Excuse me while I derail the topic a bit

I was very confused with these rules when I started CF as well. No other game penalizes you for asking other people on message boards for help or OOC assistance. In fact, a lot of games reward people for offering in-game help, equipment, and good advice, cause its a nice thing to do.

Only in CF are we encouraged to be elitist assholes.

I'm exaggerating a bit, but there is a bit of truth in there. Limited equipment and preps mean that the more people who know about them, the more people who will try to get them, the less there is for you. Sharing game knowledge of elite area explores is explicitly banned. I still have no idea how to get to 2/3 of the area explores in the game, and I've been playing for about... four years maybe? (I quit for awhile in the middle).

I'm of the opinion that all game knowledge should be shared, since even with tons of spoonfeed the learning curve on this game is ridiculously high. Ever tried to explain CF well enough to recruit a friend or two OOC? Hey, come play this text-based game and listen while I give you three hours of explanation on places to go, things to do, preps you need, people you can fight and people you should avoid and places to run and shinies to gather and how to stop people from beating your face in and... I can't offer you any help in-game, though, that would be cheating. Yeah, screw that. I have been unsuccessful in recruiting a single one of my gaming circle to this MUD, and they're a diverse, open-minded bunch who I've introduced dozens of other games to successfully.

There have been lots of effort by imms and the playerbase to make this game more newbie friendly. Thats wonderful, and I applaud it. But the reality is, as long as the rules are set up as they are, the environment is extremely hostile for newbies. You need a huge amount of info if you want to be even the slightest bit competitive at this game. CF has a ridiculously huge amount of depth, but it doesn't give newbies a very stable base to go swimming with. The game in its current incarnation caters most strongly to a group of veterans who have lots of time, experience, and game knowledge.

I've tried to recruit my own friends, but they show little interest. To be honest, I don't blame them. I'm also sure that if I wasn't bored at school with oodles of time and patience on my hands, years ago, I would never have started playing CF either.