[Lorana]

What is the longest time you have built on a particular MUD? Shortest time? Why did you quit? Do you ever think about going back?

[Odd Raven]

The longest/shortest time I've built on a MUD was before the current MUD I enjoy. A couple years. I quit because I didn't feel remotely valued as a volunteer and the set up for bosses/volunteers was clumsy and rife with poor communication. I do, at times, but then I remember why I left.

[Lorana]

I would suspect that is a pretty common reason for builders quitting.

The longest I've built on a MUD was a few years. I wasn't able to do as much when I had my first baby, and then the MUD closed so I was done. :-)

[Newworlds]

What is the longest time you have built on a particular MUD? Over 10 Years.
Shortest time? Never was a short time.
Why did you quit? Didn't but wished I had!
Do you ever think about going back? No, cuz I'm still stuck there, boo hoo!

[dentin]

I've been building on AA for 18 years. I've got one builder who's been here for almost 18 years off and on, and two others that have been building for 17 years. After those guys, there's probably a half dozen in the 5-12 year range that are fully active.

There's a been a lot of turnover to be sure, but a lot of it seems to have been life changes as opposed to server changes. Of our past gods, we have an MD, a quant, two software engineers, two lead sysadmins, a math professor, and a world traveller that I can name off the top of my head. I can hardly blame them for finding other things to do after a few years.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD

[Odd Raven]

Yeah, I could imagine the whole having-a-baby thing being fairly important, so far as lifestyles go.

I went back and forth for quite a long time on my prior MUD, but finally, I realized it just wasn't fun anymore and it was becoming hugely stressful for me to even log in. The whole thing was, honestly, handled poorly--if given the smallest amount of motivation, appreciate and encouragment can keep your volunteers going for years!

We're sort of like the Tin Man. Just oil us a bit.

[Molly]

I've been building on 4D since it started, I think in 1996, which makes it more years than I'd like to think of.

During that time I've seen many builders come and go here. Most of them produced less than three rooms, about 10% managed to finish one zone, a few finished more than one. The general pattern is that even those that manage to finish one zone quit after that.

There have been many periods during those years when I've been less productive, due to to RL - among other things getting married and having two kids - but I've never left completely. 4D is my baby too.

There are still zones that I'd like to do, and there are still almost finished zones sitting in the Build Port, waiting for someone to take pity on them. At present I am working on one of those. It was supposed to be the entrance zone to our Future Dimension, it's even on our zone list, (as unfinished), but it has been sitting in the Buildport for about 15 years, when the original builder left us to get married to a another 4D player...

[Threshold]

Development for Threshold began in 1991 so that puts me at 21 years of building.

Yikes!

I cannot imagine ever quitting.

I wish I had started 2 years earlier because then I could say I've been working on Threshold in 4 different decades. That would be super cool.

[Lorana]

That's awesome, I love seeing the responses of builders who have stuck it out for the long haul. You guys rock!

[ww_crimson]

It's like this on Aarchon as well. I've been building nearly 10 years and I'm up to about 10 zones at this point. Most of them 75-125 rooms or more. We have maybe 6 other immortals who have built 2 or more zones over the years. There are about 50 areas that we've had to scrap because the builder writes 5 room descriptions and never logs in again.

[Dovolente]

To answer the thread question, I build until I get burned out, which is usually 6-12 months, then either focus on just playing the MUD or playing other games before I'm ready to come back for more.

I've been doing that for 10+ years, but it's getting harder to be as productive and actually finish projects as I go along. Life has a way of sucking away your time and attention as you get older.

[Lorana]

It sure does!

[Centauri]

In Fluxworld (As I suppose in others) Rule #1 is building is never done! Its rather like asking when an artist is done with a painting, and its when they are tired of working on it.

Some areas start as a concept of one holder room for years, until some big areas of 50+ rooms can be fleshed out, and others vary.

Its not so much just an "area" as that is more the concept of a concept or vision of an area, but also all the supporting code for special objects which help support the interesting ideas contained in the concept area. Perhaps that place needs some new objects which help it along that dont exist currently. Depends on the existing richness and diversity of the base tools of that MUD.

I've been building technically since the mid 1980s, in Citadel, well before I discovered a true multi-user MUD, but the concepts were the same, even back then. Some areas are fairly small, say 10 rooms, and contain a concept, an inn, a bar on an old cobblestone road, etc. Others are more involved, a small town, on some faraway planet or moon, some of these linked by some common fast mode of travel.

Building is a creative art to me, and if I waited until it was "finished" to let anyone see it or experience it, no one would ever see whats been done. Consider it a living work in progress.

[Albus of HexOnyx]

I still build

I built one newbie area for GrimneMUD called Quagmire in about 1993/4 (?)

Around the same time, I built Karameikos on HexOnyx and found a love for triggers! After that I started wearing admin hats and built smaller things like clan houses and annexes.

By the time I started the Harry Potter zone, I was an implementor but still wanted to do the area justice so the 900+ room zone was built with a team of three. My part was Muggle World / Diagon Alley, the Romanian Research Center and a good chunk of Hogwarts.)

Since the return of HexOnyx in 2014, I've been mostly been fixing or bringing back old areas and finishing abandoned ones. I revamped awesome (but underused) zones that either weren't getting enough use or needed to be made more current / playable. An example of this would be plot-quest zones that were designed for 25-man groups, which we haven't had since the 90's.

My favorite kind of building now is using up the empty space in a zone to fill a playerbase need or void. (xp, gold, gap-gear...). An example would be Goblinoid Warships; which is about a 20-room area off the coast Ak-Buhen (an 80-room zone that Toll built). The area is in the past, so I wanted to continue it into the present. This brings me to my current project when I get the chance: The goblinoid warships have failed in battle long ago and are at the bottom of the sea... which is now a great new habitat for the Sahuagin!. I haven't quite worked out how I'll bring them into the future, but there's no rush As an implementor, I know that we have eq-gaps that need to be filled and a 20-room annex is the perfect way to put 1 gap item into the game without being too overwhelming of a project.

So basically, I'm a sentimental builder and don't like seeing great areas go unfinished or underused

[shevegen]

I have been playing LPC muds and also building, in a ratio of about 8:1 or so ... give or take.

That is, for, say 8 hours playing, I would have also had about 1 hour of coding/building/hacking.

LPC is unfortunately very old. It's somewhat acceptable to write content in it but way too
cumbersome. It was modelled after the time of the early 1990s and it shows, catering
primarily to C/C++ hackers.

The content creation stage was quite a lot of fun though. I remember helping in the one
or the other LQ run too or trying to run LQs created by me primarily. Reallife interferes
a lot but so does LPC. I don't even advocate modern-day "scripting" programming languages
per se, mind you - specifically tailored and SIMPLER domain-specific languages would
be nicer to be had, doing away with the type system but also being closely to the
game's language/parlance itself.

I quit mostly because I quit playing MUDs; not necessarily all voluntarily since others
ruined the game via code changes, which I always found to be one of the "best" way
to kill a MUD. Just take away the fun with code changes ... then people quit when
they don't want to partake... and then others quit because they are suddenly deprived
of interaction opportunities that they once had before.

I think if I were a few hundred years ago and would start from zero, I'd try to create a
LPC-like MUD, but without LPC, and without mapping the LPC model 1:1 in regards
to "room" objects. I'd more focus on scene, scenery, roleplay, storytelling, interaction,
world building, - in about that order. Combat and PvP can all play a part too, but it
should not be about the primary "content", largely because when it does, it all
degrades to a "kill bla" and who has the most XP/features/numbers/PK-nukes.

Biggest problem is when you have an admin who does not understand this.

LPC also has this outdated model of "wizards" and "players. This is hugely unfair.
It is an apartheid system - there are those who can change the code, and the
others (the players) are the voiceless pets. Of course this depends a lot on how
you want to run a game. You could easily put rules to prevent abuse ... guess
on which MUD this was not to be found.

The players are almost always universally great. There may be a few exceptions
every now and then, but by and large, they made MUDs great.

Text-based MUDs are a bit of a fossil from a fossil era. I think they could do
fine but it takes a lot of decidation and motivation to keep things running
in a good way, without regressions.

[Malifax]

I built and wrote code for Simutronics games, a coupla year's worth, before I went back to school. Built for a game called "Inferno" for about seven years. I quit because I burnt out hard on the player relations end of things. I had fun and learned a lot but I wouldn't go back if I could.