[MUD-Dev] Mud Metrics

[rayzam]

----- Original Message -----
From: <adam at treyarch.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 5:35 PM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] The Player Wimping Guidebook


> On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Koster, Raph wrote:
> > That's why tracking good metrics is important. You need not only
playerbase
> > but (if you can get them) things like player lifespan, based on when
they
> > started. Hard to get good data on a non-account based system, but I urge
> > everyone to try, if they are really interested in seeing what changes
are
> > liked and disliked by the playerbase.
>
> Agreed.  Even on an account system, which I use, it's very valuable.
>
> I was actually about a week late opening the mud because I was coding
> all the statistic-keeping functions.  It was frustrating at the time,
> because I felt like I was working on something that didn't matter much,
> not being visible to players.  But it was well worth it having that
> data from day one.
>
> Adam

    Very true. Other things worth tracking: race usage, guild memberships,
both overall, and averages by time of day, cash and experience given by each
area, skill & spell usages separately by players and monsters, etc. We even
track the amount of damage done by each damage type [i.e. physical, magic,
fire, cold, psionic, sonic, holy, unholy, acid, etc].

    Track everything you can, it will pay off in the end. That's how science
advances, and that's what a mud is in a sense, a new world. Even as a staff
member, there are many things to discover about it, in some ways more than
as a player. These metrics are the pulse of the mud. So far, the only thing
we've ever tracked that has turned out to be worthless to track was
identd's, as most systems didn't use them in the first place..

    Rayzam
    www.retromud.org





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