TMC Player Reviews: The Gathering...

Review Submitted By: Lilly
Author Status: Player and staff member
Started on The Gathering...: 2007
Submission Date: Oct 5, 2010
TMC Listing: The Gathering...

The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Lilly] and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.

I have been an Immortal and I have been temp banned. I have praised
the MUD (read my earlier review) and I have sworn that I would quit. I
have had wonderful time and I have wanted to pull my hair out --
enough to where I thought it best for my mental health that I step
down as a Coder rather than crash heads with one of the Administrators
about how code should be written, amongst other things. TG is not a
horrible place, and I don't want to make it out to me, but I can't
help but think that, to an extent, it is a Guilded MUD: a very good
outer layer that holds disappointments when held to a stricter light.

I will speak of the problems, since that's what you'll want to know
if you're reading this Review wondering if you should play. I find
that I can't keep the 10,000 character limit TMC has, so it's only
the problems I'll mention.

1) Lack of World and RP Depth. TG has a veritable armada of races.
The helpfiles are, most often, very good at giving an image of them,
though some are little more than a few cobbled-together paragraphs.
There are a plethora of areas across many different continents. Once
you get farther in, though, a player who wants quality to their RP
world starts to see through much of the quantity to what TG is: a good
concept poorly executed through bad area design and a lack of race
enforcement. The feel of the continents, which each certainly has its
own theme, is broken by having areas that make absolutely no sense
placed haphazardly within them: a thriving, peaceful, green village in
the middle of a swamp with no mention of the swamp within the village
itself. A random taco shop in the middle of nowhere. If immersion into
a magical world is TG's goal, then it fails to do that. Areas rarely,
if ever, reference each other despite what their proximity might be,
and overall the MUD feels more like something cobbled together than an
actual believable world.

The problem with races comes from the fact that there are, quite
simply, too many with not enough variation. The number of races,
rather than helping contribute to the overall feel of the MUD world,
waters it down. There's the demonic dog-people, the natural
dog-people, the
humans-infected-with-a-disease-to-turn-into-dog-people. There's a
bland catch-all 'Demon' race, a bland catch-all 'half-demon' race.
Beyond that there's no enforced racial alignments, so Demons might be
the most wonderfully snuggly people ever, and when a player tries to
RP racism -- ie, good people don't like Demons because they are
something, you know, bad -- then they are scorned ICly and OOCly by
other players and will find their RP greatly suffers for it. The
players of TG seem to want a bland world with no established conflict
outside of the frivolous inter-character stuff that they come up with,
and the Staff of TG certainly does little to help promote anything but
the high-school level drama (and the attempts at it by some imms are
cancelled out by the 'World Peace!' mentality of other immortals).
One will find that TG's IC world tends to be something along the
lines of 'Can't we all just be friends OMG we can wheee group hug!'
Beyond that, so many players play either: 1) Incredibly cliche
characters that are drawn as close-as-possible out of an Anime or
established Fantasy World, or 2) A thousand Alternate Chars who all
have the same personality ('Rawr I demand Sex!' and 'I'm the
soft-spoken shy guy from a bad background who yet seems to have an
inner strength that one just has to look for' seem to be common
ones). While there are incredible Role-Players out there who do a
great job establishing impressive niches, much of the MUD is nothing
more than a silly Soap Opera about who's cheating who, who's being
true, and who don't really care anymore.

2) Lack of Staff Responsibility, at times. I wrote in my past review
that I think TG has a great immortal staff. I still think that, but I
have to add the caveat of 'Sometimes.' When they are active, the
staff is solid. The coder and Head RP, in particular, I think do the
best jobs at what they do that I've seen on a MUD I've played
extensively. But all of the Immortals suffer from long periods of
inactivity, sometimes justified and sometimes not. I remember at one
point when an Admin had gone away for a very stupid reason (I'll not
go into the details, I'm not so mad at TG to do that, but suffice it
to say it was below High School Drama) and promised to people to
return, but did not for several months, causing all the areas,
housing, and RP Requests to become bogged down to the point of a
player-led questioning of the Imm's methods. The Imm Staff, simply
put, need to be more active so they can deal with day-to-day problems
and with enforcing rules that the MUD has written down, which often
seem to be ignored. It seems, to me, that those who attempt to follow
the rules and ask Immortals for permission to do various things are
the ones who are restricted, because simply not telling the immortals
is the way to bypass any rules. Want to know if a name is okay? Don't
ask for the name 'Wynter' (which is one that I know was denied) and
make 'Rameses' (the rules state no famous IRL names should be used)
and you'll be fine. Want to have a special IC power? Don't ask the
RPC for it, 'just assume you have it until the imms tell you no,' as
was one player's advice to me. The worst bit is that it seemed to
work. To make matters even more telling for TG, the co-owner of the
MUD recently resigned being an Imm because she 'couldn't handle the
day-to-day problems' and wanted to be a player again. They are still
co-owner, though, so I can't help but wonder how much them as a
'player' (which she stresses she still is) continues to affect and
decide staff decisions. It seems weird to me that a player would be a
co-owner, especially when they don't pay for the server or create the
MUD itself.

Within the Immortal Staff, even, there always seemed to be a measure
of mistrust and lack of communication. As an example, Char Notes were
the advocated way of keeping up with special powers that players had
been granted by the RP Staff (in recent weeks these powers have been
completely stripped away by the Head RP Imm, which is something I am
majorly happy with) but -- and I know because, as I said, I was an
Immortal -- the Char Notes were rarely kept up, either because of the
bother and mess of adding them, or because an RP Imm 'Didn't want
other Immortals seeing the information and being able to abuse it.'
Both were things I heard, and the second was incredibly startling and
troubling, even as a young coder. When the rule to special abilities
was 'If an Imm looks in your Char Notes and you don't have it, then
you don't have it' and yet one of the RP Imms said they didn't
trust fellow Imms to be responsible, there's an issue there.

3) Lack of MUD Direction - Two years ago any observer, both within
and outside of the MUD, would have labeled The Gathering and 'SRP
Mud.' Because of a head-butting with the Dawn of Time license and
themselves TG was forced to take steps to make their MUD a non-Adult
Mud to the tune of limiting people having SRP to a special island and
within private rooms -- inns, for example. At that point the staff of
TG explained that they wanted to take the direction of the MUD to a
more serious RP mud, I'm not so sure that this has happened, though,
except in randomly decided bits and bursts. TG often seems to be like
a car with a spotty engine: it might suddenly jump forwards all at
once after you try really hard to get something going, but most of the
time you're just sitting there playing with yourself for
entertainment.

To me there seems to be a lack of direction in what to do. The admin
constantly say they want to create a more serious RP environment and
yet they don't seem willing to enforce the stringent RP-related rules
that most major RP areas have. Player harassment, especially for Sex,
is not uncommon at all and offenders are generally just given a slap
on the wrist in lieu of harsher behavior-correcting problems. A recent
'global' storyline that took place was bungled because of poor
execution and, it seemed to me, a confusion between the Imms running
the line of what to do about it. Mix this in with a general sense of
laziness amongst many players who have been given power to move
forwards RP as well and the storyline was almost completely dropped.
I'm not entirely sure if the problem isn't with the Staff or the
Players, but it certainly is a problem. Over the past year or so
'Player-run Empires/Organizations' was pressed forwards by the Imm
Staff and, in my opinion, it was done so way too quickly and far too
liberally. It seems like everybody now just has 'troops' that they
randomly command and often employ to try to boss people around with,
yet it seems to me that this is improperly handled with a lack of any
definition into how powerful these groups are compared to each other
and troops are just a magical, imaginative number one can draw from
without any support. A small town might have an army of 20,000
elite-trained troops, despite the complications one would imagine
having so many troops in the mountainous area. Troops seem to just
magically poof between areas, making any important conflict a bit of a
bore since some Imms allow you to just throw a mystical figure at the
problem and demand for it to be fixed, rather than encouraging players
themselves to work together at an individual level.