get a lot of that here don't we? Bit stupid though. There are a billion ways to play muds and there is a type of mud that tries to cater to nearly all of those ways somewhere out there.

Text mud people are generally WAY more petty than the larger general (and mostly graphical) mud, unfortunately, particularly when it comes to developers. You sure don't see most graphical developers running around slamming each other's games. Although to be fair you don't see that among the more successful text muds either I guess. It's mainly the wannabes that feel the need to attack other muds for whatever religious-style reason du jour they've concocted today.

I would LOVE to see a text mud board for serious developers only, where the goal is productive discussion about producing text muds that can be successful (whether free or commercial) rather than promoting or attacking a particular style of mud because of that style. An emphasis on reality rather than wishful thinking would exist too. (No stupid arguments about whether builders are more valuable than coders for instance. The market has already answered that question definitively, like it or not.) Mainly, just a discussion among professionals (used in a loose sense. Not meang in the developing-for-money sense) concerned with results not whether a "good mud" should be RPI or hack n' slash or other such inane arguments.


Yeah, fair enough. I probably shouldn't have posted it. This board (and other text mud boards) just frustrate the #### out of me due to some of the Zealots and Priests that inhabit it. They make it next-to-impossible to have a worthwhile discussion on mud development. Hmm, perhaps a moderated mailing list like mud-dev, though with an explicit focus on text. (as mud-dev is mainly now full of people wanting to make the next Everquest sequel, and who have 0 chance of managing it.)

Yeah, again, fair enough. I guess I can think of two that are run like that (one of which I used to admin on and left). The one I used to admin on is run so poorly it hasn't grown since I left in disgust in 1997 right after Achaea opened.

I sometimes forget it's possible to eek out a commercial existence while doing a pretty ****-poor job of running a mud. I'd rephrase to say that a company can't run its muds like fiefdoms if it expects to maintain growth but I also don't really know of any commercial text mud companies that have significant revenue (say, at least 6 figures annually) and are growing quickly besides us, so there's not much evidence to draw on.

--matt