State of the MUD - Feb, 2013

[Chalgyr]

It has been a long while since I wrote one of these up. Not that things have not happened on the MUD, we have seen changes put into place and players who have come and gone. I think that is the reality of any online community - that people come and go, interest carries over peaks and valleys and hopefully in the end people generally enjoy their experience with said community, when they do decide to leave.

Most of the time, people leave of their own accord. Previous imms like Janus or Farnite, or previous players like Valkeo. Now and then a player leaves for a time, and then comes back - like Sye or Daklore have. Of course sometimes players are asked to leave for things like cheating, or being abusive to other players. I really don't like to 'babysit' or have to feel like I am needed to referee disagreements. They do inevitably happen, and I have had my share of them over the years online, though I like to think I tend to take the high road - that has not always been the case I'm sure. A lot of lessons learned in over fifteen years of MUDing.

Those lessons learned come in other forms as well - not just in how to interact with other people, but what I would do differently if this was day 1 of KotL. Games are always evolving. I really enjoyed World of Warcraft - I played it for years. I like Guild Wars 2 - it feels like a natural evolution of World of Warcraft. That does not invalidate WoW, it just shows that over time, lessons can be learned and different choices made. Do all of these choices work out for the better? Not always, but they often do.

We have more changes coming to KotL over the next couple of weeks. By now some of these upcoming changes have been leaked out I'm sure, but the end goal is to provide a good experience for players. Whether that experience is through the game mechanics of leveling up, or role-playing with others or just socially interacting with people in an out of character fashion - we hope you continue to keep playing here and adding to those.

We as a staff are still trying to learn. We have ideas - but we do not claim to have all of the 'answers'. I know personally, half the time I do not know what the questions really are. I was looking at newbie school content - the kinds of things that can be learned by new players that may be helpful, and Mira brought up that newbies have been getting killed in there a fair amount. So, we will add some code to reduce that possibility with the other batch of changes we have coming.

I posted a poll and note recently asking about room descriptions. That is just one of several topics I am interested in, and I will be putting more notes on the MUD and here on the forums over the coming weeks to try and see what you, our players, think of things on the MUD. I want to have a very open, honest converasation about the things that work and those things that do not.

Thank you all for playing and making this community what it is.

- Nick