[dentin]

Kavir,

I agree as well; some of the points I do consider legitimate:

1- long character creation. I've personally left muds simply for this reason.

2 - no initial goal or quest. This is a bigger problem than most people realize, and it's harder to solve well than most think.

3 - inner circles and cliques. I only consider this a problem when it involves favoritism by the staff. I've largely tried to deal with it by restricting immortal powers and making the god/mortal social interface well defined. Other than that, player only groups and cliques IMHO should be ignored by the staff until they cause break harassment or other rules.

4 - rude players and immortals. IMHO, this depends on the forum. We allow very little rudeness on the newbie helper channels, but substantially more on other channels. Player created channels are moderated by the players, so if you don't like someone being rude, leave their channel, kick them off the channel, or ignore them.

5a - slow leveling. This really depends on what you mean by slow; at low levels, getting a couple levels an hour is no big deal. At the extreme upper levels, it can take a minimum of an entire month to gain a single level. One thing we've been trying to work on is make it so that mob grinding isn't required at lower levels. It's entirely possible to get up to level ten never going through the same area twice, but after that things get more grindy.

5b - level restricted equipment. This is entirely personal taste, and I personally like level restricted equipment. I like a lot of other restrictions too, and we have a plethora of different eq restriction options to let us build different stuff.

6 - ignoring newbies. This I disagree with. True newbies generally do NOT want to talk to anyone until after they get their bearings. Too much comm traffic too early is worse than leaving them in isolation. Someone who already knows what a mud is and who wants to chat will easily find a way to do so, but by default games should be silent and peaceful until the player gets a handle on things. We connect them to one channel at level 2, and a couple more as they gain more levels.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD