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Old 01-11-2012, 06:16 AM   #9
Erisine
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Join Date: May 2011
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Re: "Planned" RP or Pure Immersion?

The failure rate of RP Muds isn't so much due to the RP theme, or the "irritating" proper RP, but rather due to another collection of reasons. I can meet your statement and raise you another one - most non-RP combat MUDs also sputter and die.

Some of the reasons that RP Muds fail include (but aren't limited to):
+ Poor choice of modern codebases. Most up-to-date codebases are not well suited for "proper RP" games; the ones that are available are poorly extendable, or were released into the wild with an air of cynicism, loaded with bugs, poor documentation, and all the fury of a group of developers who couldn't agree on anything. In fact, some of the newer codebases have actually been pulled from the public because one or two developers had their panties in a twist. Keep in mind the famously draconian licensing.

+ Poor staffing. You see this in about every failed MUD, but there it is. Many of your existing or new RP MUDs have staffs that are actually splinter groups from other RP MUDs.

+ Sharp growth curve preventing sustainability. A combat MUD has one advantage to an RP MUD: you can develop the game in any way you choose, and there are naturally plenty of things to do for a solo player. In a RP MUD, a lot of the action depends on there being enough players already online to engage you. It's infamously difficult to go from 0 to 15 players within a year for ANY MUD, little less go from 0 to 30+ in under a week.

+ Sharp learning curves and poor interfaces. Again, this is something that will eat away at ANY MUD. We need fresh blood in the MUD universe, as our staple pool of players is aging and juggling their own careers and families, and we are no longer on the 'cutting edge' of programming (so newbie programmers will bypass our community completely in favor of things like mobile development). This means we have to learn to cater to a new decade, and we haven't quite done that yet.



I responded to this because your opinion of "proper RP" is that it's irritating and negative, and you've connected that to game failure rates. Everyone has a type of game that they enjoy, and in this case, the various types of RP games are basically sub-genres of MUDs. This is like saying "proper sci-fi" is irritating, and that must be why Syfy changed its name, cancelled all its good scifi shows, and put wrestling up in its prime-time slots. Yeah. Sure, that's why they did it. Point is, some people like it, some people don't, and there's games for everybody here and we need to start cooperating more.


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To the original topic:

I never cared for Iron Realms games. I've boycotted them ever since the 'CEO' showed how much of a bigoted, narrow-minded arsehole he is several years ago after he went on an unprovoked crusade against religious players on these very forums. (Sorry, everyone has a right to their opinion, but as a CEO you need to have better sense than to not go on a tirade against a portion of your own customer base.) I also don't care for their pay-for-perks model, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

And yeah, the mandatory tutorials were brutal. <.<

I didn't feel immersed in IRE games, though. Sometimes the writing wasn't very consistent, but the biggest problem for me was that the RP was TOO laid-back. For the same reason that some people find "proper RP" irritating, I find half-hearted virtual cosplay equally irritating. If I wanted a world that was that open to interpretation or free, I'd go back to playing in chatrooms. :/ Meh. To each their own.
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