Anyone who is attending the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) this year () or who is in the Bay Area may be interested in a one-day conference being run alongside GDC on its last day (Saturday the 8th of March). The focus is on providing presentations that are of more interest to higher level MUD (text or graphical) developers than the tracks at GDC, which tend to lack depth in the design department. Details can be found at

Speakers will include:
Gordon Walton on "MCS vs. SCS in the trenches".
- Gordon is a long-time industry veteran with credits going back to 1986. He served as VP of Online Operations for Origin, and now serves as Executive Producer on The Sims Online.
(MSC = Multiple-Character-Server. SCS = Single-Character-Server)

Matt Mihaly (me) on "Managing PvP"
- I'm the CEO Achaea LLC, the second-largest company focusing primarly on text MUDs, as well as the now-defunct The Sapience Group, the world's first online community consulting company.

Lee Sheldon on "True Multiplayer Quests"
- Lee is a frequent industry speaker on storytelling techniques. Prior to his involvement in the games industry, he worked in Hollywood writing scripts for a variety of types of tv shows.

Dave Rickey on "Better Game Design through Data Mining"
- Dave works for Mythic Entertainment, developer of Dark Age of Camelot. He has design credit on that game, having contributed significantly to the design of the economic systems.

Elonka Dunin on "Steganography, Terrorism, and Multiplayer Games"
- Elonka is the Executive Producer of Online Community at Simutronics, known primarily for Gemstone III and Dragonrealms. She is also an expert on cryptography and steganography and has lectured to the FBI on the subject.


And more! Again, full details can be found at .

--matt

You should bring some of your staff from Achaea, and some of the players that "answer" questions and have them put on a forum: "How to be an ass to anyone from any other game with a complaint". I'm sure one or two people might show up to learn from the masters...

So let me get his straight: You're ****ed because someone who happens to play Achaea was violating etiquette on your game, and you expect our players not to be ****ed when you violate etiquette on Achaea? Grow up. Our administrators don't speak to people that way (and none of them ever said what you claim were said. We log everything all administrators do.), and I can't blame the players for slamming someone who can't be bothered to learn how to ask for customer service properly (using the ISSUE command) before intruding on their gameplay with OOC problems that are none of their concern. Again, I don't know how you asked for help, but if you just spammed it inappropriately over shouts or via the newbie system, you're #### right you're going to get told to shut up by annoyed players. Good for them.

--matt

Just to clear things up:

I a) asked the person who was in the room with me and greeted me upon entering how I could talk to one of the admin. He/she replied that they could do anything that I needed, and that I didn't need an admin. So, thinking that thhis person actually might be able to do something, or lead me to whomever COULD, I explained briefly the situation, to which I was told to ask on the newbie channel to speak to an admin.

b) As told to try, asked to speak to an admin on the newbie channel, and got a response from someone (I wish I had written down the name, but did not), to which I explained to THEM again what had happened, and was given the exact response which I listed in the previous post (which you didn't bother to respond to).

c) I did not spam anything, I made one request, and was responded to immediately.

d) Whomever DID respond, be they an admin, a newbie, or some random schmuck, responded rudely, and being the only person who did bother to interact with my problem, sure put your lovely game in a crappy light.

e) Had I been told to use the ISSUE command instead of the NEWBIE command by the person whom I first spoke to, I most assuredly WOULD have used it, but finding any sort of documentation or help on such a system wasn't obviously evident to someone who doesn't regularly play there, shame on me I guess.

Do you recall if the person who spoke to you was Romeo or Juliet? They are the shell characters that our Guides use to help newbies. If it was one of them, I apologize, as a Guide should know better than to direct that kind of question to the newbie channel (which is for questions relating to Achaea, for newbies).

I didn't reply to the previous post because after reading the thread, I didn't see any reason to dignify it(not so much referring to your post as a couple of the following ones. You, at least, had a semi-valid complaint, though the idea of generalizing the behavior of 5000+ people from one sentence by one person is a bit off.) with a public response. I mean, no offence, but some of the posts on this site seem like they're written by hormonally-challenged teenagers who are upset at the world, and I've got better things to do than deal with them. I generally don't even participate in this kind of forum, specifically because of the total lack of professionalism that certain community members routinely revel in.

I did e-mail you using the TMS message system to find out which admin said that, but either it's broken and you never got it (which seems likely, as I've mailed two people recently using it, and got responses from neither), or you ignored it.

For future reference, just type HELP <whatever> and you'll either be presented with a help file, or a search-engine-style list of files that may be relevant with short excerpts from those files. HELP CUSTOMER SERVICE, for example, pulls up the 'customerservice' help file, among others.

You could also mail in the future, or even I try to answer all email that I get, and we have a couple people manning the support address.

--matt

I do believe this isn't the right thread to be having these arguments, and it would be nice if you stuck to the topic so people like me do not have to post these kinds of messages.

Take it to the e-mail people.