Mud/Era Improvement Discussion

Recently on OOC there was a small chat session regarding ways to advance the Era, the concepts to what stalls an era in general and how to get more people logged in overall on a daily basis. Lets discuss it on the forums since some people might have missed that conversation (though not many people read the forums, which is one of my suggestions below). Lets try to keep a lot of the IC info for this era to a minimum if we can. I’m going to list a couple of ideas/opinions as to what I think would keep things on the topic. This is in no particular order:

1) The forums and the wiki. The old forums, and before the wiki was locked due to spam, we seemed to get more traffic on the site. Posting more information on the forums, website and wiki and allowing it to be indexed by search engines, will help get more hits in general searches. Also, when people are involved with things like posting pages on the wiki, they might feel more involved overall…especially if it’s pages about their characters or adventures. I think opening up the wiki again, maybe having some volunteer moderators to keep the place tidy, would help out. Also, posting more information, announcements and so on on the forums…Add a mudconnector/whatever other site voting link on the website so people can easily click it to lead them to voting to help promote the mud.

2) More staff. Being a staff member is a fairly tedious and thankless job that often leads to those people playing even less once they take on these duties. Unfortunately, its a necessary evil. The problem though is that many of our staff members have all but disappeared and the few that are around either don’t come around that frequently, or they’re just overwhelmed. Another issue is that some of those that are around, simply can’t do anything to help out due to needing to wait for others to show up to make that decision. The solution is to bring more staff in with short leashes, and casually advance them to more authority as they prove themselves. It’s become an ongoing joke that there’s no point in apping to start a new clan because the odds are that if you’re approved, it’ll be 3 months before the clan goes in and another 3 months to never, as far as when the base goes in….even if you write the descriptions. This is the same with developments also. This game can not work without staff presence on a consistent basis.

3) The argument continues to reign supreme between the two sides over how to get people more involved. One side says to just “man up” and go attack stuff and don’t worry over the possibility of getting killed. The other side wants another solution other than risking the time, energy, points, emotional attachment, etc of their character just to make things “interesting” for one small group of people for a few minutes. Being worried about losing your character has been an issue since D&D first hit table tops in the 70’s and 80’s. I think instead of shaming people for not risking their characters, we should figure out how to better compensate people for those characters and taking that risk. First, I think that a huge majority of the races are way too expensive for what you’re getting. There’s been arguments galore around worthless races and the unbalanced nature of seeing the same 3-5 races nonstop proves that. Second, I think the points earned for your character should have a higher cap. I’d suggest raising it from 3000 to 5000, that way even an Abyssin could possibly break even. Third, I’d suggest going back to how things supposedly use to be. IMMs giving out points rewards for good RP, taking chances on advancing your side’s cause (whatever that might be based on your RP), histories, character descriptions, armor descriptions, shop descriptions etc. There’s a ton of players that will say they get rewarded for that stuff all the time. I’ve been on LOTJ for 7 or 8 years now and never once have I been rewarded anything for RP, backgrounds, histories, it’s gotten to the point now that I fill in the bare minimum a lot of times because I’m the only one that really looks it over.

4) Suggestions on how to proceed for this era of future eras that become stagnant: The staff needs to listen to players, if the same complaint comes rolling in every day, there might be something to it. The players need to stop assuming that they have to wait on a specific signal by the staff to kick things off. As the Nike slogan says, just do it, if you succeed, watch as the pieces start to fall into place. Unfortunately, sometimes you won’t succeed. If this is the case, giving up and waiting on someone else to accomplish the task, or joining the other side, won’t solve anything. If you think that the other side is just way too strong and there’s no way to even get your foot in the door, talk to the staff and they might be able to coerce some of the other side into flipping to help push things along. You’d be surprised by how many people just want to be involved with something.

5) The pbase is always split into 4 groups in general. Major1, Major/Minor2, Engineer1, Engineer2. Why not break the monotony up? Why does there HAVE to be the same 4 slots almost every time? What can we do to change things up? We once had multi-clanning for when there was an alliance, but that still won’t change the 4 clan “norm”. And if we start adding in a 5th, 6th or 7th group, those groups become so small that they really are just one to two people with multiple characters.

This all boils down to the fact that most MUD communities consist of only a group of dedicated players who have been playing the game for a long time anymore. This has the unfortunate consequence of being very reluctant to accept changes to the status quo. Also with the advancements in MMO gaming, and a lot of them going either free to play or freemium, text-based games are slowly dying out. Some of the problems can be traced back to being the fault of the players or the staff, but for the most part it is just evolution. Plain and simple.

I agree for the most part with #3 but after how many months do you stop rewarding people for just hanging out in their clan base/hidden sector having meaningful RP about how they want to bring the Empire down and then doing nothing about it? This was a thing last timeline. Everyone insisted that the Rebellion was doing “all sorts of RP, you guys just don’t see it” except the timeline didn’t really progress until everyone in the Empire got bored and quit and I refused to keep making ships for the 3 people who stuck around.

There should be a guide for running clans that has a quota that must be filled monthly, or bad stuff happens…An example because I’m still butthurt over last timelines rebellion would be, a Rebellion must capture so many Imperials a month, or engage in a set number of conflicts that can be put into news stories, or they lose their hidden stuff. But not just quota’s for rebellions obviously, something could be put up for any kind of clan, with bad things happening when the quota is not filled.

#2: Players are allowed to build on the buildport. I’ve offered to code once last TL I think but of course they’d be a lot less likely to let some player get involved with that. Nevertheless, if people build, it takes some work off the shoulders of the staff we do have so they can do more of the rest of their generally thankless jobs.

#3: Take the risk. I usually get around 2k points per char as it is and I think I might have hit the cap once but only once. I’d love to get rewarded for going out and doing shit even with so many odds against me as I often do, and I’m hoping that maybe it’ll just show that I’m productive and let me get more apps approved. One thing I’ve noticed is it often only takes one person to actually go out and do stuff and all those people who’d rather duck out and hide and MAYBE support eventually take notice and start supporting you to the extent of some of them who don’t even have “good” levels to be going out and taking risks themselves start insisting you use them to go take risks.

Addendum edit to #3: I get that people can get all attached to their characters and I’ve seen a lot of people do some really dumb and illogical bullshit just for obviously purely OOC motivations of keeping their character alive. Consider this though, what’s the actual point of having your character alive if you refuse to let your character contribute anything?