This is to clear up certain rumors regarding my departure. Among them are:
The truth is, I chose to resign for a number of reasons. As early as September 29th I informed the administration that I was cancelling all my projects save one, and that I would be resigning after its completion. When I finally handed that last project to someone else, I was free. Now for my reasons. First, let me give you some background as to where I'm coming from. THE WIZ THANG Being a wizard means one thing. Coding. It's not about being mushy-mushy with the players, or earning their love or sympathy. It's not about spamming the players with custom poses or trying to sound witty on the public channels. A wizard is supposed to deliver code. Players play, wizards code. If there's a bug with a player, fix him/her. If there's a rule violation, go punish the offender. But for the most part, leave the players alone and CODE! Most of the wizards who left or were forced to leave didn't get this simple fact. They equated being a wizard as being a player with "special powers." Unfortunately, this attitude has a long history within Astaria's wizardy and continues on. Yes, wizards can have fun too. Yes, wizards can occasionally mingle with players. But these things are secondary to a wizard's coding. Code first, party later. Some people, including a number of players and wizards, think that there's a need for "player-friendly" wizzes to do PR work and serve as the "voice" of the players. Nonsense. Wizards serve the players best when they code. If there were fewer bugs, there would be less need to seek a wizard's assistance. If there were more varied and interesting things to do in the realm, there wouldn't be a need for the wizards to initiate and handle RP events - the players themselves could do it. Let the players do the playing. Wizards code. And as for being the "voice" of the players, here's an old saying among mud authors: "Change anything, and players will complain; change nothing, and players will complain." (See http://mud.sig.net/raph/gaming/laws.html for a full list.) You can't author a mud according to the players. They'll never be all happy, and you'll never be happy as well. Write the mud according to your tastes, and you'll attract a player base that likes the stuff you write. YOU CODE'A BEEN A CONTENDA This brings us to the first reason for my departure. Too many of Astaria's wizards don't write code. Many certainly have the time to, but chose not to. An extreme case was a former wizard who spent hours online spamming the realm with poses and chatting on the public channels, then left the wizardry saying that he/she didn't have time to code. Certainly an extreme example, but it shows how low coding is as a priority in the minds of some wizards. A certain prolific contributor to Astaria (now pseudo-retired) said that while he won't force those around him to code, he feels that his own efforts are in vain when surrounded by non-coders. He'd rather be someplace where his efforts make a difference. My sentiments exactly. It's certainly a morale buster when contributors are the minority (in any endeavor, not just mud development), but that alone isn't enough to kill my interest in a project. Any coding effort from the upper echelons would've been nice - aside from the actual code, it'd encourage the lower ranks. But I'll save my analysis of the admin situation for last and look at the state of Astarian wizardry in general. PASS ME A NOTE BEFORE STUDY HALL I'll bet that most of Astaria's wizards are ok people. I socialize with a few, and chances are that many outside my small circle of friends are cool as well. But being a good person doesn't make one automatically a good wizard. It starts from the hiring process. I've seen wiz applications from potentially solid contributors ignored, while other applicants get the special treatment. (Yes, I did get the special treatment myself, but I had stints as a wizard with several staffers elsewhere, and I proved myself by fixing the FTP code that had been broken since Astaria 1.0 opened - within days. So fwah!) I have to admit, choosing who to hire as wizards is a lot like gambling. Sometimes you score big, sometimes you break even, many times you lose. But still, some professionalism in the hiring process might have made a difference. Pick the good writers, consider those with some code abilities, skip the mental cases. But no, we get people for some truly bizarre reasons. And so we get the spammer/chatter types, endlessly droning on the Astaria channel trying to sound witty. We get people who become upset when none of the wizards become their buddy-pals. Excuse me, but this isn't a social club; crank some code or get lost. The big picture is, there's a lack of professionalism in the staff. Wizards need to have clearly defined responsibilities. Younger wizards should have projects deliverable by a set date, and in turn older wizards give area reviews within a reasonable timeframe. If someone isn't delivering, he/she should be held accountable for it. If a new hire hasn't produced an area like say within 90 days, dewiz him/her. Sorry, but part of being manager is doing not-so-nice things to nice people to move things forward, just as it is part of being a wiz to take critique and direction from superiors. This lack of professionalism plummeted to new depths not long ago, when a (non-coding) wizard accused me of spying on his/her conversations! While this accusation hinged on a flawed assumption (that the accusing wizard was interesting enough to spy on), it hammered down the point that some people are lacking the requisite maturity to understand exactly what wizards do. This isn't junior high school, please. We contributors aren't interested in your personal life. If there's anything of yours I want to know, it's what you plan to code. So there we have another reason, a general lack of professionalism. Code, or lack thereof, is one indicator of this massive problem. There's a far more insidious sign, unfortunately. CALL THE PLUMBER, QUICK Like most wizards, I have player friends. But I don't tell them anything I am privy to as a wizard, such as the inner workings of the combat engine, the way the spells work, or the area secrets. If I did, I'd be disrespecting myself and my fellow wizards, and marginalizing our collective work. It would obviously be unfair to the rest of the players (duh!). Finally, I'd be doing my player friends a great disservice, because while they may benefit from the information short-term, it ruins their fun in the long run - it hurts their suspension of disbelief and shortens their player lifetime. A good rule of thumb as far as information coming from the wizards and going to the players is, "tell no one, or tell ALL the players." Anything else would be unfair. Unfortunately, not all wizards share in this belief. Wizards from all ranks give their friends information. Which skills to train, where to find certain things in areas, what spells are being changed, what's posted on the wizard-only bulletin boards - there's this small cadre of players that are privy to this information. And this is just plain wrong. Why do wizards spill their beans? I don't know. Maybe some don't see the harm in their actions. Maybe some are going for brownie points with a player of the opposite gender. If you've been to a bash with a wiz present, there's a chance you've gotten some insider game info. If you're female and not hideously ugly, your chances are much improved. Whatever the reason, it isn't right. It's unprofessional, but worse, it's unfair to the players. GONE FISHING The admin-rank wizards have, at least by their actions if not by their words, proven themselves uninterested in seeing Astaria's code base move forward. Aside from the lack of code output, they haven't given those who do code any solid direction. There were several features on the A3 wish list that I was tackling, tasks that weren't mine to begin with but were important enough that I wanted to get some traction. I had to go to the admin to get some clarification or direction on the features they wanted, and it oftentimes was like pulling teeth. Perhaps I expected too much of the admin at this point. Eventually the active coders realized that self-direction was the only way to go. Make our own design choices, implement each desired feature the way we understand it. Fine. But the admin are responsible for a professional coding environment. They should have pushed the non-coders to work on their projects, or to resign. They should've imposed sanctions on the wizards abusing pose and channel privileges. The climate could've been changed to where production was encouraged, but it wasn't. The admin seemed to prefer the path of least resistance, to just leave things be. Now the admin are people too, who have jobs and interests outside of this mud - I understand that. They can't be logged on all the time. They can't possibly address every issue that comes up. But they took the rank of admin, and with that rank came responsibilities - and managing the coding workforce is one of the most crucial ones. The blame for Astaria's lack of a decent coding atmosphere lies with them. IT'S DEAD, JIM By the end of September it was clear to me that Astaria was dead. Hardly anyone was coding. That alone wouldn't have stopped me; I was still willing to code even if I were the sole person to doing so. But I took a step back and saw the absurdity of it - indifferent admin, non-coding people on staff, junior high school attitudes (no offense to mature junior high students out there), and information leaks galore. It didn't make sense for me to continue to pour effort into the place. Yes, Astaria will likely have new areas, perhaps new guilds. New shops, new knick-knacks, new toys. But it will remain tied to Empacher's flawed design, realized with his buggy code. It won't transcend it. A3 was an attempt to breathe new life to the place, to build a new and better core, one that would require far less hacks to do the things the area coders want to do (hacks which inevitably cause bugs and all sorts of exploits). But A3, as it was originally envisioned, is dead. There's some new blood on the staff, actively writing new material. Perhaps they'll prove me wrong. For the sake of the players, I hope so. |