So when most places shut down there is the usual banter about how good they have been, lots of pats on the back and so forth. I could do that, but I for one always end up rolling my eyes when I hear/read that sort of thing, so I can't be bothered doing it myself.
At the end of the day, the purpose of the MUD was to give people somewhere to go that was really Naruto, that was within the Naruto universe, which at least attempted to be realistic to the show. And we achieved in that end.
Sure, so we didn't put in any kekkei genkai at all. Sure, so we only got through about 5% of the total jutsu that is in the series. Sure, so we only built about 5% of the areas that are in the series. And sure, at the end of the day, we still had about half of our skills and half of our areas that were stock.
Pretty slack after 6 years, I suppose.
Most MUDs, to be successful, have a team of people working with them. Not one person. And that, ultimately has been what has failed with World of Naruto. It isn't because "the main coder refuses to let anyone help". Rather, it is because there isn't that core unit. Most successful MUDs have a group of real life friends who start them up. Or they have a group of people who had played MUDs together for years. And that, ultimately, is why it failed.
Of course, had I been one of these budding geniuses, I could still have managed it. There are places that are done by just one person. But I am not an experienced coder. My experience prior to this was making about 10 commands for a Diku MUD about 10 years ago - and and running my own talker (a stripped down MUD just for chatting) about 15 years ago. That's it. I thought I could imm on a MUD. I never really felt that I was good enough to make one.
I could sit here and blame Ihvron for all of this. After all, he was our first regular player that retaliated by cheating. I really felt stabbed in the back when he started blatantly cheating out of boredom. I didn't want to come back and didn't for about 6 months because of him. He sucked the fun out of it. Our best player was cheating.
Or I could blame the other players who blatantly cheated.
Or the ones that complained bitterly that I wasn't doing enough, in spite of the fact that, not only am I not paid for doing this, I actually have to pay a decent amount of money for the opportunity to do this.
But at the end of the day if we had had that core group to start with, then it wouldn't have mattered.
When the MUD first started, I was spending 150 hours per week on it. Not that anyone cared. Every waking hour I was spending here. When I started working, it dropped down to 100 hours per week. But there were no "wow"s or anything. It was just normal, apparently.
The thousands of hours spent on here were never really appreciated. I can remember when I had put in 130 hours one week, pulling in a couple of all nighters, and had one player complain "You are way too slow - what 2 years before you start doing kekkei genkai? how pathetic". Like what the hell? You come and do it quicker then.
Every time someone complained like that, it made me not want to do anything.
And you can say that I was too emotional, that I should have ignored it, but at the end of the day this is supposed to be fun. And grumbles like that sucked the fun out of it.
There were good periods though. When we finally got some big things going. The scroll and studying jutsu was a big thing. Adding in elements was big. Some of these things I was most proud of. Not to mention when I found out the hack bug that apparently nobody else had found in 12 years. It was big.
But I suppose that this has, ultimately, been a bit of a hobby MUD. I never intended it to be a hobby MUD, but ultimately that is what it has been.
People who were playing it for years suddenly vanished without a trace. Active immortals suddenly vanished. And that almost became the theme.
When our top immortal, Rico, was caught cheating, that was pretty much the end of the MUD, in the end. While I tried to revive it a few times, having yet another person come in and whinge, then that was enough for me.
So I hope that the few people that played it enjoyed it. Please comment if you did. But if you think that spending tens of thousands of hours on a game still makes me lazy, go ahead and whinge.
