Professional vs Hobbyist
 

EDIT BY XERIHAE: In the thread "What is free?" KaVir wrote the following in response to a post by Threshold:

Xerihae - Seemed like the easiest place to start off this debate (and give me somewhere to move posts too!) so I hope you will all continue here.

THE LOGOS POST BEGINS HERE:

The Olympics seem to manage pretty well with clearly distinguishing between the two in most sports. It's not that complicated.

--matt

Re: What does "Free" Mean?
 

I tend to agree, especially regarding the point that customer service, technical prowess, speed of response, hardware resources, and professionalism are what players ask about, not compensation. I'd have trouble classifying our game as either-- our staff derive zero income from the MUD, but they're nearly all full-time computer programmers, network administrators, etc., and the collective average workload of just our Implementors is equivalent to a few full-time employees.

Possibly worth discussing in another thread, though at this point it seems to be merely theatrics and distraction. At least in our own experience, we're very frequently asked by players whether they'll have to spend money to compete (and other things included in the current questions, such as codebase, PK, RP, etc.), but I'm not sure I've been asked about my personal compensation even once.

Re: What does "Free" Mean?
 

Valg, you are grossly underestimating the value players put on knowing the admins have a vested, financial stake in making sure the game they play is stable and continues to operate into the distant future.

I imagine the reason you are not asked about it is because you run a hobby mud, your players already know it is a hobby, and thus there is no point in asking you about it.

But the extreme majority of gamers have voted with their feet and their wallets, and they prefer playing games where the operators' jobs depend on that game continuing to exist. It is simply safer to put one's faith in another person's self interest than their good intentions.

Re: What does "Free" Mean?
 

Players care that the game is stable and will continue to operate. I don't think the players particularly care about whether or not any money becomes salary.

KaVir's examples above (e.g., one untrained guy operating out of his house for a middling income, vs. a team of people who run a game in their spare time) are illustrative of why. Games run for profit fold their tent all the time when profits aren't meeting expectations-- your argument is a double-edged sword. You might not toss away Threshold when it's your sole income, but then again you might axe it in a heartbeat if things go south and you can't afford to do it the way you're set up to do it.

The best evidence of stability is stability. Providing dates of operation and related information covers that well enough in my opinion. A '100% free' game which has been running for over a decade is very likely to continue running. A commercial game founded this month may or may not last through December.

Re: What does "Free" Mean?
 

Actually, it's no longer cut-and-dry. To quote from Wikipedia:
And particularly these days, especially in software where we have companies (and most MUDs) running on an operating system where the developers are not directly paid for their contributions (though granted, they are mostly software professionals), I think the term is getting very blurred.

Re: What does "Free" Mean?
 

Huh, guess I am not up to date on the Olympics. Thanks for the correction.

--matt

Re: What does "Free" Mean?
 

Of course they do. That is precisely what gives them some actual faith and confidence that the game will be around. Relying on someone's self interest (if the game dies, they are unemployed) is a lot safer than just hoping some random guy will choose to keep paying for hosting, hardware, and devoting his free time to the game.

Well, I don't know about those examples, but they sound pretty ridiculous and absurd. I'm talking about the real world, and real examples of real games, not some absurdly hypothetical situations that aren't relevant to the discussion.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

My own personal opinion on this is that, though I doubt it's intentional, this is another issue that could be used to "ghetto-ize" a section of MUDs. By describing all games in these terms I think it's possible a lot of players would be turned off MUDs without paid staff because of the often-negative connotations of the words "amatuer/hobbyist" when used to compare to "professional".

To be honest I fail to see why this is an issue. Surely it can be simply covered with the commercial/non-commercial distinction? If there are non-commercial games out there with paid staff then by all means put me right here!

Also, having a paid staff is still not an indicator of quality as far as I'm concerned. I know some damn good MUD admins who do it as a "hobby", and I've met one or two who are paid who I wouldn't even give the time of day to because their skills are questionable and their conduct more so. I'll concede that someone with a vested financial interest in the game has a greater motivation to do well, but best intentions etc!

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

That's possible. I think it's a useful and meaningful distinction, though, and it allows someone performing a search to say "if I'm going to play a MUD with money involved, I want to at least get full-time admins out of the deal", which seems to me just as valid as

I don't think it's entirely fair to require detailed disclosure of revenue structure from commercial MUDs without giving them a chance here and there to tout what you get for your money.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

In that case, why not "Paid/Volunteer Staff" rather than the "Professional/Hobbyist" distinction?

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

*sigh* Because like every other check box we could ever attempt on here, people will just check what they've justified themselves into being.

For example, if you have players who are "Paid" by working for credits in the game, are they paid or volunteer? It could go either way depending on what the admins feel would be "best" for their mud in the listing.

We already see that people have issues with the money-changing hands vs. no-money changing hands distinction. I can't see how everyone wouldn't play around with this, too.

There's obviously perceived benefits in just about every check list there is. I, for one, do not believe that "Hobbyist" is a negative term at all, yet a lot of people on this site obviously feel that it ranks them beneath professional. I'm a hobbyist coder, but I'm a professional writer. I happen to do both on a mud. What does that make it?

Am I the only one confused?

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

I think there's a great deal of value in professionalism -- I don't know that I feel the same about professional. I've seen pay to play games that I've considered very badly run and/or which were short-lived. I do agree that a mud that is pay to play may be more accountable to the players. The players have consumer power and can leave, but so do people playing free muds - they can move elsewhere, and I don't think any game admin is happy to see that sort of migration.

I do, though, have a bias. Our game would be considered hobbyist, but the staff that have or are working on it over the past decade and a half include people with credentials from Microsoft, Apple, Sony, and more, as well as professional writers, editors, and game designers. We have formalized processes for creating new game content, incorporating player feedback, making code changes, etc. We track turnaround time for answering player requests, and work to be professional in our replies to player queries. (I've talked more about this in detail .) We're considerably more professional than some of the pay-to-plays I've seen come and go.

I do think that very few people want to play a mud run as a hobby by some goofy social outcast in their basement, rife with favoritism, which seems to be the image of the non-pay-to-play mud that gets waved around some. But I also think it's possible to have a mud that is run in a professional manner without money changing hands.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

I think that's why it's so very hard to categorize anything here. When we say Professional vs. Hobbyist, are we talking about how the game is run? Are we talking about attitudes? Are we talking about systems? Are we talking about commercial vs. free? Are we talking about staff being paid/volunteer? Are we talking about running a mud being a full-time job, part-time job, or flat out hobby?

Honestly, I'm not sure I agree that the Hobbyist mud has the "social outcast basement-living dude", and honestly, isn't there an appeal to some dude living in his basement being a creative genius and us getting play in his head? Seriously, a lot of the hobbyist muds are huge, have been running for years, and have a large player-base. I'd play them before some of the professional muds simply because I like their style better, or I like their gameplay better.

Still, I was really sad when my hobbyist mud shut down and had a pwipe only to open up 6 months later with my favorite guild closed. I guess that could have happened on a professional mud as well, though I haven't encountered it yet. It all depends on who's in charge and on how they operate their business, doesn't it? Unfortunately, unlike the money vs. no-money issue, this one is really, really, really hard to gauge or determine.

[P.S. San, your link seems to be broken. I'd really like to read more on that topic, so could you check it? Thanks!]

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

There are two sets of 'http://' in that link. Delete one set and it works fine.

PS. good article.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

I got a wiki link to HTTP. Is that the right article?

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Fixed link:

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Whoops, sorry about that, thank you for fixing it, Valg.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Thank you for starting a new thread on this, I've lost track of the other.

I would be disappointed to see a search option which included the word professional. In the same way I am not in favor of a game receiving a rating labeled "A" just because it is free, I would not like to see a game labeled "professional" just because it earns money. I've seen my fair share of inexpert management on pay games as well.

These are the connotations that are being introduced here and I think it would be an insult to the intelligence of those in favor of these distinctions to say it's completely unintentional. Given a choice between "professional" and anything else, anything else becomes UNprofessional. Amateur. Dabbler. Novice.

As was said, if the point is to help the prospective player to determine that a game is stable, they can look at the creation date, the online status, and if they think it factors, the commercial option when that comes in. If that's not the point... then I feel that a "professional" distinction in the mud search is only going to serve to make big games bigger. I can't fault anyone for that, but if this "community" is anything more than a cutthroat venue where we're all out to push our own interests and absolutely nothing more - I think we need to be more generally considerate of the tone and implication of the things we're suggesting. To sum up - keep the language neutral.

Regarding all the suggestions in this thread and the other, I'd like to share my mother's most sage advice with a KISS. Keep it simple. As (mostly) devs, you'll be aware of the concept of value for time spent on a project. I don't think adding another half-dozen options to the advanced search is going to be incredibly useful to new players. If you're simply looking for a way to ensure that your game comes up at the top of a page in a search, I've found a for you. My two cents and then some.

Ferreh

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

The problem here is that we are talking about all these things, since those terms are very ambiguous, and are intentionally used by some people to muddy the waters. The reason I can say this with some confidence, is the following quote, from an earlier thread on the subject 'Free' versus 'Commercial':

()

Which, as you can see, is a bit more transparent about the motives for bringing it up than this one, from the current 'What does "Free" Mean?' thread :

Now to the actual question:

However the dictionaries define words like 'professional', 'amateur' and 'hobbyist', there will always be the underlying implication that the 'Amateur/hobbyist developer' is less competent at what they are doing than the 'Professional developer'.

My own interpretation of the word 'professional' is 'competent at their job' rather than 'being paid for their job', but that doesn't mean that I am unaware of the underlying derogatory character of the secondary meaning.

When I describe a Builder as 'professional', I mean that they can be depended on to deliver within a reasonable time, and also to deliver high quality work - as opposed to the numerous twinks, who just call themselves Builders because they are hoping for instant power, and who never deliver more than a couple of poor room descs and overpowered objects, before they fade out. Whether they get paid for building or not is entirely irrelevant. (As it happens builders hardly ever get paid, even by commercial Muds, but that's another story).

I consider myself a 'professional Builder', based on the fact that I have produced over 50 zones, some of them very large and most of them very complex. There are some Builders in 4D that I regard as better than myself, based partly on their language skills. (Some of those are professional writers. I am not an English major myself, but I am certainly not an 'amateur Builder' either).

Many 'Cutting edge' Text Muds are developed by 'professional' programmers who have Text Muds as a hobby. (KaVir's GodWars II is only one example of this).

Most Staff members on long established, serious 'free' Muds - including my own - are fully competent 'professional' computer programmers, network administrators, website designers, personnel administrators, writers etc. - often with full time, well paid jobs in their particular specialty. Whether they get a salary for working on a Mud or donate their time freely has got nothing to do with the quality of the work they produce. Calling the ones that donate their time 'amateurs' or 'hobbyists' is not an adequate description of their competence.

Many senior Staff members on well established, serious 'free' Muds - including my own - spend far more than 20 hours a week on line, working on the Mud. They donate their time for free, out of love for the Mud. Does that make them any less 'professional' in their actions than the paid Staff on commercial Muds?

I have seen some very 'unprofessional' conduct by imms - and even imps - in commercial Muds as well as in free ones. It seems to be a question of personality rather than salary.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Molly makes several excellent points.
I agree that the word "professional" is insufficient to have the meaning that would be helpful to potential players. [Kavir also makes several good points on this matter.] The goal for this specific selection is to give new players, who are probably unfamiliar with many of our names, some information about the work experience of the mud's staff AND the business/non-business nature of the mud. So I would propose that the "professional" category be broken down into some experience, education and lifespan measures of the staff and mud.

I think the main problem is that the terms "professional" and "amateur" do not pinpoint the real issue(s) here. So lets give measures of the things that really characterize quality.

A mud can identify itself as one thing per section. A player should be able to select multiple boxes when doing searches.

Education:
[ ] No member of the staff has a BS or higher in computer science/programming.
[ ] At least one member of the staff has a BS or higher in computer science/programming.
[ ] More than half of the staff have a BS or higher in computer science/programming.
[ ] Every member of the staff has a BS or higher in computer science/programming.
Number of staff (admin plus builders):
[ ] 1
[ ] 2
[ ] 3
[ ] 4
[ ] 5
[ ] 6-10
[ ] 11-15
[ ] 16+
Administrating or Building Experience (This is for the one staff member with the most experience on a mud)
[ ] Less than one year
[ ] 1-2 years
[ ] 3-5 years
[ ] 6-10 years
[ ] 10+ years
Lifespan (Period of time mud has been online [post-alpha])
[ ] Less than one year
[ ] 1-2 years
[ ] 3-5 years
[ ] 6-10 years
[ ] 10+ years

Yes, there are some problems with this. There are official members of Alatia's staff who had not logged on in over 5 years. Do those guys 'count'? I certainly do not think so. But think of an unscrupulous admin who is filling out the checklist, and that absentee guy/girl has the most eduction and experience of all the staff; I bet he counts that person as staff AND uses that person's education and experience to fill out the checklist. But there will always be accountability issues. But I must say, if this forum is proof of anything, it is that people don't 'get away' with false claims too often. These three categories along with the Payment model category should give the player a good idea what kind of mud it is and at what stage in its development it is.

Detah@Arcania
Ruler of 2D

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Again, this isn't really a useful category to me. Whether or not the people running a MUD have degrees in any of those subjects doesn't mean the game is going to be any better run than one where the staff don't have the degrees. Plus I don't know how it is in the US these days, but here in the UK I know people with degrees like the ones you mention above that still have problems with the most basic computer skills and I wouldn't waste the time of an interview on for a MUD staff position.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

I don't think degrees in computer science have a meaningful correlation to MUD quality-- I'd argue that it's just as valuable to have writers, HR/management experts, an artist or two, actors, and other professions, especially in a roleplaying environment. You need some level of computer expertise to keep things running and implement new features, but a degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to provide that.

The last two categories strike me as especially irrelevant-- if a commercial MUD hires an accountant, does that somehow affect that 'education' level of the staff negatively? Do you really want only computer scientists writing your areas? It'll turn into TRON, people! :)

(Actually, some of my favorites on our (fantasy genre) game were written by computer scientists. Only joking!)

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

I personally do not care if the admin (or any staff member) has a MS in compsci. But some potential players might use that as one more characteristic of a "professional" mud. That is the real issue. I think that is what some people are contesting here. I am just trying to find some solutions to appease everyone. I do believe that there are solutions that will accommodate everyone. Maybe I havent put my finger on it, but there are many options here. I don't think the 'prof' vs 'amateur' route is going to resolve anything. Not only are the words too loaded, but the variance within each is huge. It doesnt provide the mud searcher with useful information.

I am an amateur admin. Im an intermediate level builder. My mud is still in alpha for goodness sakes. Most of these issues are irrelevant to me. But I can definitely understand how and why commercial muds, would want to have several categories which declare their excellence in several different ways, including categories for number of admin (In my experience free muds have far fewer staff) and experience of staff. That seems fair to me. More importantly, we want to give the right signals to the mudsearchers with these categories. If we have 6 different sections for various 'quality' measures, then players can choose for themselves which issues are important to them in determining quality. Maybe players do not care about education level. Maybe that is NOT correlated with quality. Maybe the number of BAs in english actually matters. I dont know. If the player doesnt care about the BSs in compsci, then they can NOT select that box and it will search ALL muds on that category. But I am in favor of letting the searcher decide among multiple alternatives, as opposed to having just one dichotomous (and vague) category representing the real issue (quality).

Detah@Arcania

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Agreed.
I think the best action is to just drop the entire professional/hobbyist suggestion, since it was obviously not made in good faith.

'What is Quality in a game?' is a real hard thing to quantify, but is probably worthy of its own thread.

Just as I think that 'What does fair mean to you?' is worthy of its own thread, even if neither of the subjects will result in any new checkboxes for the search engine.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

There are a few things, though, that relate to the "professionalism" of a game:So without getting into the people so much (paid/unpaid/education/etc.), some of the above could be important criteria. Having games go down, have to reset a week back, etc. can be pretty annoying.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

I like those system-related measures, stated by Zhiroc. I would also add to that some measure for playerfile backup frequency.

[] playerfiles are backed up daily
[] playerfiles are backed up weekly
[] playerfiles are backed up monthly
[] playerfiles are backed up bimonthly
[] playerfiles are backed up semi-annually
[] playerfiles are backed up annually
[] playerfiles are backed up instantly (eg. resides on a RAID setup)

or some similar groupings.



EDIT: Ive been told my RAID comment is not accurate for 'backups' per se. I retract that example.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

These cover a fraction of the professionalism of a game, all but one related to the physical stability of the server.

Does there need to be? If there does, is that a good sign or bad? Open to debate.

How far do you take that? I know of at least one very high profile MUD that thought their backups were being taken daily but their provider at the time hadn't tested any backups and they weren't good. I know of another down for a week while an entire city was without power (Hurricane Charley, ouch).

You would also need:
- What is your retention schedule for backups?
- How often are backups taken off-site? Where?
- How often do you do a test restore of backups?

Also valuable, but shared/dedicated only goes so far.
- "Do you have a written security practice for your server?".
- "Do you do your own penetration testing?"
- "What is your disclosure policy on any successful hacks that may occur?"
- "How do you protect yourselves from DDOS attacks?"

System operators don't care about your mud. Your mud could be frozen and they don't care if the server looks healthy. Exceptions might be the hosting companies that specialize in MUDs such as Wolfpaw. Needs to be elaborated:
- Test the MUD can be reached.
- Test the pfile checksums are all intact (you do have checksums right?)
- Can you login?
- Is its heartbeat (or equivalent) running?

The number of bps isn't really relevant without knowing the type of MUD, average online, etc. More useful for a player to know about latency, rate of connection "drops" (often ignored by hosting companies as it doesn't affect web sites if links drops but can immediately reconnect). A non-ANSI MUSH needs much lower bandwidth for 100 players than an ANSI/RIP mud with color overhead map feeding a custom made java client.

As for h/w failures, you could argue that the person running the mud out of their basement on a cable modem is in a better position than anyone here assuming they have another machine in the house somewhere.

Not trying to give you a hard time, as a CISSP (its a security cert) this stuff is interesting to me, but in terms of judging a MUD's professionalism this seems to have a massive bias towards availability over everything else that comes into play in the day to day running of the MUD itself.

As with most of the other recent discussions, we could add dozens of categories and there'd still be missing information.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Agreed.

Stability, uptime and regular and frequent backups, especially of playerfiles, are important factors to players, and could be valid additions to the search engine.

Those factors are not exclusive to commercial Muds however.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

The thrust of my points run into a few things:

1. Availability: having a data center, T1 lines, climate control all relate to the professionalism of the hardware. Maybe not so much the network bandwidth, but DSL is not something to be running a game through. Imagine a game where the owner started a software download through a small pipe...

2. Recovery: when failures/disasters happen, can you get back up? True, backups fail when you need them a lot :) But still, tell me you're trying... Having alternate h/w or guaranteed replacement means it's not down a week, or a month, or until you get enough donations to buy a new box :)

3. Problem resolution: Having a wizard/imm around is important to do conflict resolution, rather than having to let it fester til the morning. Or to reset a bugged quest. Or... etc. Having on-site operators lets you get the system rebooted if it's hung. I've been on games when it's down all night when that happened.

I doubt that any of this would be useful as a searchable criteria. But it sure would be nice to see what a game says about how far they've planned for it.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

See now Zhiroc, I would expect your criteria for ANY game I played, whether professional or hobby - with the possible exception of item #1 - though having your own T-3 (T-1 is SO five minutes ago) would be a bonus.

If *I* was doing a search for a "professional" game, I'd be looking to see if it was run in a professional manner. Personally I don't give two cahoots if the admin had his own data center, or had photographic memory and didn't need no stinkin data center. Or, if he simply put all his data on an old 5.25 floppy in a wordpad file every day. As long as he behaves himself like a mature adult when he runs his game.

If a game had everything you listed, but the owner sitebanned people he didn't like, simply because he didn't like them, I would think it about as UNprofessional as it gets. If it had everything, and the admin invited everyone to his house for a gathering each year, but told three players they couldn't come because they weren't good looking enough, I'd think that's pretty damned UNprofessional.

On the other hand, if he was the most dignified guy in the world, with so much integrity you could smell the roses from a mile away, sunk his heart and soul into the game, spent every spare moment of every day on improvements, was fair to everyone, at all times, worked the soup kitchen in town on Sundays after church every day, but his game was chock-full of typos, the code was loaded with bugs, and he used a hosting service that couldn't give him access except on alternate Tuesdays and every Wednesday between 3 and 6 in the morning, I'd consider THAT unprofessional too. Even if the guy was a top-notch professional coder for MicroSloth.

I want to know if the game runs. I want to know if it runs well enough to be worth playing. I want to know that it's well-written. I want to know that there's someone available to check the code, make improvements, and keep an eye out for disruptive players. I want to know that I don't have to pay any money to get anything from within the game, BUT that if I wanted to, they would allow me to send a little something to help support the costs of running it. I would also want to know that the coders and admin know what they're doing - whether they have a B.S., or if they simply started coding or being in charge of their cubscout softball team when they were 12 years old and progressed naturally until they were experts at it (coding or admining). I don't care if they code for a living. I don't care that they have their Masters. I -do- care that they behave like adults, listen to the players' concerns, provide appropriate and polite feedback when and if necessary or requested, and don't arbitrarily siteban someone for something someone else claimed happened, without even asking for the bannee's side of the story - simply because the tattleteller is a buddy, or a friend of a friend, or sent her some peppermint schnapps one year, or is a fellow staff member.

To me, THOSE are the things that mark a professional from a non-professional. And THOSE are the things I would use as criteria for professional/non-professional, if I was interested in actually searching for new games to play.

Re: Professional vs Hobbyist
 

Very true.

This is true as well. There proof is only in going to the mud after they've checked that they are the biggest, baddest, most competant mud in the universe and you get to find the truth.