Re: Windows Issues

From: Daniel A. Koepke (dkoepke@circlemud.org)
Date: 01/03/01


On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Patrick Dughi wrote:

> Least, I think it was muddev.. my mind is slipping lately

It was.

> I usually pay visits to most muds that even briefly catch my
> attention, just a 'look and see' sort of thing, and sad to say that
> the majority of circles fail in one of several ways:
>
> [snip descriptions of StockMUD, HuhMUD, and XeroxMUD (no, not Lambda)]

We're basically talking about signal-to-noise ratio for muds, and I don't
believe it's something that should specifically concern us more than it
should any others.  A high number of "substandard" products (i.e., noise)
is endemic.  Bad television outnumbers the good; bad books outnumber the
good; bad movies outnumber the good; bad ideas outnumber the good.  You
might see a seemingly disproportionate number of bad CircleMUDs (depending
upon your particular standards) out there.  I think at least part of it is
natural.  And the rest is the same thing we see with web pages: if it's
easy enough to put together and easy enough to publish, a lot of people
will publish crap.  So it's at least partly due to CircleMUD being easy
enough to use for beginners.  This is a side effect and, IMHO, an
acceptable one because there's some people that have good ideas and manage
to put together a good Mud only because the server was easy enough for
them to use.  Anyway, the truly terrible muds tend to extinguish in weeks,
a handful stick around and about 60% of those, I would venture, get better
as administrators stick with it and figure things out.

I think, if we ignored the rapid influx of bad muds, we would find that
there is the fairly standard proportion of signal-to-noise here as there
is elsewhere.  Preparation is easy to skip if you're anxious and you don't
have to do anything but take a few hours to get it up.  Once the novelty
of that wears off, the administration generally shows its true promise or
dies off.

> ... are actually causing the vast populations of potential players to
> skip my mud, simply because it's the same brand as theirs?

Maybe.  I don't think so.  On the surface it seems like a fairly logical
assertion.  Beneath that, I doubt its validity.  People, if they're
interested in trying something, will try it.  If they have a bad initial
experience with one element of a vast array, they'll probably try another
element and another and another, until they find something that hooks
them.  Despite being fairly cynical, I tend to believe people are capable
enough of anology to realize that giving up on an entire class of Muds
because of one bad experience with a particular implementation, design, or
genre is pretty ridiculous.  It'd be like someone giving up games based on
any of the Quake "engines" because of Daikatana.

> I guess it's something I ought to think about.

Maybe.  Maybe not.  It's not something I'm ever going to concern myself
with.  I don't do this for the good of the world, anyway.

-dak

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