[ScryMUD]pfiles

[Edward Roper]

On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 18:40, Brian wrote:
> How many times have people said that something is being "completely
> reworked" or "totally overhauled" or "rewritten from the ground up" in the
> past year or two?  And how many times has it actually happened?

Quite often. I think the overpowering reason for this is that we spent
too much time talking about what we all ideally wanted. Unfortunately
when it comes to a 98,000+ line chunk of code reworking things into a
list of ideals is a bit daunting. Many of the debates focused around
such things as implementing XML back-ends. These sort of changes are 
implementation details, not player details. All player-noticeable
changes were sort of frozen until we decided what to do there. Of course
we ended up ultimately doing nothing.

> Let's face it.  In the beginning, Scry was a real, genuine MUD.  It had a
> really strong community and everything.  But over time, the MUD part of it
> has died off.  The community has mostly stuck together.  It seems to me
> that the community doesn't want to break up, and so they're trying to keep
> the MUD "alive".  But the community could just as well hang out in IRC as
> on a MUD, and there's a lot less time involved in managing an IRC server.

Here I'll debate that ScryMUD is still a mud. It's just all the
long-time players who've willingly or unknowingly exploited all the bugs
and oversights got bored. Who wouldn't get bored in a 100% repetitive
hack-n-slash world where there was nothing left to do that hadn't been
done and nobody fears losing their character. (i.e. fire-bladed trick)

> I'm sorry if I sound overly angry about this, but that's because I am
> pretty angry.  I've spent a fair slice of my life on Scry for over six
> years -- I watched it grow, and I watched it prosper, and I watched it fade
> away.  I've watched it start to come back several times now, and each time
> it fades away again.  I think that, before going through all that again,
> people really need to evaluate how much interest they have in it, and why
> it is that they're doing it.

Nobody is asking you to do anything here. Don't worry. I'm not going to
*touch* anybodies Pfile until everything that needs touching gets
touched. If I restarted everyone at this point they'd just get all
messed up again by the time all the necessary changes were in place.
Therefore if nothing happens on my part, you don't lose any work ;)

My official stance on all of this is that all technical debate is over.
I'm of course open to suggestion, but it's time to change/fix things,
not talk about what to do. I'm implementing things. I have the source on
my machine torn to shreds and I'm addressing and implementing things.
Come the day everything is in place, the DB gets a balance overhaul.
Once that's finished there will be a heads up and all the changes will
kick into effect. Same Scrydom, new rules.

> 
> If someone truly has the interest and desire to bring Scry back, then by
> all means, go for it.  But if no one does, then please, for the sake of
> everyone who's put countless hours into the game, don't pretend that you do.

Earlier you stated that the community might as well ditch ScryMUD and
hang out on iRC. If you're at that point, so be it. You shouldn't be
worried about future ScryMUD changes.