I keep trying to play MUDs, but I never seem to find any good ones, and the better (RP wise) ones seem to have horrible interfaces and poor documentation.
From my experience of being a HeadWiz, a codemonkey and builder, and generic staff, more or less all levels of mgm. For Mu*s, is that documentation is hard. If not impossible. The games are organic, in a sense that its workings are always changing. I've never been on a mu* in my 8 or so years, that was *done*. There always something more add, or something to change so forth.
There also the issue, of what consider common knowledge, like +occ, +who(who) +where WHO, +staff, +p(pub so forth) are universal more or less. There exact functionality may be different from place to place, but more or less they work the same.
Each game, is a role playing game so there going to be always a series of familiar commands.
There also the fact that codewiz aren't exactly the most social of staff. They get direction from the Headwiz, but for the most part they're the only one that knows what working under the hood.
Its a combination from constantly changing, staying somewhat familiar, and poor communication.
+help is suppose to be, helpful. Its not. Just be polite, plead newb and see if there a patience player that willing to help you out. On some larger mushes there might be a staffer who sole job is newb helper, but those are uncommon.
As for the interfaces. I don't know, there user friendlyness, seems to about the same. The most convoluted UI I've seen was for a starwars mu*, one that had an okay from Luscas Ltd. Strange place. It never struck me as being any more difficult then any other text parser game.
Sorry to hear that, but from outside of tabletop rp, Mu*s in my experience will get some of the better roleplaying you will see. PbP, has lead to some quality rp though any system outside of freeform (shivers), never function well and move in my opinion, very slow, killing any tension or emotion in the scene.
Although I never had a good a LARP group. Either they were to overly involved or were just bad rp'ers. They exist, I've heard the stories never experience one though.
And because of this thread, and a boredom with others games I'm mu*ing again. Armegon doesn't get my creativity flowing so you won't see me there. But I applied to be generic staff at an up and coming cyperpunk place. I'm hoping to get one of my ideas tried out.
Played Affected Rooms slowly set themselves back together. I got this idea, from my stint of playing on high action martial arts anime type places, where city blocks getting blown up wasn't that uncommon.
The player 'plode the room, they can set the destruction level for the room within, it will change to a preset desc of destruction then it will get slowly repaired overtime.