People play MMORPGs because it provides a feeling of reward. It's baked into the psychology of the format: You level up, you get gear, you clear missions, you make progress dozens of times in a single sit-down session of an MMORPG.
MU can be rewarding, yes, but it also can be sitting around for a few hours to find roleplay to begin with, navigating the myriad egos in the hobby, and then spending hours of your day/night trying to accomplish a much smaller number of things in the hopes that it will feel satisfying.
I just don't see this all as very complicated and think a higher-level approach makes it easy to mentally grasp:
- MU isn't as immediately or frequently rewarding as most other online forms of entertainment.
- It is difficult to not bump into the social issues on MU. There are large egos, pushy everything has to be my way players, creepers, etc.
- Unless people are going to commit to working out policies that they intend to enforce and check their own behavior in a meaningful way that involves COMMITTING to identifying where they are part of the problem...theres little point in discussing this.
If #3 is going to be "Everyone else is stupid but me, and I'm not the problem" then you may as well all sign an agreement to meet up once a year for a headcount to see who died that year as the hobby slowly marches off into extinction and further irrelevancy.
People leave the hobby because of people and timesink, and when GOOD players leave because of people(the juice isn't worth the squeeze), the % of people who are hard to deal with (in the population) rises.
And I think the reason why this topic has gone into subtangents about MUCKMOOMUDMUX and into talking about Ruby/Perl etc is because the people in this conversation know that trying to get people to knock it off with obsessive/ego behavior isnt a task, it's a war that will be more difficult and trying than it's worth; it would likely result in the community at each other's throats.
There's so much thin skin in this community you could print a bible on it, so the hopeful sense of things is trying to improve it in some way that doesn't involve actually addressing the behavior of some of these dinosaur players who are the core of this community and this forum...which is why the hog pit is such a cowardly arena where people can throw barbs at each other over minutae.