First of all, for all those lurkers out there who are "waiting for the real game to start," stop waiting and go make a character. The game is as open as it's going to be.

On the coding front we have Moira working on the web-based chargen, slowly turning it into a more permanent and detailed fixture. Hawk advises when he has time. However, there are no Rhost coders, so the code is (once more) stalled on that front.

There is a core set of players who do the occasional run and who spend a lot of time idling on the MUSH. There aren't quite enough to draw a dedicated staff from. So while we could open a more traditional game (which would require doing an enormous number of things by hand), we lack adequate staff to run it.

So, for the time being we're going to continue with the player-run game.

We've noticed that people are doing runs rather than character development or general RP. It reminds me of grinding on an MMORPG, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me since a MUSH is so much more than that...but whatever floats your boat, I guess. We're discussing some ways to make Seattle more of a world and less of an empty box that you sometimes roll dice in. Waffle has voiced an interest in returning when he's stateside again in a few months and we look forward to his assistance. I should have more to say on this front in a few weeks.

I'd like to open up the discussion here on the boards on how to make Seattle a persistent world again. Please avoid ideas that require additional code or staff...if I had a coder I would have them doing things like reality levels, private spaces, and chargens that calculate essence, etc. and if I had more staff we'd have a traditional game. Think about what made your other MUSH experiences unique. What would help you do that here?

Just a quick update: I had a rather ambitious plan to develop a dynamic world context for the game. However I have been unable to get adequate staff buy-in on it and since I cannot execute it single-handedly I will leave further efforts in this vein to them.