Re: [MUD-Dev] Community Relations

[SkeptAck#antisocial,com (Dundee)]

Jon A. Lambert" <jlsysinc#ix,netcom.com> wrote:

> Note that the former is usually enforced with great enthusiasm, while
> enforcement of the latter is haphazard and oftentimes explicitly 
> non-existent.

In our case, the attitude was very much "This is not a public park, this is
my backyard.  If you don't like me, then get off my swingset and go play
somewhere else."

We had no mud hierarchy, no admin policy, no code of conduct (beyond "don't
be a jerk").  We're only now starting to put that stuff together (only been
up for six months, so maybe that's normal ... or maybe we've just been
stupid).

> Any thoughts as to why this is so?  

We spend the time and money to make the mud for other people to enjoy. To be
insulted on top of that...  Eh.

> Don't such obtuse policies essentially boil down to 
>     "You can be banned at our whim"?

'Can't say for most muds, but I think in our case, our demographic is a bit
different.  We're running a UO emulator.  We have a handful of players that
never played UO, a handful for whom EQ's expansion "Caverns of Camping" was
not sufficiently appealing to make them stick with that, and all the rest of
our users (90% or so) come from OSI.

All of those (the 90%) fall into two categories:  1.  People who quit OSI's
servers due to the antisocial element. and 2. People that OSI banned (which
is to say, the very worst of the antisocial element).

That day a while back that OSI banned massive numbers of people, we had 20
applicants in one day.  People with names like PsyKoBarf and Buttpirate.

So... we're very aggressive in trying to identify which group a person is in.
The players want us to ban early and ban often.  It's a feature.

On top of that, there aren't very many UO Emulators running 24/7.  It's a
very different thing than with text muds, where there seem to be about 3 muds
per player and if you want players, maybe you have to be a little more
diplomatic, tolerant and even manipulative.

I wish I had been more involved in MUDs 15 or 20 years ago.  I wonder how our
growing pains compare to the MUDs at that time.  We're in a very different
situation than text muds today, but similar to where text muds were years and
years ago, maybe.
 
> What is it about administration personnel that makes them so much
> more delicate and important when it comes to being insulted or 
> offended?

That's a good question.

-- 
http://dundee.uong.com/



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