Review Submitted By: Ditchhook
Author Status: Player
Started on The Burning Post II: August, 2012
Submission Date: Sep 11, 2012
TMC Listing: The Burning Post II
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Ditchhook]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
A new player should consider whether they can deal with a number of
issues before trying Burning Post II.
First, the help files and commands leave much to be desired. Help
files refer to other files that don't exist. On other occasions help
files exist for commands that staff have disabled. I was able to crash
the game during character generation by choosing skills that I later
discovered were disabled-- like haggle. On top of that, many commands
are counter-intuitive: you search a room with the 'quarter' command,
for example, and if you want to stop a command that is in queue or in
process, the command is... well I forgot it aready, but it isn't
'stop' 'halt' and I don't recall it having any vowels at all.
Second (and this is hinted at by other reviewers) while one can use
visnet to get lots of OOC technicial help from other players, there is
very little help offered (or patience shown) to how to create or adapt
a new player to the IC expectations of the gameworld: the playerbase
is rather cliquish. Established players' characters do not approach
new players' characters ICly with offers to be IC mentors-- such as
recruiting them into their clans or guilds giving them jobs and
projects, etc. Their first and dominate response to roleplay that they
feel isn't consistent with their theme was to punish and ostracize.
Third, a MUD with a smallish playing space, as well as a smallish
player base, and focusing on intrique and exposing and destroying
dissidents, doesn't do itself any favors by allowing
multiplaying.(Multiplaying is for me a particular focus of critique on
a game focused on intrique and discovering secrets: with so many MUDs
out there, I'm troubled by the motivation of those who want multiple
charactes on one.)
If you consider Bartle's classic article
(http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) the relatively small playing
space, and the many code flaws would likely not be appealing to
explorers. The police-state nature of the game: where even 'the good
guy' law-enforcers are typically arbitrary, selfish, and brutal--
will appeal to killers much more than to heroes. The level of intrique
and double-dealing would appeal to socializers as well.
