[MUD-Dev] [NEC] 2.8: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (fwd)

[Michael Tresca]

J C Lawrence [mailto:claw at kanga.nu] posted on Thursday, July 03, 2003 7:22
AM

> 3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the
> things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either
> join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher
> levels.  There needs to be some kind of segmentation of
> capabilities.  Now, the segmentation can be total -- you're in or
> you're out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be
> partial -- anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post,
> non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to
> moderate, you really have to have been around for a while.  It has
> to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some
> users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to
> defend themselves.

And this is my argument for why there must be a screen for users to
ANY MMORPG with any theme whatsoever (that'd be all of them) if they
wan to have a cohesive community.  The community needs a means of
defending itself.  Who the people to defend against may vary, but
usually it's a horde of pre-teen punks with lots of time on their
hands.  Segmentation is critical in definding target markets and
playerbases.  It's not about role-playing alone -- that's just an
extreme market segmentation and a complicated barrier to
participation.  In can be anything, but it has to be defined vs.
"well as long as you can pay you can play."

     Mike "Talien" Tresca
      RetroMUD Administrator
      http://michael.tresca.net
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