Scandum has said the idea is that different mud listing sites will add their own fields.

A while back, Kiasyn said he'd be supporting Cratylus's suggestion - and that suggestion included notes keys, such as "CLASSES-NOTES", etc. However that post was made quite a while ago, and a lot has changed since then.

Will MudBytes be making use of such notes? Are there any other fields that MudBytes will be using, beyond those specified by the MSSP protocol?

Having end-users determine what they need not only makes sense, it's inevitable.

It doesn't hurt, though, to try to cover many bases with the core system, to increase
its out-the-door attractiveness. IMO.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, pk, rp, and questing fields seem obviously useful
for many muds and probably ought be added. Other stuff I've heard that makes
sense includes remort and multiclass.

BTW I hope we can leave the "dikucentrism" sniping at the the door of this thread.
Those flames from another forum need not singe us here.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

It's a little to early to tell ATM. Right now we're working on patching it into the MUD listing for some more detailed info. It's a part of the MUD List that's been lacking since creation and this is a very intelligent solution IMO. Only var that's actually come to mind is one for a banner slot. Might be possible though, to leave it up to you guys. I could always add an interface that lets you filter/add variables to display in your listing.

As a side note pk, rp, and quests are globally covered. A mud that primarily focuses on questing would list GAMEPLAY as Adventure, pk muds as Player versus Player, and roleplaying muds as Roleplaying.



Something like BANNER250X80 could work. As was addressed earlier, should the full url be used? For sake of consistency I'd say yes.

I don't think "GAMEPLAY: Adventure" necessarily means what I am thinking
of when I'm talking about questing, nor is it especially clear to a seeker
that a mud listed as having adventure gameplay has quest points as a
requirement fpr advancement, for example.

I would have thought that by now you'd realize that "I already gave this 1.5 seconds
of thought and you don't need to think about it anymore" is an extremely weak
position for you to adopt.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Most of the quest-heavy MUDs I've encountered would be more accurately described as "Hack and Slash" - there's lots of questing, sure, but you still need to kill lots of mobs in order to advance.

I've listed my mud as "Player versus Player", although it could also be accurated listed as "Hack and Slash". Questing can also provide a very fast means of advancement, and is required for unlocking certain bonuses and the best equipment.

Questing is basically an orthogonal concept to adventure vs. hack and slash vs. roleplaying vs. etc. It's really that simple…

I actually briefly considered adding experience bonuses as part of quest rewards so I could list my mud as Adventure. Too much work for me, but the gameplay variable will show where the niches are at maybe even lead to ADI approved muds, aka Adventure Intensive! :lol:

Well I do that as well, but I think you'd need to make it the primary means of advancement in order to accurately list the mud as "Adventure".

Are you guys equating "Adventure" with "gaining experience"?

I think the term also kind of implies unique content, so the ROM quest master system wouldn't apply cause it's just a boring grind of randomly assigned fetch and kill.

As a side note, according to Bartle explorers reduce the amount of killers (because they're hard to find and hard to kill), so an adventure pk mud might not be the smartest idea, unless you want to push pk into the background.


Only in the D&D sense where you not only gain experience for killing stuff. Adventure is really about unique content, which makes creating an adventure mud a bitch because of the amount of work involved.

I'm using the definition Scandum gave here: http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topi...

"Adventure is for muds with a strong focus on non combat advancement and puzzle solving."

So it doesn't necessarily have to mean "gaining experience", but it does mean advancement, and in many muds that's the same thing.

My quests are hand-written, and can only be completed once per character. However they all involve combat (even if the goal is to avoid it), which would pretty much rule out the "non combat advancement" aspect.

I do think it might be worth including the different quest types David Haley mentioned though - generated, hand-written, and immortal-run. These aren't mutually exclusive either, but each approach certainly has its fans. At the very least, both TMC and TMS will want to know whether the MUD supports any questing (regardless of whether or not it's an "Adventure" mud).


The quests are all accessable via specific locations, which actually makes it easier to find people to kill.

Well, my plan solves every problem globally, so I've decided
not to read what you guys posted terribly carefully, and
instead I'll quote you some opinions by some guy.

Ok, just kidding, I did read. I want y'all to understand where
I'm coming from with this stuff, so please read an example
walkthrough of a stock quest in the codebase I maintain:

http://dead-souls.net/hints4.html

Different quests have different points they award,
depending on the difficulty.

Now, Dead Souls muds have these toggled options.
You can make level advancement require a certain
number of quest points depending on the next level.
Or you can disable quest requirements and just
make advancement depend on XP.

Whether this fits into your personal definition
of "Adventure" (or Bartle's) is irrelevant. It is
enough that normal people will not necessarily make
that connection, nor look for it in a "gameplay" val.

I don't really want Scandum telling me how to shoehorn
this stuff into a GAMEPLAY entry. That's just
unnecessary. Are we trying to save electrons? Quest
types richly deserve their own var, and I'm really
"over" having to justify obvious stuff because
Scandum refuses to accept his design is imperfect.

This is why I am pleased that the consensus seems
to be to take these choices out of his hands.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

We're aware that you feel that MSSP magically came to be out of nowhere and that it was decided by the powers that be that it would be governed in the communist manner by Cratylus - our fearless leader.

I've always said that I'll leave it to the mud listings to deal with the specific variables because I don't think it should be done by 15 people on MudBytes, most notably those who scream the loudest, or those who act so pissed off all the time that many people probably don't even bother contributing and let me deal with the trolling and poison.

Needless to say that the MUDPROGS and MUDTRIGS variables are ideal for reporting the interactiveness of your world, or that your mud ideally fits the 'adventure' niche which is completely ignored on TMC.

I'm really not sure that you fully appreciate that, as past empirical evidence has already shown, you are not the best person to judge and decide for others how their MUDs work. :sigh:

You know, it'd be a lot more constructive if you just said: "OK, let's work with this then and see how we can adapt the current spec" instead of telling people how dumb they are because they can't understand how their worldview fits into your all-encompassing solution to life, the universe and everything.

lol who's "we"?







I am trying to come up with some constructive purpose for this outburst, but I'm afraid
I'm failing. :(

I'm sorry you feel that I'm a communist…or whatever it is you do feel, which is probably
pretty helpless right now. You should consider that while I may fit a stereotype or two on occasion,
your best interest is served by addressing the content of my posts, not by demonstrating
how hurt your feelings are about them. You've not to this point made yourself an
especially sympathetic character, you see.

You've decided to play obstructionist. Don't act surprised when people walk around
your obstacles.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Enough with the drama.

Not that I'm innocent in the slightest in this regard, but… damn, people need to calm down. Quit fighting over something as inconsequential as game protocols. Go relax, kick back, have a few drinks, get some boobs in your face, don't come back until you've got a goofy grin plastered on your face. Do everyone some good.

Scandum, stop being a little kid.

For the record, the MudBytes crawler crawls ALL variables, it doesn't sort, validate, modify, unmodify, tweak the electrons or digest anything to do with them. I see absolutely no reason why a Questing variable is such a big problem. I would even go so far as to have MORE quest-related variables describing how the quests work, due to questing being such a large and ambigious topic.