02 Oct, 2010, donky wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
There was an article on forgotten games linked somewhere. One of them was MUDs, and the covered MUD was Cthulhu MUD. I think it is great that these games are getting coverage, as there is a lot of play value in them. I hope some modern players manage to get past their familiarity with more graphical and focused games, and give them a shot. But that's not what this post is about.

I would like to post my experience with Cthulhu MUD. This is not intended to be a collection of complaints, but rather to gauge what common consensus is on the importance or relevance of these experiences. I am sure there are hundreds of MUDs that are just as good, but that provide the same experience.

  • Dry meaningless feature list. This is the exact same thing that people called a feature list back in the 90's, when I first became familiar with MUDs. Seriously, "extended race selection" and "extended class selection"? Is this list trying to drive me away?

    I can understand how you might end up with a list like this. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop a MUD, you get to the point where you do the best you can and sometimes that means an unimaginative list.

    Does anyone do a list of brief feature descriptions that are actually interesting, with links to short articles on how these features contribute to the game. Perhaps even screenshots of the game, highlighting them.

  • I logged in using Windows Telnet. It asked me if I could see colour. I suggest that based on past posts, it should be entirely possible to detect what client a player is using. Yes? No? Can this step be removed? Does it make a difference? Does the coloured word "color" ever appear as the printed escape codes if someone does not have colour? e.g. ".I logged in using Windows Telnet. It asked me if I could see colour. I suggest that based on past posts, it should be entirely possible to detect what client a player is using. Yes? No? Can this step be removed? Does it make a difference? Does the coloured word "color" ever appear as the printed escape codes if someone does not have colour? e.g. ".[33mC.[34mO…."[/li]
    [li]The login process does not give you the option of making a new character, so I enter a name and suddenly I am asked for the password of an existing character with no option to get back a step and try for a different non-existent character name.

    Minor lack of polish.[/li]
    [li]The login process featured some detail text including "childern" as a typo for "children". When in the game I typed "typo" and got "typo reported". So I tried again with "typo childern in login process" and got "typo reported".

    Minor lack of polish.[/li]
    [li]I entered the game and some red text highlighted that I could type "up to get to the CthulhuMUD Newbie School". Now, I have two problems with this. The concept of newbie school is cheesy. Recent discussions (with adoption by Kavir) here have covered new and interesting ways to hand feed new players.

    Perhaps personal preference. But I didn't like going to a garden and killing rats and butterflies when I first started playing MUDs, and this is reminiscent of that. Make that waiting around with other newbie players for a chance to have a turn with the rats and butterflies, in case that sounded too exciting..[/li]
    [li]Once in the game I was left wondering what to do and idled out to write this.[/li][/ul]

    From a MUD developer's point of view, these are the kind of things that in the past I have become blind to after putting in so many years of work, and time and effort. After all that, maybe I don't consider them to be that important. It makes me think that if I ever accomplish what the Chtulhu MUD developer has (an open MUD), I'll come here and invite developers to log in and critique it.

    Thoughts? Is it possible to do a feature list that potential players might get something out of? Or is this feature list one you consider to be absolutely fine? What about the rest of the points?
02 Oct, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
donky said:
Dry meaningless feature list. This is the exact same thing that people called a feature list back in the 90's, when I first became familiar with MUDs. Seriously, "extended race selection" and "extended class selection"? Is this list trying to drive me away?

Those are Mudconnector listing options. You sometimes see lists like that when a player advertises a mud by copying and pasting its TMC listing - I would speculate that the website developer may have done the same, rather than asking the mud owner/developers for something more creative.

This sort of information is great for a listing site, as it allows mudders to search for games based on specific criteria. But as you point out, it looks very bland when used for general advertising.

donky said:
Does anyone do a list of brief feature descriptions that are actually interesting, with links to short articles on how these features contribute to the game. Perhaps even screenshots of the game, highlighting them.

I used to write feature descriptions in my mud listings, but found that a bullet-pointed feature list was a more effective way of presenting the information, particularly when targeting cynical experienced mudders with short attention spans. When posting an advert, however, I tend to tailor the advert to the situation.

Linking to short articles is an excellent idea - but you need the articles first, and few muds seem to bother with such things. I have occasionally linked to other posts when advertising on forums, but writing some dedicated articles is definitely something I'll consider.

I've seen some muds provide links to logs, but screenshots are usually only used to advertise custom interfaces. It's pretty difficult to fit much information on one screen, so I think it would be difficult to show off many features in this way. I'm also not sure how worthwhile it would be to provide screenshots if you're just using a plain text window - it won't impress mudders, who've seen the same thing many times before, and it certainly won't impress non-mudders, who are used to more graphical interfaces.

donky said:
I logged in using Windows Telnet. It asked me if I could see colour. I suggest that based on past posts, it should be entirely possible to detect what client a player is using. Yes? No? Can this step be removed? Does it make a difference? Does the coloured word "color" ever appear as the printed escape codes if someone does not have colour? e.g. ".I logged in using Windows Telnet. It asked me if I could see colour. I suggest that based on past posts, it should be entirely possible to detect what client a player is using. Yes? No? Can this step be removed? Does it make a difference? Does the coloured word "color" ever appear as the printed escape codes if someone does not have colour? e.g. ".[33mC.[34mO…."[/quote]
I'm not aware of any way to reliably detect colour support, and I have used clients in the past where the escape codes were indeed displayed on the screen. However that was many years ago, so these days I just assume the client supports colour and hope for the best. Nobody's complained yet (touch wood).

[quote=donky]The login process does not give you the option of making a new character, so I enter a name and suddenly I am asked for the password of an existing character with no option to get back a step and try for a different non-existent character name.[/quote]
This is actually fairly common in the Diku world. I think Realms of Despair (the original SMAUG) was the first Diku I saw with a specific option for creating a new character, back in 1995 - but few muds seem to offer it unless it was already part of their codebase.

[quote=donky]The login process featured some detail text including "childern" as a typo for "children". When in the game I typed "typo" and got "typo reported". So I tried again with "typo childern in login process" and got "typo reported".[/quote]
Typos are pretty unavoidable, but at least they have a way of reporting them. I should really add a command for that as well…

[quote=donky]I entered the game and some red text highlighted that I could type "up to get to the CthulhuMUD Newbie School". Now, I have two problems with this. The concept of newbie school is cheesy. Recent discussions (with adoption by Kavir) here have covered new and interesting ways to hand feed new players.[/quote]
I think the concept of newbie school is too well established to be dropped. Perhaps a few muds will consider other options, but I suspect it's become a permanent fixture for most.

[quote=donky]Once in the game I was left wondering what to do and idled out to write this.[/quote]
Yup, a common problem, as I'm sure most of us have observed. I found the 'what' command idea helped a lot with this, but once again I can't see many muds going to the effort of implementing something similar. In the case of games like Cthulhu MUD, you'll probably find that many of their new players already have a background in similar muds, and therefore have an intuitive grasp of what they're supposed to do next.

If you see most newbies progressing without any problem, it's easy to dismiss those that struggle as "clueless newbies", particularly if your game dates back to the old days where it was considered perfectly acceptable to drop players in the deep end and watch them sink or swim.

Player expectations have changed a lot over the years, but not all muds have kept up with those expectations. I can't speak for Cthulhu MUD, having not played it, but I have observed this with a lot of the older muds, so I don't think it's that uncommon. You'll often see older muds blaming EverQuest, World of Warcraft, the "decline of mudding", etc, but I can't help noticing that some of them continue to evolve and grow.
02 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
I think what's jarring about "Newbie school" is that there is absolutely no attempt to make it in-realm at all. It seems very meta. In Muds where there isn't as much an emphasis on roleplay or atmosphere, but it always smacks me right in the face when roleplaying MUDs have that kind of thing.

I still need to hunker down and write some sort of newbie introduction for my mud but Ill design the systems first.

Maya/Rudha
02 Oct, 2010, jurdendurden wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Linking to short articles is an excellent idea - but you need the articles first, and few muds seem to bother with such things. I have occasionally linked to other posts when advertising on forums, but writing some dedicated articles is definitely something I'll consider.


You could instead build a feature list with links to specific points in your player's guide. If you have as detailed a guide as say… Maiden Desmodus, then it should cover most features you'd want to advert anyhow.
02 Oct, 2010, Tavish wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Rudha said:
I think what's jarring about "Newbie school" is that there is absolutely no attempt to make it in-realm at all. It seems very meta. In Muds where there isn't as much an emphasis on roleplay or atmosphere, but it always smacks me right in the face when roleplaying MUDs have that kind of thing.
Maya/Rudha

Same here, I ended up going with a newbie demo instead of school. This is the rather brief original discussion I had before implementing it.
0.0/5