Newbs building MUDs?

The guy makes the arguments for what goes wrong at a very high level with MMOG (Or MOO's for us old-timers). He makes some pretty interesting points which definately put things in perspective.

The paper's here.

It's pretty short. Discuss it amongst yourselves here.

-Kevlar

Favorite quotables:

Why not? Because they're all text. Newbies don't do text.

I am really suprised there has not been more commentary on this topic. I would wager a guess that people are not comfortable facing the facts this points out. I am especially interested in the portion on Permanent Death.

We do have Perma-death here, but we also have a 'save' feature in the form of clones. The more I have thought about it, the more I have come to the conclusion that we need to make cloning have MUCH more negative side effects. Particualarly, I think DCD needs to be so damn common it makes you want to gag. It is a simple tweek, that is to be sure. Just nudge a few numbers about in the code and voila, 1/3 clones result in you coming out of the tank with an extra arm and no penis.

Or at least a penis that is slowly rotting away as your faulty genetic code eats itself up.

(more neat quotes)

*It promotes role-play, because players aren't stuck with the same, tired old character the whole time.

*It validates players' sense of achievement, because a high-level character means a high-level player is behind it.

But that is a bit of an asside from the article.

Perhaps what we do NEED to do is shut down the Ideas forum. I hate to say that, because I love the forum, I love posting ideas, but Jman and Kev and the rest of us have enough trouble dealing with the ideas we have, let alone the ideas that get rehashed over and over on the ideas forum because nobody uses the search command before they hit @idea on-MOO.

I think I will have to track down this fellows book, it sounds interesting. I think we should also all sit down (the staff at least) and look at the features we have. See which are short-term bad, long-term good. And vice-versa. And you know. Change things as needed. Cull the bad genes, even when we like em for some reason…

Be nice to have some players read this topic, thanks again Kev.

I like what he said about Newbies though, its very true.. I would have expanded it a bit further and said that there is rarely a time when you get -just- one newbie.

They run in packs.  One person finds something cool, and they jump onto AIM and spam that bitch for an hour.  Then you have a group of newbies.. Except where as the normal players can handle -one- newbie.  They become frustrated with -group- of newbies on a whole.  (IE: For twinkish behavior, punctuation, mistaking the moo for a DBZ MUD..)

In getting frustrated, the players tend to push most, if not all the newbies away.  So another problem, is ways show newbies what the game is about, before they jump into it.

From my point of view, when I went through chargen the first time, I had -no- idea what to expect.  I also had no idea what skills were going to benifit me.  I didn't know who my character was going to be, because how could I choose, if I had no clue what the RP was like.   Maybe a couple of logs of RP, that have the names changed.. or something.  To show the newbs what RP is like.  Make it avalible during char gen.  The logs could be between a Judge and a Streetsam fighting for a fixers gear while TERRA agents and couriers watch.

Maybe not DCD, but something like.. if an NPC dies.. maybe for a week - two weeks, his stats are lowered.. have a coded system that does it..

So if an NPC dies a bunch of times in a short period of time, they are weaker then when they started.  But they slowly get back to where they were.

The fact is, Sindome has learning curve. Because us if its status a hybrid mud/moo it attracts a varietly of players. The mudder newbie generally expects to be set loose idea on to the streets, start kicking everything in sights ass, or maybe gets around to using some socials. THe moo newbie tries to figure out how to rp and how the environment functions. The complete newbie shits his pants and runs away. Then there is the sindomian…

The sindomian comes into this game without a clue, trying to become there current delusion of grandeur. They spend the next week or so sitting in The Drome begging for handouts because they have no idea where to start. Eventually, they're to live on the streets and have to find safe places to sleep. The visage of greatness becomes a street urchin, eventually dieing in the sewers when they get to curious.

I died over and over until I figured out how to survive in the mix, that accomplished I moved on to bigger and better things. I generally expect the same out of most newbies. Still you help them out when you can, because someones got to push them out of the nest.

Not many players cope well with dieing left and right on a perma-death mud.  Those that do generally move on in the game, those that don't generally quit. Fact imitates fiction here not much more to it. Nothing can really prepare a newbie for sindome except for informing him of the truth, they will die. Tell them to enjoy it while it lasts, get drunk...pick a fight...do some drugs. If they come in the expectation that they're gonna get a cool job and be the biggest badass ever, they'll just run away crying.

Maybe we need a newbie guide?

Help theme also is of help. There is a forum with an expanded content along these lines,  Some Tips For Everyone:

http://www.sindome.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/topic.cgi?forum=1&topic=205

(Damn that took a long time to find…too bad we don't have sticky topics. Thanks Johnny) In fact, if you read the little bi-lines under @who, it is apparently linked to.

Perhaps Jman and I can look into making it into a more fixed location, perhaps under 'Pay Data' as a web based resource.

(In case you can not find the above, scroll this webpage all the way to the top, and you see right beside the image that says 'SINDOME' there will be a bunch of words. You can click em.)

:shocked:

Maybe we need a newbie guide?

I don't think that's such a bad idea.
&yes, there is @newbie, and the whole goddamn BgBB that I'm wading my way through, during dull lectures (I read all of the New Game Features forum last Friday, for example).

But still, it doesn't really do justice to the, uh, 'wonder' that is Sindome.

Second time now I've gone through CharGen - and each time when it comes to assigning stat points, I've been totally stumped. This time less than the last, because I had a workable character in mind, but still - it's a tough choice to have to make when you have little to no idea about the world you're walking into.

The first time, I had some help with a couple of admins who happened to be lurking around, giving me ideas of feasible 'careers' that might be enjoyed in the Dome (&said "No, you can't just have two or three points in every category, you have to specialise!"), but to someone without that, it's pretty daunting.

Maybe, if a lot of what's in @newbie and on the thread Iga linked to was condensed into one place - perhaps the email that's sent out for character registration? (I'm trying to think of somewhere that's virtually crammed down the user's throat, rather than something in-game - but putting it online here could work too…) - that would hopefully ...minimise (never eliminate, of course), some confusion.

&no, I'm not just waltzing in here after a month of RP saying "Do this for me!", I'm actually putting my hand up and offering, as a new kid, to help out - to write this documentation.
Hell, it's gotta be a good way for me to learn too, right?

I'm thinking it could be packaged as, perhaps, "A Tourist's Guide to Withmore", including help for things IC as well as OOC (eg - treat all characters like real people... this is the command you use to talk etc)...
...maybe even "This is a good way to make money if you're starting out" - but I can see that might be considered IC...?

So yeah. Colour me a student with too much time on her hands, who's learning "How to write user manuals" and wants to use her powers for good.

(&heh, Riviera thought he wrote too much...)

Quote: from Spaze on 7:51 pm on Mar. 19, 2005[br]

who the big players are

This knowledge does not pass from one character to the next. You still have to learn the hard way who's big and who's not.

noobs don't neccessarily have to learn the hard way who the big players are…  that can come through asking others ICly about the player in question, or witnessing the player do something big.

but even then, they shouldn't think that dude is -the- badass just because he took out a whole mob of TERRA Agents.  because in a city so big, some other dude could easily come around and kick this guy's ass.

of course, some players will -always- act like they're the shit and be cocky, like they can take on everyone and everything just because they know their OOC stats are insanely high and can trump anybody else's stats.

(Edited by InsaneRadical at 9:21 pm on Mar. 19, 2005)

Quote: from InsaneRadical on 3:50 pm on Mar. 20, 2005

…noobs don't neccessarily have to learn the hard way who the big players are... �that can come through asking others ICly about the player in question, or witnessing the player do something big.

Quote: from Biohazard on 6:27 pm on Mar. 20, 2005

I didn't say you shouldn't be IC about it. Like say I create a new character now. I know just about all of the heavy hitters OOCly, but does that mean I'm not going to be IC about it?

*adds to notes*
(Does that need a new topic? What's the admin's view on this additional guide?)

I'm "a writer". I can remove bitterness from anything. :P

The simple act of finding out on your own without applying any knowledge gained from previous chars is the hard way to find out. 'Learning' from your past three or four chars and only making a token effort to find out is the easy way.

I haven't been here for a while because of the lack of players, ironically. But I agree that a N00b Guide or a specialised section of the game or something would be a good idea, rather than actually modifying the way the game works to suit the hordes of new kiddies. If the game had been in any kind of watered-down, n00b-appeasing form when I arrived then I wouldn't even have bothered playing in the first place. It's the cold, realistic, almost unfriendly nature of the early game that caught my eye when I was new.

Hooray for sado-masochism!