Helping

How to help as a player on Accursed Lands.

It is always very nice to hear when a player wants to go that extra step and help out our online community of role-players here at Accursed Lands. Players have asked us many times: "What can I do to help?", so here is a help file explaining what would be really helpful to us as an online community.

Help out newbies:

OOCly:  Over channels, point them to the right help files, or help them with syntax.  Explain some of the concepts here to them, like "We aren't allowed to release IC information over the channels" Use the helpsay command to point to help files if you are in the same room with them, and they seem to be struggling with something.

ICly:   Role-play with them a bit, instead of passing them by.  Talk to them about the world in an IC way.  Teach them to survive, teach them ways they can prosper, and give them a good grounding in the drama so they can live and RP properly.

Help with creator morale:

Take the time to understand how complaints negatively affect creator morale by reading 'help complaints'.  Explain this to others.  There are nice ways of giving suggestions, and we welcome those.

Report bugs:

One of the best ways to help the game progress is to notice that something is not working properly, and to report it on the bug board.  Make sure the bug is reproducible, and play around with it a bit to make sure it is in fact a bug and not just a feature.  Please don't abuse bugs for personal gain.

Report bad help files:

Help files are our primary way of communicating game mechanics to players in a consistent and efficient fashion.  If one of them is wrong, please report it via the typo board.  If you are really confident in your writing abilities, you might want to rewrite the bad help file yourself and submit it.  A lot of times, we will tweak the rewrite a bit and copy it in, putting your name down for credit.  If you choose to do so, though, please make sure it is in the right format, and have some other people review it for you first, to find typos or ways in which it could be improved.

Try to help us resolve trouble:

If someone is causing problems on the mud where creator involvement will be required, this will take us away from coding new functionality or areas. Make sure everyone knows the rules.  Try to resolve any OOC conflicts that are affecting the IC experience.  Speak up if someone's badmouthing the game or breaking the rules, and ask them to stop, don't just be a silent partner. Of course, not causing problems yourself will obviously help us too :)

Help bring good players to the game:

Our community will only grow and prosper if you invite good people to show up here.  Ideally, they should be someone with a strong interest in role-playing, a reasonable ability to understand the concepts of the game, and the type of person that doesn't cause problems wherever they go.  Often due to the complexity of the game, this rules out some younger players. However, we would rather not set a specific age limitation, and just mention that we expect them to act reasonably mature. One way of doing this is voting every 12 hours for AL on topmudsites or other sites we might mention on our web page in the future.