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Old 01-28-2008, 06:36 PM   #8
Tezcatlipoca
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 46
Tezcatlipoca is an unknown quantity at this point
Re: How not to be still-born

I see what you're saying, certainly. What I define as success is much different than what you do, given that your project is at a completely different point. My definition of success currently (it will certainly change as things move along) is that it manages to get to the point where players can play and have fun on it consistently. My definition requires that I manage to convince at least one or two other people (the more the merrier up to a point) to join with me on the project (how, is the main point of the discussion), so that development can continue at a consistent rate that is rapid enough to allow those players to come on before I'm old and gray(er). Yours might instead include a minor clause that is to try and keep people from asking for positions because it's annoying, or at least find some easy way to filter them out so that only the ones that can provide some measure of quality work that can improve your project get through.

However, I disagree with your example because I think it's a bit misleading (beyond the point that I think it's also a bit exaggerated). I'm not asking people how they stay in business once they have a large productive place, nor am I asking how they're *currently* continuing to be "successful" in their present state. I'm asking how they managed to successfully *start* and not fail. This would be the equivalent--in an equally exaggerated example--of the would-be entrepreneurial burger fellow not walking up to a manager of a single McDonalds location and asking how McDonalds operates and how he can apply that to his much less significant burger stand, but instead this fellow successfully contacting the *original* owner and creator of McDonalds, and asking him or her how he or she got *started*, which more than likely was from an origin quite similar to this fellow's own.

From some of the responses I'm guessing as originally posted that there isn't any “true” set of answers, although the feed-back so far has been helpful. But I think the question kind of grinds down to, in a "The Beginning" situation, where does one go to find those with the abilities to assist on a project, and then how does one convince others to assist on that project they previously never heard of and/or did not care about. This leads into one of your other points I think Newworld. While those people are obviously out there (you mentioned you get at least one a week, even if we can't gauge their actual capacity), I have no idea where to find them, or when I do how to convince them that it's in their interests to come on board, since as you pointed out, I don't have a large established and already successful Mud.
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