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Interview
with who?
- Larnen Skyfire: Part 4
What would be your tip to someone else starting up a mud?
I would say 'don't even CONSIDER it' unless you have lots of free time,
and are prepared to make a huge commitment, which could last years and years. Many people
think they can just boot up a stock mud, make all their mates wizards, run around on a power
trip for ages and sit back and wait to lap up the praise. It doesn't work like that -
you NEVER have enough time to do all the things you really want to see happen. You have
a responsibility not just to your own sense of fun, but to the people who play your mud -
after all, if I was to throw in the towel and shut Ele down now, I would be effecting
thousands of people, and I have a duty to consider those people in any decisions I take.
But in way of other tips, I would say the following:
* Pick your wizards carefully, and do not give our power to random passers by, no matter how
skilled they may claim to be. Interview everyone, or ensure you've known them online or off
for a long time.
* If you are terrified of security and try to lock your mud down to prevent those you have wizzed
running off with bits of it, you will strangle creativity. Once you have hand picked your wizards
you must be prepared to trust them.
* Your trust will be broken sometimes. This does not make it the wrong approach.
* Listen to your players, but do not try to run your mud in a populist
fashion. If you only do things that will be popular, you will suffer in the long run.
Sometimes you have to take the hard decisions, and be prepared to take the criticism. You
must be true to your vision of what you are trying to achieve or there is no point in even
trying.
What is the hardest thing about running a mud?
Finding the time to do all the things you know need doing. Time is a critical one,
especially if you are working full time. Sometimes with a list of outstanding issues
you want to address that's as high as a mountain, it can be demoralising, so the ability to
maintain a positive mindset is critical. The other thing is that running a mud is akin, in many ways,
to being permanently on call. If something breaks at 4am in the morning, I'll fix it. If we need
to physically move a server, we'll do it in the early hours to minimise impact on our
players. An example of this was when we moved from Demon - I moved the machine across London
sometime after midnight, and Azazel and I spent a number of hours sorting out all the various bits
and pieces that needed doing in the machine room of its new host. Both of us got into work the
next day looking very bleary eyed after only a few hours sleep. You have to be prepared to do
that - when running a mud the buck stops with you, so you need to do what is needed to keep it
running smoothly.
What is the easiest thing about running a mud?
Easy? Running a mud? :) Im not really sure theres an easy answer to that ;)
There are certainly things that are easier than I thought they would be,
but most of these are purely from long familiarity.
Do you ever wonder if it's all worth it?
Sometimes. Mainly when despite all the effort and hours you put in, you
get criticised for not doing enough. Or, the flip side, that you spend hours upon hours doing
something that is desperately needed, only to have a bunch of people who
don't like the most superficial aspect slag it/you off. Or even when something has to be done that is not
popular, but clearly necessary, and people refuse to look at the bigger picture and
concentrate only on its immediate impact on them. Some people believe that any negative change is just the admin 'messing
about with something that worked fine.' In truth nearly all such changes are because its causing
serious problems elsewhere, and something needs to be done. Most are prompted by something very
positive that has happened, which has unbalanced things. An example is the move from daily to weekly
reboots - this had a massive positive impact on the rate people gained exp, so we needed to take the edge of
this with other changes to counter it - naturally people only looked at the negative changes, and ignored
the positive, turning to insults when their demands to have things changed back
weren't acceded to.
Muds only survive due to the commitment and enthusiasm of the people who run them, and at times
I wonder how this small group of people can be so hostile to the people who give up their
time to make it all happen, while claiming to care about the mud at all. Of course, for every
person who complains, there are five who agree that it was needed, even if they'd rather
you'd not needed to. The whole 'vocal minority' phenomena is very prevalent
on muds.
Why do you do it? What drives you?
Because we have a mud that gives a great degree of pleasure to a large
number of people. I know that for every hour I put in, other people will get many times more pleasure
out of it. I've already spoken about the positive aspects of blazing new
ground, and providing an environment where people can get together and have fun, and
that's really a critical thing.
We want people to have fun - if people
don't enjoy it, there is little point having a mud at all. Some may argue that bearing this in mind, doing unpopular things makes no sense, but this is a short
sighted view. If avoiding a hard decision breaks the balance of the mud, or makes things too easy,
people will love it....at first, but a prize that is not won is worth very little. There are any
number of muds where you can noble in 6 hours, but when you do it on Ele, you know it MEANS
something, and is something that has value. If you can noble too easily, it will get boring very
quickly and the mud as a whole will suffer.
Even the most cursory examination will show that
these '6 hour to noble' muds last for a very short time. I won't go into a full treatise on this, but
it is a subject I am very well versed in - something that some people may have heard me refer to
as the Monty Haul Syndrome, something has been the bane of muds and roleplaying games alike for as
far back as they've gone. Elephant Mud is very rare in that it avoids these problems almost
completely, and it is for this reason that our players stay for the long periods of time that they do.
Compared to many other muds, our player loyalty and retention is extraordinary. And for as long
as people keep loving Ele, so will the people who run it.
How many days of your life have you spent working on
Elephant Mud since
it began?
Too many! A huge number actually - I think last time I worked it out, I
had spent something between 18 and 20% of every second of every day since April 1993 logged on and
active. That is NOT excluding time asleep - if we factor that it, the figure is far higher.
Its certainly well over a year, probably more like a year and a half of SOLID login time.
As time goes on, and I have less free time to commit to the mud, we have done a lot of things
to become more organised and more time-efficient, but despite my best efforts, the only way to
stay on top of things is to accept that late nights are a permanent fixture of running the mud.
Many of our late owls will often see me online on the wrong side of 2:30am, and 5 hours later
I'll be getting up again. All I can say is hurrah for weekends :)
Interview
with Larnen: Part 3
Interview
with Larnen: Part 1
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