Experience as staff (for any MUD)?

I staffed on an RP (not RPI) mud for almost a decade. There is a key difference between being a staffer and being a player and it really can change your perception, RP, and even character choices on that MUD. It can even affect how you play and make concepts on all MUDs.

1) Staffers tend to peek behind the curtain. They know things about current plots, roles, etc etc. This allows them to be able to assess the needs of the game. Do we need more clan members here. Do we need an interesting plot there. Would a raider in this area promote RP more in line with the lore. As a player you can kind of see this overtime with experience but as a staffer you can become acutely aware of this. When I staffed I played a lot of teacher/mentor roles. I filled the spaces players seemed to avoid but were required for a healthy mud. I personally loved it.

2) No. I think being able to understand a MUD from a staffer level can make you a better player. However it is very easy for staff to begin resenting players. All staff kind of succumb to this overtime some more than others. You know things they don't. You know how things should be played. So when you see deviations for special snowflake syndrome you kind of go "Why can't this person play a role to docs. There's a lot of enjoyment there for them if they gave it a chance."

3) I staffed on a heavily modified SMAUG mud. I felt my tools were adequate as the where command gave you the vnum and room name and you could easily identify where people were. I could also go anywhere I needed too. Create items. Etc etc. Then again I was Head Storyteller so I had a bit more freedom than the junior storytellers. They had access to all the information tools and stuff but weren't allowed to create items willy nilly.

It is really no longer the case, if you look at things, as posted above, with Bam a kuraci merchant for example. She was around 20 years as a Kuraci of game time, and years before that as a merchant who worked their way up to master brewing. And they had to spend a RL Year of their life, with a still and the damn plant to make her drink, in order to get 15 minutes worth of work done. It was the saddest thing. I can't think of any other place in the world that would say that that is acceptable.

I've worked on 3 different MUDs, two were RPIs, one was a far cry from any sort of RP, though it claimed such.





To me, being staff was an unusual experience. It definitely can "ruin" the game for you. I refuse(d) to play on any of the MUDs I had staffed on after realizing how corrupt, futile, and ridiculous things were staffside. My latest stint as staff on a game has really soured me to the whole idea. Everything event wise fell upon my shoulders. I was the only "imm" equivalent logging on to run plots, to create things for players, to oversee them, to award them, and to brighten their days. It sincerely has ruined me and sucked me down to the bones, and the marrow from them, in terms of even wanting to log on to *any* MUD and play any more.





I thought that the RPI/DIKU muds were fun in terms of how you could control things. The last game I (am/was) imming at? It's Cold C, which is a dead fucking language from about 20 years ago that has no relevance in the coding world today. It is a dinosaur and hasn't been updated and was abandoned and used only for MUDs in the mid to late 90s. It has crazy customization, but you can't find any literature for it: I only am an "event" GM, so I don't code things and even if I wanted to learn a smattering of Cold C to get what I wanted done, it would take oodles of research... since like, no documentation exists on it any more.

vorpalbunny/jenki - I think I agree with that (re: cutting down on the lifespan). Arm has some very cool coded mechanics that are really fun when you discover them for the first time. As a really simple example, my first MUD ever was a basic CircleMUD without hit locations, encumbrance, etc. So seeing specific locations getting hit (with tasteful, simple hit messages) was one of my early thrills. This made me realize you could buy armor specifically for those locations. But there was no way to tell what was the 'best' neckguard, so I had to read the descriptions, learn about things like encumbrance and (later on) aggressive 'rinth NPCs, etc. It was all very simple and easy to learn, but it had a lot of interesting depth. But if I had access to the code I'd know immediately and exactly what neckguard to buy, and purchasing it would be a chore not a puzzle.

ask - "Cold C" was a scripting language? My only experience with scripting used something called DragonScript I think. I could find nothing on Cold C, and had never heard about it til now. Wild.

Thanks for all the responses guys.

It doesn't help I'm also retarded and the only thing I know how to code is HTML/CSS from about 10 years ago.

I staffed on Shadows of Isildur for a while, just under a year. Mostly it served to open my eyes to just how little of a fuck the average player gives about portraying a realistic, believable character whenever they stand to benefit from doing the opposite. Naturally I wasn't oblivious to how bad people can get, but you really discover the extent of it when you're able to actively observe them while they think they're alone. The same has always been true of Armageddon where it's easier to discover due to the variety of ways even a mortal player can spy on other characters.

The difference between SoI and Arm, however, was that staff on Arm did pretty much nothing about it and almost never intervened when someone abused the game as long as it didn't affect any PCs who were liked by staff. On SoI, if someone did things like killing city NPCs for their loot or staying in one room for a week just spamming skills over and over to max them without ever roleplaying or interacting with anybody, they would get caught and dealt with. On Arm, you get away with this shit nine times out of ten. People would literally camp certain NPCs, like that dwarf in the Tuluk warrens with the nice armor or that elf in Undertuluk with the lockpick, to the point where their corpses were stacked several high. People - even in high-karma roles - will go around PKing everybody they encounter on the thinnest possible pretense of roleplay, and while staff might occasionally scoff at this or give a token wrist-slap, they essentially don't try to stop it.

This kind of thing creates an atmopshere within a game which, over the years, grows and becomes ingrained until it drags down the overall standards for roleplaying and fairness. When you don't hold people to any kind of standard, they'll get worse at whatever they're doing. As a result, Armageddon ended up with by far the worst average roleplaying quality of all the established RPIs. There's a core of very good and creative veterans, but the rest of the playerbase consists mostly of a horde of absolutely awful roleplayers and shameless twinks, and the game has become the platform of choice for people like Kronibas and X-D who have played for fucking ever and still roleplay so poorly that one thinks one has encountered a new player when interacting with them, yet are lauded as great players by Armageddon's sycophant community.