<!-- MHonArc v2.4.4 --> <!--X-Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea --> <!--X-From-R13: "Re. Qng" <pngNotn.pbz> --> <!--X-Date: Sat, 5 May 1998 06:47:31 -0700 --> <!--X-Message-Id: 199805052014.PAA00941#zoom,bga.com --> <!--X-Content-Type: text --> <!--X-Reference: c=US%a=_%p=EA%l=MOLACH-980504152024Z-92177#molach,origin.ea.com --> <!--X-Head-End--> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <html> <head> <title>MUD-Dev message, [MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</title> <!-- meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" --> <link rev="made" href="mailto:cat#bga,com"> </head> <body background="/backgrounds/paperback.gif" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" alink="#FF0000" vlink="#006000"> <font size="+4" color="#804040"> <strong><em>MUD-Dev<br>mailing list archive</em></strong> </font> <br> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] <br clear=all><hr> <!--X-Body-Begin--> <!--X-User-Header--> <!--X-User-Header-End--> <!--X-TopPNI--> Date: [ <a href="msg00393.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00396.html">Next</a> ] Thread: [ <a href="msg00366.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00430.html">Next</a> ] Index: [ <A HREF="author.html#00394">Author</A> | <A HREF="#00394">Date</A> | <A HREF="thread.html#00394">Thread</A> ] <!--X-TopPNI-End--> <!--X-MsgBody--> <!--X-Subject-Header-Begin--> <H1>[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</H1> <HR> <!--X-Subject-Header-End--> <!--X-Head-of-Message--> <UL> <LI><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI> <LI><em>Subject</em>: [MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</LI> <LI><em>From</em>: "Dr. Cat" <<A HREF="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</A>></LI> <LI><em>Date</em>: Tue, 5 May 1998 15:14:33 -0500 (CDT)</LI> <LI><em>Cc</em>: <A HREF="mailto:pixel#bga,com">pixel#bga,com</A></LI> <LI><em>Reply-To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#kanga,nu">mud-dev#kanga,nu</A></LI> <LI><em>Sender</em>: "Petidomo List Agent -- Kanga.Nu version" <<A HREF="mailto:petidomo#kanga,nu">petidomo#kanga,nu</A>></LI> </UL> <!--X-Head-of-Message-End--> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-Begin--> <HR> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-End--> <!--X-Body-of-Message--> <PRE> WARNING: The following message contains references to cannabilism. Those who have difficulty distinguishing reality from made-up stuff may wish to stop reading now. (Those with weak stomachs should also be forewarned that there may be typos in the following text as well!) Raph Koster wrote: > cf my other post re: Bettelheim. Talking on the phone for social > purposes is "play" by his lights. However, how much of a phone > company's revenue comes from people in the business world (in other > words, engaging in the "game" of getting ahead?). I don't know. But consider... Home computer games were in the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues, for the whole industry, until just the last few years when they grew up into the $1-$2 billion range. Console videogames (Nintendo, Sega, Sony, etc.) have fluctuated over the years, hitting around $5 billion or more in the better years. Arcade machines, the kind you put quarters in, have been as high as a $10 billion a year industry, but they're seriously slumping right now. Compare this against the phone industry. The last year I saw numbers for, if you added local and long distance revenues together, the total was $162 billion a year. What percentage of that needs to be non-business calls for it to dwarf the computer & videogame market? Heck, even broadcast TV is only $40 billion a year. And for what it's worth, I'm willing to take money from the business community too, if they want to buy any services we provide. Their money is just as dirty as everyone else's after all. :X) (If anyone's interest in the comparison - online gaming is over $100 million a year now, 1997 was the year it broke that mark. Highly optimistic research and forecasting firms like Forrester and Jupiter are predicting it'll be over a billion in 3 or 4 years. I hope they're right, but I suspect when you're selling reports that cost over a thousand dollars apiece, it pays to make sure you're offering the client something that sounds like ral good news!) > It's interesting to note that these two hooks are almost always > inextricably intertwined. A roleplayer who is "playing" finds > enjoyment from it, sure, but I bet they will roleplay extra hard if > there's some award to win that marks them as "the best roleplayer." What I actually mentioned as hooks were "gaining money/power/items" and "chatting/socializing". While the former has been almost inextricably linked with the concept of "computer roleplaying game" since the early days, when almost everything made was a D&D inspired dungeon crawl, you really can have "roleplaying" without "pumping yourself up" and vice/versa. Some kids might play "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians" or "play house" or have an imaginary tea party. Me and my best friend used to play Star Trek, he was Spock and I was Kirk. We made no effort to say we had "gained a level" or "had higher phaser skill" or had items acquired from the last time we played, or anything. We just had different settings and stories the next time, exact same characters. Or maybe I'm misreading you, and rather than casting my hooks of "building up" and "chatting" as "roleplaying" and "chatting", you're casting them as "building up" and "roleplaying". I wouldn't agree with that characterization either. Many people will sit around and chat about what they did at school/work today, what they ate, what movie they saw, etc. There's no roleplaying involved in that - but there is a lot of money in it. On every commercial online service I know of (AOL, Compuserve, Genie, Prodigy, etc.) the chatrooms was their number one most popular feature (and therefore, in the era of hourly fees, also their biggest moneymaker). Anyway, when I first happened upon the mud scene, I happily accepted the labels of "combat muds" and "social muds" as the two categories the mud world was divided up into. On getting to know it better, though, I realized there were really three kinds. Combat (most dikus and LPs), social (most MOOs and MUCKs and other TinyMUD derivatives) and roleplaying (most commonly found on MUSHes, though it pops up elsewhere at times). On FurryMUCK, there was for a time a huge tension between the roleplayers and the socializers. In small private groups of friends, they'd get along fine. But in the main crowded public areas, they'd annoy each other with the conflicting assumptions "Since this is primarily a roleplaying MUCK, when I start acting out some story in the park, other people should play along or at least treat it like it's really happening" and "Since this is primarily a social MUCK, I should be able to hang around here and just chat, and not have my conversation interrupted by people trying to play out kidnappings, earthquakes, 50 foot giants grabbing people, and wizards turning me into a newt." We have these two groups in abundance on Furcadia (and also people who want very much for a combat system to be added, which isn't going to happen - at most some voluntary tools for people who want to play out MUSH-like combats and add some perceived validity to the results, but which can be easily ignored). The goal was always to build the central maps to allow players to self-segregate into groups of people with similar tastes, rather than annoy each other and generate friction by constantly rubbing up against people with incompatible tastes and desires. The next update of the game will be the first one where we actually have things set up to attempt to do a decent job of it. In addition to the categories I already mentioned, we're going to have two R-rated areas. The first for risque' behavior, the other I realized the need for last week when seeing some characters tossing bloody severed body parts around in the main tavern and cooking them, it'll be called Dusk to Dawn and will by for gory violent stuff. I'm sure the many vampires in the game will all gravitate to it. Anyway I think the various elements - building up power, roleplaying a character, and socializing - are indeed very intertwined for a player that wants to do all of them. And they become intertwined for those that don't, in a homogenous environment the likes of, oh I dunno, say every mud ever (just about). But I'm making an "online service", and I feel that a significant number of players might want to participate in only one or two of those three things, and not be annoyed by people expecting them to participate in the rest. It's just like an online service might have buttons on its opening menu for news, movies, and sports - or a newspaper would have sections for them. Organize things, let people pick and choose, rather than having everything that can happen in the world be possible everywhere in the world because it's more "realistic" or more "consistent". Yes, it's more consistent. But in the information age, value is created by sorting information, not by presenting/providing it in a highly homogenous form. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds", as the line goes. These are the kinds of thoughts that led me to decide years ago that in any combat-based graphic mud I'd ever do, there would be three types of areas. Those where anybody could attack anything, those where players could attack monsters only, and attacks against other players would do no damage, and areas (usually towns) where it was physically impossible for anybody to take any damage from anything. For all the talk of loopholes like taming dragons or whatever, if you make it impossible for people to take damage (or other negative effects of any kind) while in a town, I don't think any clever trick or loophole is going to turn up. I also think that the "players can attack monsters but not other players" area could be made loophole free, if this is a primary goal from day one rather than "let's throw in every kind of mechanism for making lots of different kinds of stuff happen, and hey, let's throw in that kitchen sink too!" You either leave out mechanisms like area attacks, spells to control monsters, etc. - or if you want to do more work, you make sure that every possible damaging action is associated with a "who initiated this" value, and if if the fire-wall, hynotized or tamed monster's attack, cloud of gas set off by triggering a trap, etc. was set off by a player it can't damage any other player. Yes, you lose the ability to have "thief screws up disarming trap on chest, entire party gets hurt when it goes off" situation. I would posit that there are enough other types of interesting situations in heroic fantasy that you can create a rich and interesting experience without needing to use this specific one. For me, it's all about A) trying to focus more on what I think the players want, rather than primarily on what I personally would want in a game (as most designers do). Though it is essential that there's enough overlap, or I'll find myself bored or miserable, working on stuff I don't like at all. And B) providing for more than one type of player, with different tastes, rather than picking a specific set of tastes and catering only to the specific group of players that has those tastes. This is because I have personal, artisitic and economic desires to reach the broadest possible audience. I do recognize that deliberately focusing on a specific audience, even a small one, is a valid choice for people who have no desire to reach a broader audience, and can sometimes lead to results that are highly interesting artistically through their greater focus and depth. > We're in agreement, at least, that such methods are flawed. :) My > personal feeling is that once you say, "This place is safe" that > players will approach it with a reasonable expectation of said promise > being met. A promise which it appears we agree *cannot be fulfilled.* > Therefore I prefer to a) not mislead the players and b) not incur the > inevitable hit when they realize I did so. There's also the question > of whether making such a promise stifles the playerbase from seeking > their own solutions,and thus taking the development of virtual > societies a little further. I can't agree until you define some terms better, starting with "safe". If it means "safe from being killed", that's a piece of cake. See any talker, or Furcadia, or wherever. If it means "safe from anything unpleasant ever happening", that's different. In theory we could provide "ultra-moderated world", with five moderators to every player. To prevent even the minorly upsetting occurence of some stranger cussing at you once and then being booted AFTERWARDS, the moderators pre-screen every spoken remark, and you only see it if they approve it. Heck, though, they might show an error in judgement, or ignorance of what upsets you. Let's get rid of that "other players" concept, we only allow one player, and he talks to and interacts with the five moderators. (Now we have no need to provide 10, 15, 20 or even more, 5 will always suffice!) We have them go live in the player's house for a few years first, before we let him even log onto the game, so we make sure none of THEM will accidentally make a remarks that offends him because they didn't know him well enough. Well ok, that's a theoretical construct to counter the absolutist phrase "cannot be fulfilled". We know that neither in the commercial world, where it would never be profitable (unless the one player were wealthy and wanted to squander a lot of money on his entertainment... Hmmm...), and in the free world you'd never get so much volunteer time and effort. Still... If it's unfair to treat "can/cannot be fulfilled" as an absolutist statemnt... Should we treat "safe" that way either? Are there any places in the real world that people would apply the world "safe" to, in spite of the fact that you could be struck dead by a meteor just about anywhere? I think we wouldn't have the word "safe" in the language if people didn't think it ever applied. And I think if you have someone in a big stewpot with a bonfire around it, surrounded by hungry spearwaving cannibals, and you reach a hand down from the rope ladder suspended from the helicopter your friend is piloting and say "Would you like me to take you to someplace safe?" that the fellow will reply "No thanks, I happen to know it's impossible to make anyplace safe, so I'll just stay here". Being able to provide "safer" environments and "less safe" environments is clearly possible, levels of safety not being equal in all cases. Whether it's possible to climb the laddder of "safer but still dangerous" up into a zone that could be categorized as actually "safe" depends on where you draw that line. What level of probability of a bad event, overall frequency of bad events, average severity of the bad things that happen, and maximum severity of bad things that happens qualifies as "safe"? Is 99.999% safe "safe" to you? How about 98%? 90%? 80% The answer, or course, is that there is no one single answer. Some people find various levels of risk more acceptable than others. Some set out to tame the west, some preferred to stay back east. So perhaps a really meaningful answer to "is this environment safe" can only be gotten by comparing it to the collective opinions of A) the current player-base of a given game, or B) the entire target audience that the creators of the game want to convince to come play, or C) the entire human race. Depending on what you're trying to analyze "safeness" for. I will point out that virtual environments are well know for allowing people to try out different sides of their personality, or try out things they don't even know if they want or not, to find out. They can try being less shy, more shy, a different sexual orientation, a different gender, being the life of the party, a leader, a hero, a dishonest cheater, anything. And time and time again, we find people trying out things that they would NEVER try in real life, and learning about themselves from it, feeling liberated and empowered by it, etc. Why is this? Because the online environments are "safer than real life". No real life environment is likely to EVER be as safe as most online environments are. Even as "dangerous" a place as Ultima Online, where people can brutally murder you, hack up your corpse, cook your ribs and eat them, still shares most of the incredibly safe characteristics that online places inherently hve compared to real life. Nobody you encounter, and nothing they do, is going to make you die in real life (excluding the possibilty of them saying something so startling you have a heart attack, and presuming you don't provide your address or other information that might let them track you down in real life and murder you). Nobody you encounter can make you catch a disease in real life, get you pregnant, take your real life money (excepting the game provider who has your credit card number - wink wink), assault you, insure you, rape you, see the expression on your face when they embarass you, know things about your real race/religion/gender/acne that you don't want them to know... And the ultimate freedom, if you decide your contact with someone is so unpleasant that you never want to see them or interact with them ever again, the likelihood of them being able to do so against your will is lower in cyberspace than it is anywhere else. Online environments are safer by far than anything in the real world, even Ultima Online is. And it's possible to provide environments significantly safer than Ultima Online. So is it impossible to make anyplace "safe"? As I said, it depends on your definition of "safe". By my own - yeah, you can make a place pretty darn safe. I suspect that I also believe you can make a social environment a lot more free from rudeness than you would perhaps believe possible - being, as you stated yourself, cynical. Well, believe it when you see it and not before, and I'll strive to produce that proof. :X) > It boils down to the fact that players will attempt to exercise power > over one another. Presence of a combat system, the ability to do > damage to one another, whatever, will not change this. I've seen a lot of these arguments pop up lately on the list that "non-killing games are different only in degree and not in kind". All the way up to the extreme claim that any competitive game is sort of the same thing as competing by killing someone. I disagree. I think the feeling of seeing someone surge past me from 20 points behind to beat me at Scrabble on the last turn by making a seven letter word is SO different from the feeling of having someone kill me in a gory spray of blood, cook me, and eat my ribs, that the two experiences DO differ in kind, not just in degree. While some part of the experience of being killed and eaten does feel "just like losing at Scrabble only much stronger", there are other parts of the experience that simply aren't present in the Scrabble game at all. Likewise, I don't see the game systems that have combat mechanics that can override your desires as feeling the same as someone typing "Ha Ha I killed you" in an IRC chat room. Boffo swings his sword. You take 7 points of damage. You die. Boffo is pulling your intestines out with his bare hands. >swing sword at Boffo You can't do that, you're dead. Boffo is draping your intestines over the christmas tree. >run away at full speed You can't do that, you're dead. This is unpleasant in some certain specific way, which could be categorized in a certain spot in the taxonomy of unpleasantness. Consider a social mud, which only has a "pose" command for actions. Boffo summons a super-duper lightning bolt from the heavens and zaps you dead instantly, then cackles with fiendish glee! >pose steps aside, and the lightning doesn't really hit him. Bubba steps aside, and the lightning doesn't really hit him. Boffo pulls a machine gun out of his nose and showers you in a hail of bullets, turning you into a pile of hamburger riddled with hot lead! >pose catches all the bullets in his mouth, spitting them back at Boffo and cutting his suspenders, revealing his boxer shorts. Bubba catches all the bullets in his mouth, spitting them back at Boffo and cutting his suspenders, revealing his boxer shorts. Steve says "This is pointless." Boffo hacks you to pieces with his magic sword of no-takebacks, leaving you irrevocably dead no matter what you type to say it didn't happen! >say You're right, I should just ignore what he poses and not respond. Let's get back to our conversation about the guild we're gonna start. You say, "You're right, I should just ignore what he poses and not respond. Let's get back to our conversation about the guild we're gonna start." Steve says, "Are you using tinyfugue? Type /gag Boffo and you won't even hear him anyway." I'd contend that this is unpleasant in an entirely different way than the previous example. And that the differences between them are significant, not trivial. I'd also contend that the nature of pests and pestering in the latter case makes it far easier to set up criteria to distinguish them from people who are doing things that are "ok", and to provide mechanisms to filter, block, or prevent that kinda stuff out of the world without also removing a bunch of the desired behavior. I think that in a practical sense, rather than an absolutist one, the statement "There's a maximum level of safety that you can reasonably expect to be able to provide" applies to a combat mud. And it ALSO applies to a social mud. However, what that maximum level IS differs greatly between those two cases, and is much, much higher in the case of the social mud. Also, it's somewhere in between for combat muds that allow some mechanism for partially or totally opting out of player vs. player combat (or even player vs. monster combat, by staying only in towns or whatever), as opposed to muds where combat is allowed everywhere always against everyone. > Now, the server > may attract a different audience because of its stated rules--eg, less > people seeking to kill, or possibly MORE seeking easy targets--but the > underlying dynamics will not change. Only at the broadest levels. Like "if you put a bunch of people together they'll probably talk to each other" and stuff. Highly different audiences will have highly different social dynamics. I'm sure if I logged onto that MOO that's set up for astronomers to collaborate and communicate on, or the educational MOO for elementary school kids that's set on a space-station, I would find drastically different dynamics than I would upon logging onto one of the big pkill-arena oriented muds. I'm afraid I can't possibly see the dynamics as "unchanged" there. Perhaps you're talking about a narrower range of the field of muds than I am. But even at that, I feel the social dynamics in Furcadia are drastically different than those in Ultima Online, and I've from both players who love UO and hate Furcadia, and players who hate UO and love Furcadia. They seem to feel very strongly that there's totally different dynamics there, and I think they're right. > I am interested in finding > solutions to that dynamic, not in providing a stopgap measure. I think > said solutions will HAVE to arise from the players, not from a > supposedly-all-powerful-but-actually-flawed "God" up in admin-land. I'd say "one of the dynamics in human experience" rather than "that dynamic" - shopping malls cater to a different subset of human desires and dynamics than sports arenas, and I think different online services and/or muds will cater to more than one also, rather than there just being one single one we're all aimed at. That aside - I find the "from the players vs. from the staff" dichotomy to be as artificial and misleading as the "heredity vs. environment" debat or "the mind/body problem". You need both, and you want them to be working together well. Imagine someone with a good home environment set up, good parents, a nice school ready... But they're born with no DNA in their body. Ooops! Or someone with great genes from smart, healthy parents, but they grow up floating in a white sensationless void. Nope. As for the mind/body problem, well, I think brains are a body-part. Boffo slices Bubba's head open with an ax. Brains splatter on the walls. Yup, it's a body part. Thanks Boffo. Anyway, I really think an ideal solution involves a combination of staff and players. I think that I know how to do this well, and will learn how to do it better - time will tell. I don't want to sit around rambling about it, I'm just going to work on doing it - for years and years and years. I will say that I think some of the strongest early knowledge and experience with the techniques I'm trying to use and refine comes from the world of the sysops of SIGs on the big commercial online services like Compuserve and Genie. There's very little cross-fertilization between that body of ideas and knowledge and that of the mud development community, though. Oh well, one more advantage for me, maybe. ;X) > [Total aside: the fact that virtual environments by their nature will > ALWAYS have a "god" lurking out there--even if it's only the guy who > has the power to turn the machine off--introduces an often baffling > social dynamic into the design. Thoughts, anyone?] Thought number one - I hate how it's made some people react to me - really shy people even going so far as to say they're terrified of me. People asking if I can view everyone's whispers (I can't) or assuming I have a log of everything anyone ever said (I don't). Still, for the most part, actually being present in the game defuses a lot of that (common quote, with apologies to Douglas Adams, "I'm just this cat you know" (comma deliberately omitted, on most occasions, for artistic porpoises)). And it gives people the pleasure of interacting with the maker of the game, feeling like their opinions and concerns and suggestions are really being heard, and supports my general methodologies for making the keeping of order a joint staff/players thing, rather than assigning it to one or the other or having a sharp division about who does what. People would love it to death if Richard would spend a significant amount of time playing Ultima Online. A pity that sort of thing just isn't his cup of tea enough for him to spend large amounts of time doing it. Failing that, it's worth considering having Lord British actors run around, like the multiple Mickey-Mouse suited people at Disneyworld, or all the department store Santas, building up the name recognition more heavily of other staff members who DO get on a lot, or even giving players titles and/or minor powers that make them feel like staff to players that interact with them. Powers most players don't have do distort the game experience, by the way, and I think the BEST creators have to spend most of their time living in the game world experiencing it exactly the way the players do. So that anything that sucks about the game world is something YOU want changed because YOU can't stand it and must improve/fix it, as soon as possible! It's far, far too easy to let an issue be a lower priority than it should be, or even not deal with it at all, because it's only bothering all the players and isn't bothering you at all when you go into the game world. I've learned this lesson time and time again in the game development world, where often developers will test their game only on super-souped-up computers and never FEEL whether or not it sucks on average performance level type computers that the typical consumer has at that point in time. I know I play Furcadia over a 28.8 modem. Sometimes I play as alts, that don't even have access to the paltry selection of sysop commands that are in so far. (I will confess I cheat sometimes and look in the system logs to see when my fiancee' was last online. The players don't have a "laston" command yet, and I feel my cheating robs me of some of my proper level of motivation to add one...) And sometimes I play on my old 486-33. Which can actually handle the game reasonably well. :X) > I believe that if we did this, and it didn't work out as they had > hoped for, they would blame us for "not doing it right." Without > understanding the underlying dynamic. <sarcasm> Since you never have this problem with the current game, I can see why you wouldn't want to make this change. ;X) </sarcasm> Seriously, you have this problem already, and yes you'll continue to have it with a no-pkill shard, but so what? What if it turns out that the percentage of people complaining about their expectations not being met is lower than it is on the pkill shards? What if it's roughly around the same level, but now you're catering to TWO groups of players, with two different types of tastes, rather than one? I still think you could keep this fairly minimal, too. Plaster huge, bloody-red dripping letters on the opening screen that says "WARNING. This shard doesn't eliminate the possibility of getting killed by other players, it just reduces it beause now they have to think up weird tricks like turning tamed dragons loose next to you. Have a nice day." Or adopt one of my more drastic solutions, and turn off ALL ability for anyone to take damage anywhere from anything. You should probably then shut down all monster generation, and require people to earn money from mining, tailoring, etc. (I imagine you'd leave in chickens, cows, etc. for hunting and getting hides and food and the like. The fact that people could kill a cow or rabbit every time and never get killed by it wouldn't upset their expectations too much - in fact it might be more in tune with them than the fact that you CAN be killed by them now.) Stamp the title screen with "This is the way it is on this shard so listen up and then don't complain later that it wasn't what you thought it was". With something that clear and straightforward, I don't think you'd get many people complaining because of incorrect expectations. Some would say "It's no fun for it to be this way", to which you say "try one of the other nine shards, duh". The people that say "The way you did the other nine is wrong, and this way is wrong too, here's MY brilliant idea and you should have done it MY way you fools!" Well... All those people are already saying that to you anyway, aren't they? You really ought to do this. And I stand by my prediction that management there will never go for it. That's ok, I won't mind having a larger share of the combat-disliking market for Furcadia. :X) The Oasis example you cite is interesting. I'd just contacted the founder of Oasis myself last week, and asked him what changes he would want in game mechanics to make it more practical to found and run player-built cities. He said it all really boiled down to needing better ways to deal with the problem of people who want to spoil other people's fun. I just smiled when I read that, because I think at the core of it, that's one of the two fundamental goals of Furcadia. One is to provide tools and encouragement to get the players excercising their creativity and sharing it with others. The other is to provide tools and education that do the most to minimize the amount of spoiling of people's fun that the jerks can accomplish. I'm sure that most muds have that as something on the list of stuff they want to do, but I think very few would consider it one of their core priorities. Me, I still think that in a world where people kill each other for real, it's pretty important to help them learn how to get along better. All the more so if we've invented, say, nuclear weapons. :X) So anyway what I'm really trying to say here is - Good luck with the baby! *-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions || Free alpha test: *-------------------------------------------** <A HREF="http://www.bga.com/furcadia">http://www.bga.com/furcadia</A> Furcadia - a new graphic mud for PCs! || Let your imagination soar! *-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* -- MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future. </PRE> <!--X-Body-of-Message-End--> <!--X-MsgBody-End--> <!--X-Follow-Ups--> <HR> <!--X-Follow-Ups-End--> <!--X-References--> <UL><LI><STRONG>References</STRONG>: <UL> <LI><STRONG><A NAME="00357" HREF="msg00357.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></STRONG> <UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> "Koster, Raph" <rkoster#origin,ea.com></LI></UL></LI> </UL></LI></UL> <!--X-References-End--> <!--X-BotPNI--> <UL> <LI>Prev by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00393.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: META -- membership</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00396.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: There can be.. only ONE! (fwd)</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Prev by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00366.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00430.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Index(es): <UL> <LI><A HREF="index.html#00394"><STRONG>Date</STRONG></A></LI> <LI><A HREF="thread.html#00394"><STRONG>Thread</STRONG></A></LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> <!--X-BotPNI-End--> <!--X-User-Footer--> <!--X-User-Footer-End--> <ul><li>Thread context: <BLOCKQUOTE><UL> <LI><STRONG>[MUD-Dev] Re: Character maintinence - expenditure of resources</STRONG>, <EM>(continued)</EM> <ul compact> <ul compact> <ul compact> <ul compact> <LI><strong><A NAME="00380" HREF="msg00380.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Character maintinence - expenditure of resources</A></strong>, Adam Wiggins <a href="mailto:adam#angel,com">adam#angel,com</a>, Mon 04 May 1998, 19:36 GMT </LI> </ul> <LI><strong><A NAME="00463" HREF="msg00463.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: Character maintinence - expenditure of resources</A></strong>, J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Thu 07 May 1998, 22:36 GMT </LI> </ul> </ul> <LI><strong><A NAME="00357" HREF="msg00357.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>, Koster, Raph <a href="mailto:rkoster#origin,ea.com">rkoster#origin,ea.com</a>, Mon 04 May 1998, 08:52 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00366" HREF="msg00366.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>, Marian Griffith <a href="mailto:gryphon#iaehv,nl">gryphon#iaehv,nl</a>, Mon 04 May 1998, 13:14 GMT </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00394" HREF="msg00394.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>, Dr. Cat <a href="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</a>, Tue 05 May 1998, 13:47 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00430" HREF="msg00430.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>, John Bertoglio <a href="mailto:alexb#internetcds,com">alexb#internetcds,com</a>, Wed 06 May 1998, 19:00 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00436" HREF="msg00436.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>, Dr. Cat <a href="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</a>, Wed 06 May 1998, 21:14 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00491" HREF="msg00491.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>, Marian Griffith <a href="mailto:gryphon#iaehv,nl">gryphon#iaehv,nl</a>, Sun 10 May 1998, 21:03 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00493" HREF="msg00493.html">[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea</A></strong>, Dr. Cat <a href="mailto:cat#bga,com">cat#bga,com</a>, Sun 10 May 1998, 23:04 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> </LI> </ul> </LI> </UL></BLOCKQUOTE> </ul> <hr> <center> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] </center> <hr> </body> </html>