AROA (saved post)

Note  43  Kalder       (Mon Oct 26 09:02)  tl;dr

Astaria,

One of the most common and persistent difficulties in the job of the
wizardry is dealing with legacy code.  You've all heard us mention
it - previous wizards didn't code or write their projects to our
standards, or we disagree with the methods they used to accomplish
it, or their code introduces bulk volumes of errors in newer
systems... whatever the specific complaint, we're quite happy to
declare legacy code to be the bane of our existences.  We've even
gone so far as to commonly state that a lot of the worst parts of the
mud will never get fixed, because every layer of problems rests upon
another layer of problems that eventually propogate all the way down
to the base lib and in some cases the driver.

Thanks to an outstanding and highly productive collaborative effort
of the staff members over the past few months, we now have developed
a new core mudlib which addresses a great many of these problems, and
introduces a lot of very significant new features that we've wanted
for a long time, now -- both features that players would appreciate,
and features to make the coding aspect of our wizard jobs easier.

However, there's one thing that we've been acutely conscious of
throughout the development cycle of the new lib.  We have an absolute
aversion to making the place inhospitable to all of our existing
members.  It's a waste of your time and especially of ours if we open
the mud on the new lib, you log in, go "This isn't like Astaria
anymore, it sucks," and log out never to return.

Right now, the lib is a primordial soup that could congeal into life
in a number of different directions.  There's two major ones we've
been considering while building it.  We believe that we'll get the
best value from our time and our creative ability by involving you,
the players who've evolved Astarian life, culture, and society for
the past decade and a half, so we post this question to you:

Would you rather see a new Astarian mud which replicates significant
portions of the current areas, guilds, and features, as a direct
replacement for the existing copy?

Or would you rather have the current mud left running, and see the
new one set up as a parallel or "sister" mud, for instance one which
deviates into the past or the future of Astaria as we know it now?

Obviously there isn't a simple answer possible for most of you -- it
would depend a lot on just how similar things are, and on things like
whether it would be possible to migrate your current characters to
avoid having to start over at heritage level 1.  To some extent, we
don't have a lot of answers for you.  But, some of the things that
the wizardry have been considering or at least have mentioned
throughout the project:

  1) In either case, we would like to have some ability to migrate
     characters so that you're not stuck relevelling from scratch.
     The degree to which this is possible varies.  If we were to
     recode the existing areas, guilds, and systems, it could
     potentially be a direct export from legacy Astaria to the new
     copy with nothing lost.  If we were to fork off to a sister
     mud, it would more likely be just a few levels and possibly
     some basic gear.

  2) In the case of replicating existing areas, it is absolutely
     certain that not every area would be converted to the new system
     and lib.  Some areas simply are not worth the time and effort
     required to replace them, either from technical or storyline
     perspectives.  It is possible that these areas could constitute
     the majority of the existing mud.

  3) Like with areas, guilds would be subject to revision as well.
     The initial guild selection would be limited so that the mud
     would be playable more quickly, and would increase over time as
     we had the manpower to faciliate it.

  4) Conversely, the guilds could be subject to a great deal of
     change in a "sister" mud, perhaps even so far as abandoning
     the original Dungeons and Dragons-based fighter/cleric/thief/
     mage divisions and their derivatives, and adding guilds which
     are very different from the way we view them now.
    (Beastmasters and monks, perhaps?)

One sneak preview of a feature we can assure you will exist (since
we've already coded it) is that when you log into Astaria, you'll do
so with an account rather than a character.  That account will have a
certain number of character slots (3, currently) which you may choose
from.  We're hoping that this will alleviate some of the lure of
multiplaying by giving players a legitimate means by which to
experience multiple guilds concurrently.

We would like to stress very strongly that this new lib will not be
playable in the near future, certainly not before the new year and
probably not for months afterwards, even optimistically.  The state
of it right now is just barely sufficient that people can log in and
code - as of the time of this post exactly two rooms and no NPCs have
been placed in the game.  It's very bare-bones.  We would like to be
extremely clear about this.  We don't mean to kill you with
anticipation, but we're just about ready to start the large-scale
building and wanted to get a feel for which direction that building
should go before investing thousands of man-hours of time into it.

Discussion, debate, opinions, and questions concerning the contents
of this post may be posted to the Adventurer's Guild Hall board north
of here.

Kalder