Ok long post. And im sure i'll get all sorts of flack on this and im sure i'll get the expected retaliatory responses.
Issue 1: The Ball Being Constantly Dropped
I admit I am not an Immortal and I cant code for shit. But to me the ball has been dropped by the immortals a few times.
Savaena...spend hours and hours and hours doing it, dieing ,etc to find out its not finished...why was this area EVER put in if it was not finished? And people were obviously doing the quest so why wasnt it being looked at?
Devils Isle...Gauze/Laurana/Moiraine spends dozens upon dozens of manhours figuring this place out and died many times. I myself spent alot of time in there with him trying to figure it out. We finally figure it out...and the rewards are shit. Now this area was never done and the eq obviously needed upgrading and/or updating. Again why was this not being looked into during the weeks of figuring this place out?
Angorn...Once again Gauze and many others spend tons of time and lives and shit attempting to figure this place out. The only time bugs were found is while we were actually STUCK. Again...why was this place not being looked into more thoroughly during our questing of it?
Now im not saying every quest should be looked into while the mortals are playing it. But areas that have NOT been done or NOT been done too often are huge targets for bugs. Making sure a rare quest works for your players to me is a priority. I am not told everything of course. Im not an immortal...this is simply my point of view on the situation.
Issue 2: Hypocrisy on MUD growth
We all want this MUD to grow...yet I feel the very thing we are trying to make grow...we are actually just alienating and forgetting about. Ive heard this statement before: "Players come and go" How is this supposed to make the MUD grow? Honestly? You want people to come in yet you dont care about actually keeping them into the game. This is like Disneyland with no attractions. The MUD is the product, the consumer needs to feel rewarded. One person says a bad thing to a few friends...the few friends tell their friends...and so forth. I feel the MUD needs more games, more interaction by the immortals, and god forbid if one or two rules are bent.
Now I ask you to please NOT to get angry with me. I dont mean ANY disrespect. I appreciate this game. I love this game. I want the best for this game. Thats why im so passionate about a few things. Even to the point of being insultive which I apologize (to Kayenta). Just PLEASE consider what im saying. If you dont agree then you dont agree. Again this is just opinion with no animosity meant. Thank you.

i don't even know what the intent was for a finale for savaena. i've looked thru it a few times when ppl have bugged stuff, but i can't find any info on what it was SUPPOSED to do.

devil's isle...there is a few issues w/ the eq and making it worthy of the amount of time for the INITIAL solving of the quest vs the effort required AFTER you already know it. sure, it's a bitch the 1st time, but becomes infinitely easier after that. should you get +10 +10 eq EACH time? it would be somewhat difficult to monitor it in such a fashion as to reward the person based on the # of times completed, as it would be easily exploited w/ alts. i've thought about how to implement it and discussed it w/ whoever completed it.

angrorn...this thing is a mess. i've gone thru several portions of it yrs ago and it worked up to the point i checked to. some of the 'problems' ppl are having is that there is more to it than they know, and i'm not going to tell you what. sure, some of it is bugs. i can only test INTENT of the builder, i can't think of EVERY possible way you guys will attempt to try it and test that to make sure it works. so you guys go do something that SHOULD work, but noone thought it might happen, so it's broken for that method. i didn't make the area, Kay didnt make the area, Blob didnt make the area. we arent going to comb thru thousands of lines of script to see what happens. it was alleged to be working when put into the game. when ppl find stuff that doesnt work, we can look at it. from what i'm told, it is 'working'....if you do the right things.

unfortunately, i am not paid to be an imm. if it was my full time job, i could sit here for hrs per day looking at these things. but since i (and the rest of us) are pretty much volunteering our time, things get done when they get done. we all have plenty of other stuff we need to get done off line.

I think you have some valid points Tesh, but so does Paz.

Paz is correct, Angrorn is a mess. Its taken me months to figure out what Hyggy really wanted the area to do, and I actually had to take a week and sit and map the entire area out in excel to even understand it. And I appreciate you and Laurana keeping at it, cause really, thats how it got debugged.

I've spent ALOT of time looking at Angrorn to make it work for you guys. And, like Paz (well, maybe not totally like Paz... :p ), I do it because I love the mud and want to contribute to it in some meaningful way. I dont get paid... its something I want to do, but at the same time you guys got to cut me a little slack. I dont code well. I can typically understand it if its there for me, but I need Blobs help to write it so that it works.

Paz is right about the Devils Isle eq, and the same for some other quests. They are hard the first time, then not again. Same thing with Angrorn now. So what should be the standard for eq on quests that are hard the first time, then not again?


That being said, and I cant speak for Paz or Blobs, but all 3 of us are really busy IRL atm. So we fix things when we can. And thats the best that we can do at the moment.

Anyway, hope some of this makes sense since its early in the am...

Cheers

Jen

As always I'm busy, busy, busy. But here I am with a little time to respond to your concerns.

Areas are generally the responsibility of their creator(s). When an area has problems the first place to look for bug fixing should be the original creator. As you have seen, many of the original creators are no longer around. If we consider Devil's Isle we see that nobody got far enough when the relevant immortal was around. As such, placing the burden of tracing through some other builder's area on the shoulders of an immortal is a bit unfair. I have found in such situations that the best route to a solution is to use an explore-feedback-repair system. In other words, the player goes out and explores, get stuck or finds something buggered (explore), submits a bug report (feedback), and an immortal fixes the problem, sometimes checking the next logical step if it is obvious (repair). This allows the burden of correcting the problem to be shared across interested parties. So far this has worked out very well. Devil's Isle is now fixed and so too is Angrorn. You have to understand, even though we have the area, reading through spaghetti code scripted into the area is not an easy process for most immortals. The unfortunate thing about Angrorn was that when Hygrale said it was ready, he was around, and then shortly after, he was not, and then it was found it was not ready, and then it was found that the code was an absolute mess. Redundant script variables, misspelled script variables, invalid logic, partial script implementations, to-be-finished later messages, etc, etc. Some time ago I probably would have fixed this up lickety split, but unfortunately for the MUD my days of spending 6 hours a night working on the MUD are over... I have children now and they are my first priority.

The other point you raise is about players coming and going. Well this is a fact, players do indeed come and go. Some even say they are going to build an area. Do you know how many people I've set up to build an area just to see them not finish? Not even barely start? Do you know how annoying it is for Pazam or Kayenta or myself to spend hours helping some newbie builder just for them to drop off the face of the planet after a couple of weeks. We've gone through this routine over and over and over again. I understand it takes time to build an area, but right now the tools to do so have never been simpler, and yet few people have the focus it takes to finish. 90% of the MUD's areas were made in a the first third of the MUD's life. So it's not like we don't want the MUD to grow, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of reliability. Anyone seen Arbosus lately? But this totally focuses on the immortals as being the sole promoters of the game, and yet, the players are just as responsible. The MUD is a community, not a slave camp where the immortals are the serving the beck and call of the players.

As a community we work together to make the game better. Unfortunately time is scarcer than it has been in the past and so sometimes it takes longer to accomplish goals. I'm not angry at your questions, or your thoughts, but I hope you understand that we do what we can when we can.