On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 12:14:15PM +1000, James Cameron wrote:
> 
> The major demotivator we have for clue at the moment is the lack of new
> clue, or lack of development interest among the newbies.

I think this has been discussed several times over the last decade and
more, and the conclusion has pretty much always been the same: newbies
don't have the patience to learn a sophisticated game that has a 1980's
look when there is an abundance of competition from modern games; and,
clues don't have the patience, interest or time to tolerate the
inevitably irritating behavior of newbies.

> 1.  every service provided to the netrek community should have two
> gatekeepers, so that the service can continue despite someone dropping
> out, ... if a service only has one gatekeeper then it should be said to
> be degraded and in need of fixing, like a RAID set with a dead disk,

I've personally had a hard time getting sufficient volunteers to support
the Netrek community infrastructure.  Those who are active in the
community tend to prefer to stay low key or simply are uninterested in
pooling resources, so what remains are a few people with little time
charged with maintaining too many services.  I don't see this changing
anytime soon.

> 2.  newbies need to be rewarded for team play somehow, to encourage them
> to develop toward clue, the stats model we have rewards the wrong
> things,

Cluefulness has never been about statistics, so I don't think a change
in the model would have any impact.

> 3.  clue need to be told when other clue are present (metaserver, RSS
> feeds, e-mail notifications, cell phone text messages, whatever it
> takes),

This is not that hard to implement, but do you think it actually would
help?  Back in the final days before my retirement, my problem was
always the lack of time, not the lack of other clues on the servers.  I
used to organize MNN, Monday Night Netrek, which was successful for a
while, so perhaps something regularly scheduled like that would help to
bring clue together.

Are there even any of us crusty old geezers left on this list?  I might
even break down and install a Netrek client if I knew that my old INL
and WNL buddies were online.  Ah, those were the days...