[MUD-Dev] Languages (slightly offtopic, was Text Parsing)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 10:07 PM 6/6/99 +0100, I personally witnessed Greg Munt jumping up to say:
>
>The above indicates a direction in which the list as a whole might take, and
>which would ultimately result in a cliquey bunch of developers who dismiss
>any idea or concept, out of hand, because it doesn't match *their*
>perception of what a mud SHOULD be.

Matt's not dismissing every idea on its face. He's dismissing all of the
people like me who go "your combat system sucks". And he should. It's his
game. If I think his system sucks, then I don't have to play, and he's okay
with that. If his system favors the speed reader, the macro programmer, and
the T-1 in the basement --he's okay with that. And if he's okay with it,
he's okay with it. He thinks we don't get it. And maybe we don't. 

What will you accept as criticism on your own game? There are a lot of
ideas I'm not open to about Ultimate Universe. There are a lot more I *am*
open to. But just because my mind's made up on certain issues -- like
whether to announce it when a player's ship moves into your sector, which
I've decided not to because it has huge spam potential -- doesn't mean I'm
unreceptive to every idea. I can't easily explain the entire game to the
list, and even if I did, someone would join as soon as I finished and not
understand anything. It's a lose/lose situation. I've gone into some pretty
lengthy descriptions here of what various things in UU are like, and I've
barely even scratched the surface. 

I think Matt's game is much like this. It would take him far too long, much
longer than any of us would like, to explain how the system works and why
it works that way and expect us to understand. So he stops after a certain
amount of explanation and goes "look, you don't get it, and if you don't
get it I can't really explain it". And he's right. I think there are
fundamental differences in the Cabal and the average MUD's mobs. At first
glance, however, they seem pretty much the same: they wander around and sit
in rooms to give the players something to kill. It would take much too long
to explain what the differences are and why they're important, so if you
don't get it, well, you don't get it. 

And if you don't get it, you can't effectively evaluate or improve it, so
while you can come up with ideas and throw them out there... you *have* to
realise it's an awful lot like telling an aeronautical engineer how much
cooler your design would be for airplanes. The engineer is just plain more
experienced in this than you, and if he looks at your design and goes
"look, it won't fly"... you just have to trust him, for God's sake. Sure,
you can come up with a great idea, but he's the one that has to make it
fly, and if it can't be done -- it can't be done, and that's it. Maybe it
would be a better design for a car, or a boat, or a bike helmet. Some ideas
just don't fit.

Sure, you can come up and say "Why not allow people to eat the leaves off
trees?" and the developers might think it's a great idea and implement it,
but the natural extension "Why not allow people to eat the bricks off
walls?" is probably pretty stupid. Yeah, it's an extreme example, but a
tree has leaves at the top and a wall has bricks at the top, so can't you
eat the top parts of things? You can eat the top parts of *some* things,
but not of others. If you don't understand why... well, you just don't get
it, you know? ;)

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H       -=CABAL::3146=- 


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