Bit of a tangent (thus the thread split), but in the past few years it seems that there are more and more players asking on mud forums for suggestions rather than simply checking the listings - and to be fair on the players, they frequently specify requirements that aren't included in the listings. Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems that players are becoming increasingly picky about their choice of mud, and the listing sites just aren't keeping up.

MSSP strikes me as a potential way of getting around this issue, although I'm not aware of any listing sites that take full advantage of it, and my gut feeling is that the older listing sites are unlikely to ever do so. I think it would be nice to see a listing site that provided a really extensive amount of detail.

I think it would be difficult to adequately categorize muds in a useful way. When I was still looking for a mud, I'd go through all the brief descriptions, find 10-12 possible candidates, click their extended info, close about 9 of them right away, then follow their webpages, read them for a bit, then ultimately end up closing them all for one reason or another.

Here's some example of troubles/problems I have with mud listings:

PKILL

No PK is a dealbreaker immediately, and I usually ignore a mud that has Restricted PK too, because the muds I've seen it on, it's usually stupid. However, Free PK isn't really what I want either, in the sense that I don't want rampant PK. What I'd like is a system where PK is "restricted" in certain situations by player-enforced laws or reasonably expected consequences.

So, basically, no matter what it says in the "PK" section, I'm always immediately put on edge.

Death

I can think of a few categories for Death:

Reincarnation
Limited Reincarnation
Limited Permadeath
Permadeath

But then what about the other penalties associated? Some games have very minor penalties for death. So you could have a Minor Penalties/Major Penalties for each. Some games scatter all your equipment on death. So you'd have to add a field for that, too. Some have corpse retrieval, another field. So if you add all of those up, I count about 14+ possibilities for the Death field alone.

Here's one you probably never see on a mud site:

Rules

One of the first things I do when checking out a mud is read its rules. If there are very many rules or they say things like "be considerate to other players", I just close them. This may sound anti-social, but being forced to distinguish between players and mobs breaks immersion for me, and immersion is my highest priority in a game. On the other hand, aside from maybe having a few fields like "friendly" and "laissez faire", I don't know how you'd make a sensible list of options for people to peruse.

I think the only way to implement something like this usefully would be to have some sort of publically editable wiki-type database where people can update new fields as they are added, since I don't expect must mud administrations to actively browse for added fields, and if you keep a stock set of fields, you'll ultimately end up with a repeat of the current situation with mud listings becoming useless to many mudders.

All of that said, I wish someone would do this. If you know what you're looking for, searching a mud listing is the best way to go, but they often don't contain the information necessary to make a useful decision.

(Oh, and here's another example of things that irk me: When the game code enforces restrictions on sensible actions. You can't loot that corpse [because it's a player, but you can loot as many mobs as you like], You can't attack that player [because of levels or whatever else], and so on. I don't even know how you'd include information like that in a listing)


How would MSSP help? You'd probably have to keep adding new fields for things you didn't think about or things you'd never heard of, and then each mud would have to update their MSSP info, which might work fine initially, but I suspect people would forget or stop bothering after a while.

Is it not immediately and utterly obvious anyhow which characters are NPCs and which are PCs?
Is it really such a terrible thing to be asked politely to not be a jerk to other players? (That's what the rule is saying, after all.) I don't really understand the aversion here.


The logistics of MUD listings updating their information presentation to keep up with all of this would be nightmarish.

I've learned to take everything that comes out of your mouth with a grain of salt. Especially after the whole g++ bit on SmaugMUDs.



So, you want PK, but it can't have rules, but at the same time it can't be free-for-all? Doesn't that seem a little contradictory?



Being asked to be nice to other people isn't a big deal. It's actually common sense. Players usually stand out. In the fact that, you know, they talk. They display intelligence. Personally, I play MUDs to meet other people. If I want immersion, I'll play a BioWare RPG, or I'll read a book. Ruling out a MUD because they expect you to treat other players with respect… well, that's retarded.

Sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too :wink:

The strength of MSSP is that it makes it easier to update listing information across multiple sites. I think it's a good thing and I've included it on our server, but MSSP itself doesn't really help with a better MUD classification. Maybe listings sites should be putting less emphasis on a (flawed) classification system and instead encouraging MUDs to give a detailed description of their features and gameplay which users can search for keywords/phrases in the normal way.

Or it's an admission that he's a griefer. Either one. Speaking of cake.. There's some in the kitchen….

If you're not in character, then the distinction is pretty obvious, and no, it generally isn't such a terrible thing to ask, although I occasionally want to be a jerk anyway. If you are in character, then suspension of disbelief prevents distinguishing between them. If it doesn't, it's pretty hard to stay in character, and it's pretty hard (for me, anyway) to stay in character when you have to consciously not suspend that disbelief in order to follow the rules. On a mud, I, personally, don't ever want to be out of character for any reason.

Another reason I object to rules like this is that people will eventually ignore them. So I have to follow a rule I don't like, which is especially difficult when people are irritating me, such as by not following the very same rule, and my only "legal" alternative is to tattle to administrators. So I have to choose between breaking the rule, which irritates my OCD, and running to tell mom, which got old in Elementary School.


That was pretty much my point, yes.


You should probably use the whole shaker.

I can't even begin to imagine why you care about that at all. I have no interest in your personal preferences, and can't imagine why you take an interest in mine.


The alternative is that I run out of cake!

A distinction I failed to make in that post is that I like player-enforced rules, but despise administration-enforced rules. Player-enforced rules are fun, they pit players against players, and even if you can't win against them, the struggle is theoretically winnable, and is part of the game. Administration-enforcement is an unwinnable situation, at least within the scope of the game, aren't any fun, and aren't part of the game.


Possibly, but how would they know what terms users are likely to search for? Maybe some sort of middle-ground would be preferable, where sites have the ability to create new fields and add entries, which are visible from that point on to other mud list…ers.. so that once someone adds a field for "Advancement:" "Mario Coins", others can set that same option, if appropriate. It still runs into the same problem as with updating MSSP though.

Well, I think this above all explains why you don't like being asked to not be a jerk.


Look, I don't mean this to be offensive, so please don't take it that way; this is a comment on having useful conversations. Saying things like the above makes it very hard to even try taking you seriously, if you know that everything you say isn't what you actually meant, and you say up-front that people should take everything you say with an entire shaker's worth of salt. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here; it makes conversing rather difficult.


Well, you expressed your preferences as a complaint regarding what the FUSS project was doing, so presumably Kayle cares, or at least cares about being complained to – unless of course you think he should completely ignore what users have to say. :wink:

I have no interests in your preferences except when you ask me to revert changes made to a public codebase because you don't like the direction we'd taken it.

What I am trying accomplish is for people who do believe in clear conversation (such as yourself) to not take me too seriously, because I don't believe in clear conversation as more than a theoretical possibility, like honest politicians, and, even if I did, I'm pretty terrible at it. I can get within maybe 80% of what I mean on the first try without us taking out a tremendous amount of time defining terms and agreeing on assumptions, which is time-prohibitive and (more importantly) interest-prohibitive. I am also quite accustomed to people misunderstanding me, and, therefore, predict such things will continue. I don't consider it unreasonable, then, to attempt to warn others that I predict that such things will continue to happen.

And, honestly, my being a jerk is secondary to my not being able to suspend disbelief. I can be a jerk anywhere, I don't need to roleplay for that.


I'm pretty sure I didn't ask that. My memory is pretty terrible, but I'm pretty sure what happened was that I was surprised to find it used g++, found I didn't understand the error messages, made some posts asking why it used g++, and how I might go about changing it back. If I did directly ask that (and not if you inferred it), then I am an idiot and I apologize.

Get better at it instead of making excuses for your shortcomings.



Note: See what I did there? I was clear and concise.

Back to the original post:
I've always thought it might be nice for listing sites to have a questionnaire form.
Sort of a personality test so to speak that recommends muds that fit the persons preferences.
This is of course catering to the players, but if it was semi sophisticated, it could assess which
mud(s) might best suit the player.

I think this is a step in the right direction, but I think questions would need to be added/altered from time to time, and such alterations would skew the results. Perhaps combined with some sort of account system that notifies people of a change in questions, this could be overted, but that seems a bit unwieldy.

I think the old Bartle test used to recommend muds, or it at least referred you to players like you and mentioned what muds they played.

What is the danger in it "skewing the results"?
Are we to assume that changes would take place before our player found at least 1 mud to play?
If the routine was well written, the chore of adding criteria would be nominal, especially if they used
a database of some sort with a web front end to change the search parameters at will.
This is from a programmers point of view, so depending on ones background this may or may not be an easy task.

Let's face it, TMS and TMC are both outdated. Don't get me wrong, I value both of these sites very highly; I basically grew up checking them practically every day. However they don't offer the functionality they could and there's no sign that they will; I think their architecture is basically too top-heavy to make that kind of change.

MudGamers is a step in the right direction, but I think Orrin has a different ultimate vision for that site.

I think a new site similar to MudGamers, that takes full advantage of MSSP, and is similar in functionality to something like this, is a good idea.

I had in mind a listing site that was designed in such a way that new fields could be added extremely easily. The listing owners could perhaps have an opt-in automatic notification whenever a new field was added, and they could then just add it to the MSSP-REQUEST for their mud. If they didn't bother, no big deal, but I've noticed that most active muds keep their listings up to date (for example when TMC added the new fields for crafting and player-run cities).

MSSP would also make it viable to have fields for information that changes very frequently - for example an exact world size instead of just a range.

One of the things I wanted to avoid with mudgamers was having MUDs fill out an extensive checklist of features when listing. Instead, I made it so you create your own tags (as many as you like) for your game when you list it. I was hoping that this would be more flexible for both games and users who wouldn't be constrained to a set of predetermined categories that don't necessarily cover every feature they might want. The tags combined with the game description should give MUDs plenty of opportunity to list their features, which can then be searched by users. Whether this approach is an improvement or not I don't really know for sure. Certainly if you look at the tag cloud on the site it's a mess and could definitely be cleaned up a lot if the tags were preset, but I really wanted to let games define their own classification.

I actually quite like filling in checklists! I do also find them a lot easier to scan through than pure descriptions (which is why even on MudGamers I list my features with bullet points, and split them into different sections).

I don't mind the MudGamers freeform approach, but in this thread I was contemplating the viability of something at the other end of the spectrum.