[SnowTroll]

RPI players claim to hate staff control and staff running things, but that's not entirely honest. Players want attention, recognition, and to be unique and special, not just to muck around in the sandbox with everyone else, using the same things everyone else has to play around in the sand. When mud administration is involved, special powers, items, commands, scenery, world-changes, and whatever else can happen, not readily available to normal players. Sure, a mud can give all of this to normal players, but then the normal players are all just decorating and messing around with their tools, yearning for the mud administration to come along and do something even more special. The second a regular player just like you can do something, it becomes normal and unspecial. I'm not going to run to participate in a player-driven plot if I have the exact same abilities to run the same or a similar plot tomorrow and can change or unchange the world however I see fit.

I played this sandbox-style mud-mush hybrid for a bit awhile back. The game's really set up for player-run RP. Players make their own rooms and objects, as needed, to facilitate whatever they plan on having around to interact, and can change, destroy, or make new things whenever they need to. And they custom design every one of their character's attacks/abilities (i.e. the damage you do is based on a stat, but you write the text, so from an RP standpoint, you can have whatever special abilties are appropriate). So in essence, every player is sort of a mini-builder/staff, free to set up and change the mud however they'd like to run an RP plot. Additionally, every player was allowed to have an alternate "storyteller" type character, who has quasi-imm abilities to make room echoes, restricted areas (for people currently participating in the plot being run), mobs for people to fight and interact iwth, and see the skills/stats of other players (who give him permission), so the guy running the plot could, for example, send a special private echo about something only people with acute hearing noticed. I think this mud, as great and flexible as all of the features are, still hovers at about 3 people who play it. Most players don't want to be builders and storytellers. They want a game that's easy to get into and play, with active staff that recognizes their awesome rp and gives them speical stuff nobody else gets. Then, they complain that they're bored the rest of the time waiting around for the mud administration to make special things happen, and when the administration does do something, they complain that they didn't have enough control as a player over how things went.