It's been a while since I've been around, but here's what I got. From what I have seen one thing that limits NarutoMUD from expanding is bug testing. Now I understand people join this and do not realize it's still in Alpha (the big thing that reminds me is PKing will not be out until at least Beta) see rule 14 and by the way I did have to look that up.
People join expecting a full game and for the most part it delivers enough to keep the average person around for a short while. The thing to understand is there are, as I prefer to call them, bottle necks where leveling becomes difficult. So people join and try to focus on leveling/advancing their character and are not looking to bug test. I know the reasons I found and helped try to bring bugs to light were during my leveling or advancing my character. I kept pushing them and bringing them up every couple of weeks (while I was still quite active) so my char would benefit. I did have in mind that others would be effected, but as no one else had complained I suppose it was more for selfish reasons. However I did try to see the long term effect of the bug I was trying to help get fixed (ex. STR > 25 used to cause you to be able to carry 0 max weight and take your damage mod back to 0). Sure not everyone is effected now, but as the game progressed and people did get to 200 or 300 and new items are added to the game it would effect them.
It took a while since I brought that bug up for it to get fixed. Some of this may stem from having such few builders/coders. This is however Gatz' baby so to speak and it's understandable that he keeps the main code guarded. People need to recognize this and see the changes he has made. They've been huge and accommodating, but it does take time.
Another large problem I have seen is Rule 16. If everyone knows how to do a quest before they do it, it's no longer a quest and there's no point to having it. Questing together and figuring things out as a team/group is perfectly fine at least in my eyes. Handing someone else the steps gains them no experience and no knowledge of how future quests are meant to be tackled. This can be viewed when there's no new Genin for a while than all of the sudden there's 5+ within 2 days (not say every instance of this is people giving out quest info but it's a good sign given past and current numbers). Then you have the new Genin complaining over OOC about the Genin quests within 10-15 minutes maybe even an hour of getting them when some people spent a week or more trying to figure out how to become a Genin. This is a hard rule to enforce. If people tackled it properly by working with their fellow Shinobi to solve the problem instead of asking for the answer out right, they would learn to solve the puzzle and work with people around them (as Shinobi in Naruto are taught to do once they become part of a Genin team).
I'll add more as I review things and get re-situated back into NarutoMUD.
