@SunnyJ covered most of it. The most important advice I can give you is that you can't please everyone. No one has ever been able to, no one is currently able to, and no one will ever be able to. Therefore, whatever you do, it's important to keep to your vision and to your target audience. Don't try to needlessly widen the game's scope to appeal to every genre of role-player. Have an experience that's as pure to what you want to do as you can make it; if you dilute it too much, it'll do more harm than good.

It's better to bring joy to twenty-five people than to bring a so-so experience to fifty.

@Gilette Introductions in the real world are almost never like that so I don't understand why people role-play them like that.

People tend to meet when their circumstances see them doing the same task together, whether that's working, studying, drinking, playing games or otherwise, and first meetings tend to center entirely around that activity. People get to know each other a little bit as they do something together, and if they enjoy each other's company they seek to meet again either to repeat the experience or try a new one.

"Getting to know someone" doesn't happen in a single meeting like role-players seem to think. It might be an attempt to establish immediate friendships and skip the boring parts, but the resulting role-play tends to be bland and boring.

If your MUSH has 100 log-ins but only 5 role-play every other day your MUSH is basically a failure. It's pretty frequent that when a MUSH falls into this kind of fate they'll say everything is fine because they still have lots of log-ins.

Log-in count is the least useful of MUSH metrics. A MUSH with 10 players but each can have 8 characters can easily feign looking like it has 80 players when really it's just a big cluster of alts, like Multiverse MUSH.

The best metric I've found is to measure: are people active, and are people having fun.

If a good percentage of your population is active, and people are having fun, you've made a good MUSH. Nothing else matters.

@ixokai If you asked me to make a MUSH and then told me my reward when the MUSH finally opens is to not be able to apply for a character at the same time as players, potentially not even getting a chance to try out for a character I really want to play... I wouldn't make the MUSH. That's just a really bad setup.

I agree there needs to be oversight so that staff doesn't first pick all the interesting characters, but surely there's a better way to do it than that.

Are you fishing for feedback or just stating plans?

I'd recommend keeping personality for FC and eliminating it for OC.

You see, an OC's personality is in the long run pointless to have. Players of OC characters will often take turns and departures from their plans or adapt them to events and plots. Their background is on the reverse very important, as you don't want someone's OC to have done crazy things in the past. Key points and important events only. No one cares what high school your OC went to.

It is naturally the other way around for FC characters. You already know their background, what you want to know is whether the player has a good idea of what he's signing up to play. If someone applies for Vegeta you want to be sure they understand who Vegeta is, because maybe they're just after the prestigious position, and power boost, of being Vegeta. At the same time you don't want an essay. Like backgrounds for OC characters, key points and important events only. No one cares what Vegeta's favorite food is, even if it's interesting trivia.

Your best bet for a nearly complete list of currently active and populated games is to just check out Mud-Stats:

http://mudstats.com/Browse

Sort the games by number of players, make sure online status is set to UP, set a world-type if you only want a certain type of database, and the first several pages of results should be accurate. Not fully complete by any stretch, but it's easier to use Mud-Stats to build your list and then ask people for games that aren't on Mud-Stats.

Here's a suggestion for how to handle keeping the list up to date: instead of a file downloaded and included with the client, have the list of games hosted on your own website and accessed through the BeipMU client. Add a "send report" button either next to each world or at the top of the list, allowing users to send feedback if a world in the list is dead, or if they want to add their world to the list because it isn't in it already. If necessary install a security check so people don't spam the report function and make your lives unpleasant.

That way, even if someone doesn't update BeipMU for a long stretch of time, the list of worlds will always be up to date. Since BeipMU isn't a program you'd use without an internet connection, the list being online doesn't disrupt anything, and being something you can store as plain-text, it won't eat people's data either.

@Tempest That's not active, that's just populated. MUSH population isn't an indicator of MUSH activity.

Activity is better measured in terms of "if I ask for role-play can I find role-play". That's a lot harder to compile a list for since it needs first-hand accounts from multiple sources to confirm.

If you want a list of games by population there's always the mudstats directory.

@gilette No, @ThatGuyThere is right, that sort of stuff does happen in the real world too. That doesn't make it right, but it does happen.

Student bodies and clubs are the best example I can think of, as by their nature they'll rotate membership every three to five years as people join and then graduate. The identity and purpose of any given group of students can change entirely based on the agenda of new students joining.

Back when I was still in college, I joined the "Japan Appreciation" committee/group/hangout/student body, whatever you want to call it. It was basically a private room with a TV and a huge library of anime and manga on shelves. When I joined, it was still true to its roots. There were only about twenty of us, so between classes maybe only four or five would ever be in the room at the same time.

One year before I graduated, freshmen showed up with a Nintendo 64 and asked if they could use the room to play Smash Bros when we weren't watching anime. They paid their membership fee and all so we didn't see a problem with it, so long as it didn't disturb the people who came to watch anime or read manga in peace.

Over the next few months, those freshmen lured in more and more of their friends and would spend increasingly alarming amounts of time playing the game. The ones in charge, like me, were too busy with graduation projects to settle disputes and through our neglect the anime and manga club became the Smash Bros club, unofficially. Old members left over it, new ones looking to play the game came in droves.

By the time I'd graduated, one of the freshmen had become head of the club due to there not being anyone else with the drive to do anything left, and policies changed drastically to put a bigger focus on gaming than the club's original purpose.

If they'd followed proper procedure, they would've made their own group/club by going through the school's administration. With their own room and TV they wouldn't have had to disrupt another group. But: the application process for getting a new student group approved and funded was notoriously harsh at the time, not to mention unfriendly to people who just wanted to play video games while at school. It was easier for them to invade the one club that already had a TV.

@tnp Party hosts do get to eat at the same time as guests though.

And staff should get to pick FC at the same time as players.

Your equivalency is false, you talk of an example where staff would have selected their FC and closed them before the game even opened. As long as it's done at the same time players can, with the same application process, where's the injustice?

Staff signed up for months of work before opening and possibly years of work after opening to keep everyone happy, free of charge, at the expense of significant chunks of their free time, what's the harm letting them pick characters at the same time as everyone else?

I'm deleting my entire reply because I came up with a better one.

What if instead of a MU Wiki we had a MU review site.

We could call it Rotten ToMUtoes.

From experience, TMC's forums empower game owners to silence criticism on their games and that's never a good thing. I recall, without naming names, one incident where someone posted in a thread with several logs as back-up about a case of harassment coming from an admin on a game to warn prospective new players of this abusive staff, and the game owner made noise until TMC mods silenced the conversation and things went back to the status quo of the game owner posting ads and patch notes for their game like nothing ever happened.

Perhaps the most damning thing about it is that it hadn't devolved into what we'd consider Hog Pit material immediately. The person voicing concerns about harassment and providing logs was civil and polite, it's the game owner that went straight into Hog Pit mode. Unfortunately, TMC's policies are basically that game owners are always right about their games. It's not the greatest environment.

This is pretty interesting. What kinds of systems are used for characters interacting in competitive manners? Typical combat system, dice, coin flips, free-form? Do characters have special attributes set on them to determine how strong and weak they are, or is everyone assumed equal due to dream-world madness?

My experience with multi-themes is that people like going for the craziest most powerful characters they can get away with, which hurts players like me who prefer to play more mundane existences, so I'm curious to hear what your approach to this is.

@ping Coder advice, if you don't know what to do about a file type and what should and shouldn't be in a file, make the file plain-text, only include the information you'll need in it, and handle formatting and prettying in the GUI or program itself.

If you end up incorporating more fields in a later version of the file, just host a second copy of it and leave the old one for people still using the old client. Plain-text files are small, won't clog your bandwidth or storage space up, and reading from them is painless in most languages.

I understand if you'd still rather have a file people have to update, just thought the suggestion was worth a shot. The advice to use Mud-Stats stays though.

Your best bet for a nearly complete list of currently active and populated games is to just check out Mud-Stats:

http://mudstats.com/Browse

Sort the games by number of players, make sure online status is set to UP, set a world-type if you only want a certain type of database, and the first several pages of results should be accurate. Not fully complete by any stretch, but it's easier to use Mud-Stats to build your list and then ask people for games that aren't on Mud-Stats.

Here's a suggestion for how to handle keeping the list up to date: instead of a file downloaded and included with the client, have the list of games hosted on your own website and accessed through the BeipMU client. Add a "send report" button either next to each world or at the top of the list, allowing users to send feedback if a world in the list is dead, or if they want to add their world to the list because it isn't in it already. If necessary install a security check so people don't spam the report function and make your lives unpleasant.

That way, even if someone doesn't update BeipMU for a long stretch of time, the list of worlds will always be up to date. Since BeipMU isn't a program you'd use without an internet connection, the list being online doesn't disrupt anything, and being something you can store as plain-text, it won't eat people's data either.

I can't vote on this poll because the options aren't comprehensive enough.

Basic character information and stats should always be fully visible. This not only helps prevent problematic builds but in the case of character versus character interactions allows better "pairing" of folks who are at similar combat proficiency levels to ensure nobody gets taken out after one round of throwing dice. It also helps you spot people who might be sitting on five years of XP and who exclusively target weaker characters for combat. I've seen that happen often enough, even on games without XP systems where "power levels" were fixed. If I play a combat-focused guy I'd prefer to fight another combat-focused character, because odds are the social manipulator won't make for a very fun fight. Not for him, not for me. By the same logic if I play a scientist who happens to have a gun but isn't great at using it, I'd prefer as much as possible to engage other similarly-skilled characters unless on that particular day I'm up for being chased through hallways by Pyramid Head.

What should be hidden is stuff people should find out in-game. Secret contacts, backstory, plot hooks and the like. Characters shouldn't be open books because then there's no sense of discovery and mystery. Their capabilities and what they can bring to any given scene or event, however, should be fully revealed.

I'm deleting my entire reply because I came up with a better one.

What if instead of a MU Wiki we had a MU review site.

We could call it Rotten ToMUtoes.

@zombiegenesis If you intend to have closing periods, then you want some way for players to contest closing characters and try to compete for them. What method you use for that is up to you and every method has ups and downs.

Proper applications are seen as archaic and tedious but will get you the best results.

Short pitches are fast and easy to manage but give you a worse idea of who should get the character, and can be prone to people who put no thought into it.

@tnp Party hosts do get to eat at the same time as guests though.

And staff should get to pick FC at the same time as players.

Your equivalency is false, you talk of an example where staff would have selected their FC and closed them before the game even opened. As long as it's done at the same time players can, with the same application process, where's the injustice?

Staff signed up for months of work before opening and possibly years of work after opening to keep everyone happy, free of charge, at the expense of significant chunks of their free time, what's the harm letting them pick characters at the same time as everyone else?

@ixokai If you asked me to make a MUSH and then told me my reward when the MUSH finally opens is to not be able to apply for a character at the same time as players, potentially not even getting a chance to try out for a character I really want to play... I wouldn't make the MUSH. That's just a really bad setup.

I agree there needs to be oversight so that staff doesn't first pick all the interesting characters, but surely there's a better way to do it than that.

@bored Tier 1, to me, is any character who has their own comic. Titular characters. Characters whose names you see on the cover of comics to attract people. Those are universally the characters you don't want someone having multiple of. This doesn't work 100% of the time because some really weird and obscure characters got their own titled spin-offs but as a rule of thumb it works. Needs a bit more work to identify Tier 1 rogues and villains because they don't tend to get their own titled spin-offs though.