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Old 06-28-2010, 12:52 PM   #13
Parhelion
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Name: Sarah
Location: Tempe, AZ
Home MUD: Ethos
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Re: Why I Left Your MUD- A Newbie's Persepctive

I think this is a marvelous point, and one I've toted across many games and experiences. From my time as both a homeless MUDder, a player, and as a working staff member, some MUD administrations appear to "jump the gun." They want to be successful so they start trying to recruit players long before they are ready.


The thing that bothers me the most is that there appears to very little integrity between MUD administrations. Now, this does not apply to ALL administrations -- there are a lot of MUDs out there whose staff works their butts off and they don't cut corners. But the bulk of MUDs try to throw as large a net as they can possibly throw, all in the hopes of snagging new players.

I think the tactic that causes the most problems, and is the most visible, are MUDs that advertise themselves as RP-Enforced or RP-Intensive (note: this is not a signal to begin debate on the definition of terms). I can see why some MUDs do this, as it is a way to attract more individuals of a particular play-style (for example, if you want more RPers on your RP-Encouraged game without alienating your non-RPing pbase, you just tag your game as RP-Enforced). Others do it because they honestly think their style of game is "RP-Enforced", without realizing that from the perspective of new players, it doesn't look that way -- and that is where the fighting and ill feelings begin.

Being so dishonest in game listings is harmful.

1.) It hurts the game listing - because of the sheer number of dishonest and LAZY MUD owners, the search engines we have available to us are so unreliable that there's almost no point to them. The last listing site that even got close to having a reliable database was RPIMud, but that site was made to cater to a very narrow selection of games.

2.) It hurts the community of games that ARE truthful about their stats. To be quite honest, I would love to try out new RP games, but I have no intention of wading through the 200 or so results that pop up under "RP Enforced" when I know only about 30 of them actually have the quality I'm looking for. The rest are just people who like to blur the lines. This goes for ANY searchable term (player numbers, CODEBASE, genre, etc).

3.) And lastly it hurts YOUR game, because you have new players who come in, see a bunch of stuff they don't like, and then they leave. They remember your game -- and they don't come back. Even if, at a later time, you fix your game to be just as advertised.


Now, that all said, the SECOND thing that bothers me is the attitude the community has towards cheating and dishonesty. It seems like it's reached such a point that there's no reason to even argue against it anymore. So what, this MUD is making money off a Diku codebase. So what, that MUD is using Yet Another Stolen IP (Star Wars, Tolkien, any anime, Mass Effect, Dune, Wheel of Time, Pern, you name it, it's been stolen and made into a MUD). So what, that game says it's free-to-play but it's pay-for-perks and/or subscription-based. And lastly, and not least, the game that ballot-stuffs on listing sites like TMS and then pretend like it's a totally legitimate way to recruit new players (you know who you are).
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