A few MUD related questions for the Oracle

[germs]

In no particular order...

1. Is the mud well backed-up and in little or no danger of ever being permantly destroyed?
2. If you died tomorrow, would it be easy for somebody else to pick up where you left off? Would the mud go offline? Is there an action plan in case of disaster?
3. Which feature(s) that is/are unique to alter aeon are you most proud of? Please name at least five.
4. What are the biggest problems with the game that you'd like to fix at some point? Please name at least five. Try not to say something vague like 'class balance'. Please be specific.
5. Do you consider Alter Aeon to be your life's masterpiece?
6. Do you consider the game's code, fludity, stability, inner-mechanisms ect. to be a work of art?
In other words, if you died tomorrow would you be satisfied with leaving the game behind as a testament
to your greatness?
7. Besides yourself, who else do you give credit to for making the game what it is today?
8. Do you consider the game to be a success? If not, *specifically* what requirements must be met before you will consider it to be a success?
9. Do you believe the game will exist 100 years from now in one form or another? Try to give a better guess than "50/50".

[Dentin]

You're just not going to get a lot with these 'list five things' questions.  That's fundamentally not the way I operate internally, and the answers would be meaningless next week if I actually posted them.

1) Yes, the mud is well backed up.  Nevertheless, it will almost certainly be permanently destroyed at some point.  I find it unlikely that I'll be actively maintaining it a thousand years from now.

2) No, it wouldn't be easy to pick up where I left off.  It would be pretty easy to keep it online though, simply give it server space and a periodic restart.  The existing imms and admins could pretty easily keep it running, but it would likely take a while before new skills and the like were added.

3) I don't really think AA has anything that unique.  The thing that makes AA work is the combination of things it has.  About the only real weird thing we have is the ability to enter containers.

4) I honestly don't know.  Mostly I find spots that I'm unhappy with, or that players are unhappy with, and try to change them to improve the overall flow of the game.  A lot of the things that I would consider problems are only problems if you try to do something new that depends on behaviour being changed.

5) At this point, yes.  This is perhaps sad and unfortunate, because it could be so much more.  It tells me I need to work harder.

6) Some aspects of the game are a work of art; most of it is not.  If I died tomorrow, it probably would be a testament to my greatness, which quite frankly means I need to work harder.  A lot harder.

7) Definitely the builders, especially the early ones (Wyvren in particular, the original Alaska gods, the original Texas gods.)  After that, the players, who helped guide the builders and me through making a game that was fun to play.

The game right now is not a success, by my personal definition.  I'd have to bring it up to a minimum of 200 players to begin considering it a success, and after that I'd probably just set higher goals.  On the other hand, I do not consider the game a failure either.  It's simply waiting for success.

9) This is dependent on a lot of factors.  If I die, the odds decrease substantially, and are probably on the order of 25-50% that the game will be backed up somewhere, 1% that it will still be running.  If I don't die, odds are probably 90% that it will be backed up somewhere, 10% that it will still be running in a recognizable form.