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Old 04-14-2003, 04:29 AM   #2
Molly
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: 4 Dimensions
Posts: 574
Molly will become famous soon enoughMolly will become famous soon enough
The problem is that all Builders - even the best ones - have been new at some point of their career, and all new Builders WILL make mistakes, from sheer inexperience, if not from bad judgement.

Another problem is that the most promising and talented Builders often tend to make just as many and bad mistakes as the worst moron kind, (the ones that should never 'have been made a builder/admin' according to the above statement). The reason for this is that the most imaginative persons, (which are also the ones that potentially could make excellent Builders) like to experiment a lot. Being imaginative, they think of stuff that nobody - (sometimes unfortunately including the coder) - ever thought of before. They get this exciting idea how something could work in a zone, and then try to implement it, using skills that they have not yet honed to perfection. Simply speaking, they are using tools that they don't quite know how to handle yet.

With Builders of this kind you might end up with a totally amazing zone, that baffles players and staff alike - in the best case. Or, in the worst case, you might end up with something that crashes the Port a lot. (Most so called code bugs are actually caused by building mistakes, in particular bad scripts).

The problem is of course how tp separate the 'mad genius' from the moron. This is actually not as hard as it would seem. One look at some descriptions usually tells you if you've got a potential top Builder on your hands, or some totally useless schmuck, who'll create more problems than usable zones.

One of my own top Builders put a lot of 'cute' stuff in his first zone. 'Cheat' objects that were cheated in a much more imaginative - (and hard to detect) - way than the usual method of putting insane stats on them. Scripts that allowed a mort to use imm commands. And some other 'inventions', that I've mercifully forgot by now.

That zone had so much 'cute' stuff that I actually withheld the imm that our Builders usually get in the Game Port as a reward for finishing a zone. Even though the zone was one of the best I'd seen so far, I just didn't feel I could trust him as an imm. So I told him to come and talk to me when he felt that he had grown out of that irrestistible urge to cheat with anything that could be cheated with.

He took it quite well. He continued to build in the other Port, soon became our top expert on advanced scripts, and eventually matured enough to be trusted with an imm in the Game Port. He is now at the top level below imp, and has lately gone over to coding, to which he devotes as much imagination and energy as former to building. I guess he's well on his way to becoming co-imp. And I guess most Admin would have banned him at an early stage, for being an 'incorrigible' cheater and trouble-maker.

It just shows that the step between genius and villain is short.
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