Thread: Review comment
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Old 10-10-2002, 12:27 PM   #1
Seraphina
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 49
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I read the following review of a P2P mud.

The review above isn't a review at all. It is a rant by someone who wants a free ride. There is no useful information other than the mud in question charges which they are up front about. There is nothing indicating what the poster found lacking in the code, the building, or the environment.

So, what aspect of the code did you find lacking? How about the building and the environment? How easy or difficult was it for you to get a new character created and understand what steps you should take next? Lacking in imagination how? Give me an example.

The impression I get here is that only one kind of mud is valid. The kind that is free and that works the way the old muds do requiring that players be experienced in old style mud environments in order to try out new games. You have a limited insulated playerbase and a limited pool of builders and coders and all compete to get the same individuals to switch games and play/build for you instead.

This site from your perspective is supposed to be your personal playground for doing so. Anyone with an offering that doesn't fit your preconcieved ideas about how a mud is supposed to be set up is attacked.

My perception is that there is a definite prejudicial elitism going on here. If your games are so all fired great then you wouldn't have to put other people's games down in order to get players for your games.

Heck the fact that some games are FREE give them a huge advantage over commercial muds. People should be swarming to the free muds if on top of being free they are also so much better! When something is free, word of mouth advertising generally attracts a lot of people. After all, it's free.

The line that "well they can afford to advertise" doesn't fly. I am sure that does contribute to the fact that they have 10 thousand members, but free ought to be able to get you a hundred players which seems to be about what you can support anyway. Belonging to this list is "advertising" but instead of using it as such many of you come across as disgruntled creators with games so lousy you can't get enough players even though the games are free.

When I see the smaller free muds attacking the more popular muds, what I see is games that can't get players on the merits of their game so they have to slander others.

Top of the forum discussions are either about suggesting the P2P muds are unethical for daring to create commercial muds or threads about funny websides and word association which can be amusing but have nothing to do with mudding.

Look to yourselves for why you are having trouble attracting players. Insular elitism, referring, even in jest, to inexperienced people who want to try mudding as idiots isn't very inviting. To suggest that someone is lazy because they don't want to spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to get to the point where they can start playing is ridiculous.

I can see why free games would not want to take the trouble to create pre-configured clients, or have the patience to help new players OOC to grasp both the technical and theoretical aspects of roleplaying from scratch. But then don't turn around and whine that you can't get enough new players because of those nasty commercial muds. If your interface and introduction is aimed at experienced mudders, then that is all you will get.
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