Agreed

The fact that everyone seem to have got carried away by my last point of Coders getting paid has pretty much diluted one important point I seeked to make. Well, and the fact that obviously I am not as good a writer as I like to think I am (joke).

So, I try one last time, and off to bed I go. 5am isn't good thinking hour for me.

Coder Gods, as I understand it, often do not climb the godranks in the same manner Builder Gods do. Once they become visible as real player Gods to the playerbase, they always seem to raise through the ranks faster. Their Orders open sooner than those of Builder Gods, they tend to have more fancy RP gimmicks allowed. Whereas the Order members of Builder Gods are told, no you have to wait, with silly excuses like, I'm still too weak, poor me. I can't have more followers. Which logically thinking is just silly, everyone knows a "religion" gets stronger when there are more followers. Then there is the 'why can that God have two temples?' 'Why was that God allowed to move an important city monument just to place his own statue there?' RP stuff should be allowed to all Gods. So just because Builder Gods take longer to build a good area than a Coder God takes to write a decent code, the players get told they can't have this or that for their Order, but not told why. I have seen many rants and complaints on this forum alone why certain god refuses to open their Order, or create small but significant RP flavoured items for their members and so on. This is where a little bit more transparency could be appreciated.

Quick, bring out the Estarra pics!

Just having skimmed your post, Nuef, I wanted to touch on a few things. Yes, coding goes quicker than building, so sometimes a Coder god might open their order before a builder god. Sometimes they've been working on a code project since before they became a god. Who knows! Lots go on. I know my order was opened within a month, but I busted ass, hard, to get it that way - and I had it a bit easier than your average volunteer god, for reasons I'm just not comfortable saying.

That said. All the 'cool rp gimmicks' aren't limited to just coder gods. Any god could get them if they wanted to. A lot of that was pointed/drawn on Morgfyre, who was exceptionally creative and pushed the limit (not in a bad way!), thought outside the box and was a really awesome person to be around and bounce ideas off of. If Celest wanted to move some city monument to make a big statue of Terentia, Eventru, Lyreth or Isune, I doubt it would be disallowed. I wasn't around for the alleged second temple, so I'm not going to touch it.

The rest I'm kind of just going to not touch, as I don't think it's really my place.

well, that bit, yes I'm sore about. But that's for personal reasons, I suppose. In your scenerio, yes, if Celest did ask for the monument to be moved, or even was asked if it was ok, that's fair enough. However, I think you would be grumpy too if it was simply done and Celest wasn't asked, and did not ask for it to be done, in fact only found out it was moved, one day while taking a walk through the city. Anyways, this point doesn't really have to do with this thread too much, except as an example of what a God could perhaps do.

I always assumed that coder gods get "more perks" because they do it themselves. i.e. they know how to code their own special way of talking etc, or they know how to code and move items around without leaving holes in the map etc.

Also, if coding is like a cookbook, so it writing/building.

coders use a set of functions, writers use a set of words. Both groups are just using preexisting material and putting in the right proportions of those items, in the right order, based on the "recipes" of those who came before them.

Spell a word wrong, someone TYPO's it. Spell the same word wrong in the whole zone, someone TYPO's it. Spell the same word wrong in all of Lusternia, someone TYPO's it.

Screw game-integral things up on a live code merge? The game you pay money for ends up having ridiculous errors, imbalances, or even evaporates for however long it takes to fix.

I've seen a couple builder gods in IRE move their orders up that fast. It takes a lot of work, but even then, look at what can often be the delay of such things. Special gimmicks they have to have custom CODED for their order/area have to be requested from the coders. So not only is it a rank thing, but the coder also has to develop what they want. As someone said earlier, this probably happens a little more often for the orders of those who can take care of it themselves.

Some of the viewpoints on this thread are positively mindblowing. Comparing it to literature and film? What in the hell? You people seem to forget to mention that most people know authors simply because that's how you can easily locate a book, not exactly because you are frothing at the mouth over their amazing literary skills. Plus, unless an author has written a gigantic shelf of books, I rarely know who it is. Often I have to go to the internet to google up plot devices and book titles to figure it out. Comparing that to who coded what game is moot. Games are categorized by title and often by company. I would equate a game "company" to the "author" in this scenario and yes, I can definitely name what studios pop out my favorites. You probably can't name the people who helped bring that book together, just the name plastered under the title. I assure you, that book didn't make it to the shelf under only the steady hand of the author. Good grief.

How about this, look at everyone who has ever designed an item, written room descriptions, and/or composed books/plays in Lusternia. Now look at everyone who has written a viable combat system. Bet the former outweighs the latter by a ridiculous margin. It's not that one is easier or less work than the other, it's that it is a less-common skillset to have in a very critical scenario. Think about it in terms of database admins. Tons of people can do SQL, far less can do Oracle. It's not like you do less work, but the Oracle guys get paid buckets of cash compared to the SQL guys for having a less common skill.

P to the S: Every bug fix in a god's post isn't from that god alone.

!

Estarra forgot all about Maylea and Isune.

Luckily we are not quite as invalid as you seem to think, I have made all 'gimmicks' I have ever used myself, including my voice. The same goes for Morgie, who made his 'gimmick' long before he ever got into coding.

Estarra keeps our Gods/Goddesses in lock and chain and force them to work on Lusternia. Sure, we may have wonderful skills to play with and awesome areas where we could play with fae/cherubs/imps, but do we think about how the people who made them feel? Do we once think about how our play things were made out of the forced sweat of the coder and builders?

This is worse than child labor. This is slavery.

Down with Estarra.

Congratulations, I'm sure those few instances are exactly what I meant when I said that. I'll be waiting to see your Aestra pillar-like effect done completely on your own. Similarly, if you are capable of such via modifying the code, I suppose that lifts you out of the "can't code at all" category in the first place. Notice that I also said it "occurs more often for those who can take care of it themselves." If the interface exists for designing such things in-game, then all you're doing is standing on the shoulders of some coder who decided to make prog'ing that much easier for everyone else. OLC wasn't created by a builder-only immortal in the various codebases that exist today.

No one called anyone invalids, it's just a simple fact that if your department or skillset lacks in something another department provides, you must seek said department in order to rectify your lack of said something. Thus, people capable of doing something themselves are more likely to have said thing done.

ok, as far as I'm aware all muds have two classes of what you seem to term coders. Builders and Coders

Most objects in a mud will have a prog behind them. The only difference between what a coder and a builder can do in terms of what you see is that a coder could possibly add commands to the progs that don't exist currently to allow them to do something new, where a builder has to go through a coder to do such.



That said don't really know what the Aestra pillar effect is, however... quests, instant-death rooms, things that echo to all order members alone(I think atleast), are more likely to be done in a way a builder could do them.

Pick up the free copy of smaug and you can play around with a basic building stuff to see what can be done by builders. (though ire code is quite likely to be far far better)

Let's mail all the gods cheesecake. Sure, by the time it arrives at IRE and they redistribute it there's a decent chance it'll rot, but that just makes for a wonderful metaphor.

I keep hearing people talk about coder's getting perks, so I've been tossing and turning to just TRY and think of what Morgfyre gave his order that required coding. His order item, the tattoos, change their appearance depending on the gender of the person who wears them. That's basic scripting, that any god can do without a coder's help or assistance. The Aestra pillar could, likewise, be scripted by any god (we regularly use similar methods in areas when we build them). Knowledge of the scripting language is one of the basic requirements to become an full-fledged IC god, as it's required to be an admin builder. The sort of benefits that -only- Charune can code or Morgfyre could code are not allowed for orders afaik, nor for guilds or cities.

As for the statue, I rather doubt no one was aware, but I wasn't there, so I cannot say for sure. Likely though, if I had to take a guess, the Iron Council approved it and his order paid for it. Just a guess, though.

So, these Gods that get paid positions, I have to know...

Do the checks come in thier God names? Will Charune's first check be made out to "Charune, the Horned One" on a check decorated with little Kethurus and signed by Estarra?

It's not just gods that release areas. There are mortal builders as well. I used to be a mortal builder for an IRE mud, and like 75% of the building work was done by mortals. That's why area builder info is not released. Because then people would go to the person trying to ferret out quest/mob specifics. I think Gods play a bigger role in building here in Lusternia (well, I'm fairly certain the numbers are reversed), and I don't think a mortal would have been able to build the Undervault.

I try to explore each new area, I am grateful for them (if not the constant stream of volatile aggressives that have been released in the newer areas since the undervault :/). Especially the newer sections to the Skarch (and Zaoka is probably still one of my favourite areas, a ton of my designs use comms from that place.)

You're going to know who the Coder God is just by the announces they release. And Coders certainly don't go unscathe! People complain as much about changes as they do about events/areas. Maybe more so.

The work of Builder/Coder Gods and mortals are greatly appreciated. People take them for granted, and are more inclined to say FU than thank you.

I'll say thanks now, and let it cover all the new stuff.

This is so completely untrue. People regularly rave about who they think coded something, but they're very often wrong about who it is. (Whoever actually did it just glows quietly from the rave-by-proxy.) Certainly the name on the announce post that happens to mention the coding doesn't tell you anything about who did it.

ahh cool. Looks like I was dead wrong.

This is so very wrong because this presumes that "people capable of doing something themselves" are ALSO capable of thinking that something up. It takes a rare person to not only be able to implement an idea, but create it as well. This is why Morgfyre really shone. Not only did he have these incredible ideas (just look at the areas he created, and the messages he wrote for his code) but he also knew how to implement him. This puts him at a serious advantage of those who are either strictly creative, or strictly able to code something.

Likeliness doesn't factor into this matter at all. Charune may be "more likely" to code that awesome "RP gimmick", but if he isn't likely to think it up, then he's just as unlikely to get it as someone who can't code to save their life. Perhaps more so, since I'm sure he, and most of the capable coders/proggers in the havens, are often happy to do what's asked of them.

I'm sure that Charune is a creative void, like all other programmers. Especially ones that have played RP Enforced MUDs for years. This isn't some random sample of humanity at large, it's a MUD where the vast majority of people can already write and be creative. Take the office example I provided. Everyone there is proficient with a PC and Windows. Not everyone there is capable of creating a VB App to sit on top of a proprietary contacts database. This proficiency doesn't mean that the programmers are failures at Windows and need the secretaries to hold their hand while they do it. The environment they exist in leads to a certain common skillset being shared by all departments. So too, in an RPE environment, easily 95% of the people there are already creative and possess writing skills. You get the few amazingly bad typists and uncreative people, but by and large the people here are already creative and able to write/roleplay by virtue of actually being here.