Member Discussions

After advertising for builders, we had someone come on and say they had no interest in building, but said they had 30 areas already created we could use. For several reasons, we have no interest in this offer, but has anyone heard of such a thing? In all the years I've been involved with muds, I have never heard of someone giving away what amounts to an entire mud.
I'm wondering if it might be a bitter ex-admin from somewhere.

By order of probability:

1) Disgruntled ex-staff who had shell access and stole the area, now giving them away as a form of payback.

2) Ex-admin whose Mud went down (possibly due to poor-quality area :P) who wants to see the work of his builders/his own live on.

3) Found 'em somewhere online and decided to sell them for an immortal position on some Mud.

You decide which one fits best :P

I've actually had a similar offer twice.

The first one was an admin for another Circle mud, that was closing down. I was a bit reluctant, because of all the work needed, since our OLC is very far from custom. (I've converted areas to it once, when we switched codebase from Mythran, and only really basic things like rooms and mob descs came out right, while most of the rest, including the resets, had to be adjusted manually). Converting about 50 zones would have taken all my efforts for several months, and frankly, it's a lot more fun building your own zones than converting old ones.

Luckily, while I was still thinking about it, they decided to keep the mud running after all, under a new leadership, which really was the best thing that could have happened. It was a great mud, with high quality zones, and it would have been a shame to see it go down.

The other case was one of my present top builders, who came to me from a mud that had closed down. She had built about five zones there, and managed to get the admin there to e-mail her the zone files. (Not all admin are that forthcoming).

I did the basic convertion on them, and she was going to do the manual part herself. However, in the meantime she got engaged in a new project, which eventually grow into 5 new zones, so her old zones are still in our Buildport, waiting for the final convertion. Like i said, it's more fun building new zones...

I've received the offer on a few occasions, but they've all been turned down with no hesitation. I don't condone the behavior, but I could see why it would be done. Orginality issues and other "issues" that may arise because you accepted the builders offer. I've also had a disgruntled coder steal several custom areas, and its a wonder where those will end up.