[the_logos]

Originally Posted by Even disregarding the ethics of doing this (it's illegal I think in Google, I could bust them for this) I think this approach doesn't help muds as a whole, it's an inward-looking approach which doesn't grow the totals.

It's not illegal. You're thinking of a lawsuit brought by Geico against Google, which they settled. Geico was upset that Google was selling adwords that was Geico's trademark. It wouldn't apply to you because you can't trademark WoT stuff, and because you're not suffering any loss to sue for.

Originally Posted by There are millions of kids looking for online games to play, but most just don't know about us.

Yes, there are millions of people looking for online games to play, but very few of them will play text games. I know: I've spent tens of thousands of dollars advertising to non-text-MUDers. It's very expensive to acquire a new non-text-MUDer customer when compared to acquiring a new customer who already likes text MUDs. It's about 10x as expensive, in fact, and that's with our pretty Nexus client giving a good first impression to people used to graphical games. Most text MUDs require that people play either with a horridly ugly java client, download a piece of third party software (like Zmud) or use Windows telnet (*shudder*). That creates an even bigger barrier to entry for these potential customers.

In summary, depending on your situation, it may be worth advertising outside the text MUD market, but expect it to be -very- expensive in terms of customer acquisition as compared to acquiring existing text MUD players as customers.

--matt

[nass]

Originally Posted by It's not illegal. You're thinking of a lawsuit brought by Geico against Google, which they settled. Geico was upset that Google was selling adwords that was Geico's trademark. It wouldn't apply to you because you can't trademark WoT stuff, and because you're not suffering any loss to sue for.

Yeah, apparently Google will allow anyone to have someone else's trademark in their keyword phrase in AdWords so long as the trademark does not show up in the ad copy.

Originally Posted by In summary, depending on your situation, it may be worth advertising outside the text MUD market, but expect it to be -very- expensive in terms of customer acquisition as compared to acquiring existing text MUD players as customers.

Yes and no. Yes, it's certainly hard convincing people with graphical MMORPG expectations to stick with a text game with a geeky client/telnet interface. In terms of expense though, since I have no marketing budget anyway, any players we get through the non-mud routes have to be 'free' anyway, ie game banner exchanges etc. Not that the click-through ratio is high at all, but 200,000 impressions does get you a few people in the door, espcially if you can target them at sectors with low technology & high fantasy expectations.

It's interesting though that the successful guys like Med etc tend to throw a lot of their ad spend at game magazines (I forgot the name of the one that they take DPSs in). But, I note they're here agin too, and several other lists I know of, maybe they've drawn the same conclusion as you.

[the_logos]

Originally Posted by Yes and no. Yes, it's certainly hard convincing people with graphical MMORPG expectations to stick with a text game with a geeky client/telnet interface. In terms of expense though, since I have no marketing budget anyway, any players we get through the non-mud routes have to be 'free' anyway, ie game banner exchanges etc. Not that the click-through ratio is high at all, but 200,000 impressions does get you a few people in the door, espcially if you can target them at sectors with low technology & high fantasy expectations.

Your time is an expense and there's always opportunity cost too. If you have X banner impressions, for instance, you could either use them on a very text MUD-oriented banner exchange or a very general games exchange, for instance. It's a finite resource that you have to choose how to allocate, and the cost for doing it inefficiently is whatever the value of your best other opportunity was.

Originally Posted by It's interesting though that the successful guys like Med etc tend to throw a lot of their ad spend at game magazines (I forgot the name of the one that they take DPSs in). But, I note they're here agin too, and several other lists I know of, maybe they've drawn the same conclusion as you.

We've never advertised in print magazines so I can't really comment on the efficacy of doing that. My reasoning for not doing so is that I feel like with a web/internet-only game, your best bet is to reach people via the net so that they can go straight into playing your game. Having to get them to walk to the computer and log in or remember your web address for next time they're online seems like it'd be less efficient to me, though again, that's purely an educated guess on my part.

We definitely don't intend to stop advertising to non-text MUDers, mainly because we're already promoted pretty well to text players, and there aren't that many text players in the world. It's expensive to reach out, but it sort of has to be done.

Incidentally, despite spending a fair amount each month on advertising, word of mouth is still BY FAR our biggest player attractor. It's bigger than Mudconnector, TMS, Zmud, and all our other ads combined in terms of results. One lesson to be drawn from that, I suppose, is that the best way to get get players is to ensure you have a decent proportion of very happy players who will act as evangelists for your game when talking to their friends. It's ok to have very unhappy players (though I'm sure everyone would prefer not to), but you really need those super happy players who will preach the virtues of your game.

--matt

[Alexander Tau]

Ok, well this has been interesting so far, let me recap a bit.

I suggested a few things might happen in the future

(1) The concept of Mud might get wider.

KaVir and others agree that this has really already happened and that what a Mud means today can encompass a much wider range of games than ever before.

(2) More commercial ventures

Pretty much happening and will continue slowly.

(3) The use of dedicated Telnet Clients might get replaced with Web-based connections and interfaces.

Lots of discussion on this one, but it is happening and has the potential to really expand the potential players of our games.

And since the number of people available as Staff and Players has always been one of the most limiting factors on the number of games that can be created I think this one idea alone is quite important.

To avoid what happens to any group that grows to 10x or 100x it's original size may push some members of the Mud Community into 'Telnet Text' fortresses.



If anybody has any other major trends they would like to contribute we can discuss them as well.

With anything that has been around as long as Muds have change is always going to be slow and hard to detect. Some people will always jump on new ideas or technologies but it takes quite a while for anything to become common.

So it does take some fairly good people skills to be able to tell a trend from a fad, but considering which is which has kept Forums like this one alive for a long time.

One aspect of  Muds that has made predictions even harder is that no matter how similar two game's codebases/mudlibs are, each is a unique work of Art.  There are certainly common threads of knowledge/decisions that run through most game Staff, but the differences are huge.

Usually when one makes a judgement about a group that one is a part of, they naturally include their feelings as part of the 'overall picture' they see. I think in Muds even more than most things this is a mistake. No matter how logical or correct your views may be, everyone else sees things a little differently. And we always, and I mean always myself included, overestimate how many people actually agree with us.

In other words, it is really, really, really, hard to predict trends for Muds, but it is fun to try.


A.T
(-)

[noodles]

To me, what is interesting is the idea of where text based MUDs will go.

I've always thought that by having an engine where the world was defined in a processable way, would enable a deeper more interesting world.  What I mean is a 3D world, room-less, where the description for the current position is generated automatically based on a generated world.  Then procedurally generated life, cities, towns, villages and entities that populate these going through an abstract simulation of life.

Doing a 3D world is doable, even for a text based world.  Procedurally generating content in that world is doable.  To me, the hardest bit is defining the materials, resources, processes of manufacturing, what an entity of a given profession does for a living.  But once you have, you have a flow of resources.  A simulated economy.  A base world where the entities are the normal people and the players can be the heroes.  Players could organise businesses and employ entities or other players interchangeably.

There is one company making a graphical game where the world is defined in such a way that players can take any part in the world, bringing in the harvest, etc..  I believe it is called Medieval Kingdoms.  Personally it sounds like drudgery, but to me when I read about it I just see the potential for middleware where you can buy the logic to define the contents of a medieval world and the processes which involve these materials.

Because the world is defined in a way that is abstract and code can reason over it, the builders place would be to take the generated base and to tweak it and paint over it.  Giving it colour, perhaps even editing the generation parameters to build in that colour at an ever lower level.  In a way, it reminds me of the way Star Wars Galaxies did their terrain generation, they generated the planet randomly, then had artists tweak it and colour it building on top of the base.

Anyway, thats the vision I have had for a long time, and not all of it (if any of it) is unique, I have seen similar things in some of the aspects out there.  But not a text based MUD based on a generated 3D world, maybe PhysMUD by Nathan Yospe qualified as an implementation (but has anyone ever seen PhysMUD and does it really exist seems to be a common thought).  There are things out there which implement parts of this, more likely in the graphical approach, but I see no reason that it could not be done by someone with the motivation and the skill.  And while I may not have explained what I see the potential to be well enough here, I think it would be a next level in text mudding.

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by I've always thought that by having an engine where the world was defined in a processable way, would enable a deeper more interesting world. What I mean is a 3D world, room-less, where the description for the current position is generated automatically based on a generated world.

(snip)

Originally Posted by There are things out there which implement parts of this, more likely in the graphical approach, but I see no reason that it could not be done by someone with the motivation and the skill.

Such an approach is much more difficult and time consuming to implement than a room-based model, and there is very little in the way of precedent - so we're effectively talking about a subset of the developers who are capable of writing a mud from scratch. Such a mud is also going to be sufficiently different at a fundamental level that it'll alienate the majority of potential players - so the mud developer would need to be someone who didn't place too much value on having a popular mud. In my experience, most mud developers who fulfill those requirements tend to quickly tire of their projects, abandoning them so that they can move on to something even more interesting and cutting-edge...

[noodles]

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ Dec. 07 2005,12:31) Such a mud is also going to be sufficiently different at a fundamental level that it'll alienate the majority of potential players - so the mud developer would need to be someone who didn't place too much value on having a popular mud.

Why are players alienated by different approaches to MUDs? Your MUD is somewhat unique, are you basing this on your experiences, or something else?

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by (noodles @ Dec. 07 2005,20:37) Why are players alienated by different approaches to MUDs?

Because, while many players may ask for something new and original, the fact is that most of them can't really be bothered to learn a new system. They want something familiar - something very similar to what they're used to, but with a few extra bells and whistles. Show them something completely different, and they're not interested (this is why you'll rarely see people who play both LPmuds and Dikus, for example, or Dikus and MUSHes - most players tend to stick with what they find familiar).

Originally Posted by Your MUD is somewhat unique, are you basing this on your experiences, or something else?

It's based on my own experiences, yes - but not just from my own mud (although there are certain a lot of players who quit when they realise that there are no rooms).

[the_logos]

Kavir is definitely correct, and it applies to games generally, not just MUDs. In MUDs generally (text and graphical both), the overwhelming success of WoW is attributable largely to giving people a very familiar and relatively simple experience, just with more polish.

Look at the best-seller lists for games sometime. The top 10 is usually 70-80% sequels and licensed games with completely generic gameplay. It's just what people want.

However, the exceptions can be HUGE. When a game does break out of the standard molds, it breaks out in a very big way. Doom and the Sims are good examples of games that at least seemed new at the time and managed to be phenomenally successful.

The first instinct of many people is to bemoan this and to wish that people would play "innovative" games. I'm part of a little indie game developer mailing list/community, and Marc LeBlanc (worked on System Shock and Thief at Looking Glass Studios back in the day), whose indie game Oasis won the 2004 Independent Games Festival's top prize, posted something during a discussion we were having over the state of the games industry and innovation. I think he's spot on.

-------------
Marc wrote:

This whole innovation argument seems like it's all a matter of semantics. It seems like people use the term "innovation" to imply some sort of vast quantum leap from games that are "merely evolutionary" to games that are "truly evolutionary." In my opinion, *innovation* is a red herring; that kind of distinction doesn't really exist in practice.

I heard a story about how Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday." He told his friends that he had a tune stuck in his head, and he couldn't identify what song it was or where he had heard it. When he played it for his friends, they told him that he must have made this tune up, it wasn't any tune they had heard. He added lyrics and it became "Yesterday."

So was "Yesterday" a new song, or an old one? Did McCartney make it up, or did he regurgitate some long lost cousin of "greensleeves" that most people had forgotten? More importantly, does it matter? Would it make a difference as to whether "Yesterday" was "innovative" or not?

Was Tetris innovative? It started a whole genre of "action puzzle" games. But really, there were games before it where you caught falling objects, and other games where you had to pack polyominos tightly in a space. Couldn't Tetris be fairly described as a hybrid of those games? Isn't hybridization the opposite of innovation?

Look at board games. Surely, the input devices haven't changed since the industrial revolution. Yet, somehow new games keep coming out. But aren't they just syntheses of old mechanics? By and large, yes. But that doesn't stop them from contributing something new and unique to the genre. One of my current favorite board games, LotR: The Confrontation, contains no mechanics that can't be found in Stratego or Magic or Poker, but the resulting mix is something unique, something worthy of study, something that can entertain for hours. But is it Innovative? Who the hell cares?

If there is a sickness in the game industry, it's not the lack of innovation, it's the obsession *with* innovation, the notion that there's this vast chasm between "trite" and "fresh," between "old" and "new." It's a lie. Get over it. All games are syntheses. All games are old. All games are new. Sim City is just Hammurabi, and yet not. Katamari Damacy is just Pac-Man, and yet not. There are no great innovators in our industry, only great synthesists.
-------------------------------

--matt

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by Look at the best-seller lists for games sometime. The top 10 is usually 70-80% sequels and licensed games with completely generic gameplay. It's just what people want.

There is one important difference though; (most) muds evolve, while 'normal' computer games do not (other than patches, bugfixes, and the rare expansion pack). The major exception to this is mods, but you don't see those on the best-seller lists anyway (because you don't usually need to buy them).

If you played and enjoyed Diablo, you'll probably also have bought Diablo II - because it's a 'better' version of a game you already enjoyed. Equally, if you enjoyed Diablo II you'll probably also have bought the expansion pack for the same reason. You'll also see people who enjoyed Diablo II moving on to other games which are similar, but with some feature or other they consider 'better'. The same logic applies to other computer games - people like the game, but they want some new toys to play with as well, because the existing gameplay is starting to feel a bit stale.

A well-run mud has no need for sequals or expansion packs, though, because it is being constantly updated anyway. A player may look somewhere else if they don't like the direction their favourite mud is taking (and some players may even start their own spinoffs), but there's no need to move elsewhere just to find some new toys for your favourite gaming environment.

A regular computer game can make its own niche just by adding a handful of 'cool' features that will appeal to players from similar games that lack those features. A mud cannot do this anywhere near as effectively, because if those features are really worth having the older muds can simply replicate them themselves. I remember the days when things like "ANSI colour" and "OLC" were selling points - these days they're so common that they're not even worth mentioning as features. For normal computer games, each such feature has to wait until the next generation before it appears, so that the newer the game the more advanced it tends to be - but for muds, the reverse is true, with such features being applied retroactively so that the older a mud is the more advanced it tends to be (unless it stagnates).





Marc LeBlanc seems to have fallen into the same semantics trap he's arguing against (indeed he almost seems to be making a straw man argument). Innovation and originality doesn't have to mean something utterly different - indeed, as he points out, that's not even possible. You cannot develop in a vacuum - everything draws ideas and inspiration from elsewhere. However you can certainly innovate in terms of evolving and combining old ideas into new concepts, and I think that's what most people mean when they speak of innovation. There's a big difference between taking existing game features to the 'next level', and copying the gameplay entirely and just relying on eye candy to sell the product.

In mud terms, 'originality' tends to have three different meanings. The first is similar to that used in copyright law - an original world or codebase being one that you created yourself, rather than downloading from an ftp server. The second meaning refers to ideas and concepts drawn from outside the mudding community - for example there's a mud which is heavily based on RTS games such as C&C and Warcraft, yet the concept is fairly original when applied to a mud environment. The third meaning is similar to the innovation argument detailed previously, with 'originality' meaning something that significantly expands on an existing idea or set of ideas - a "combat system" may be an old idea, but with sufficient effort you can certainly create a very original spin on it.

[noodles]

Originally Posted by (KaVir @ Dec. 08 2005,06) A regular computer game can make its own niche just by adding a handful of 'cool' features that will appeal to players from similar games that lack those features.  A mud cannot do this anywhere near as effectively, because if those features are really worth having the older muds can simply replicate them themselves.  I remember the days when things like "ANSI colour" and "OLC" were selling points - these days they're so common that they're not even worth mentioning as features.  For normal computer games, each such feature has to wait until the next generation before it appears, so that the newer the game the more advanced it tends to be - but for muds, the reverse is true, with such features being applied retroactively so that the older a mud is the more advanced it tends to be (unless it stagnates).

A natural aspect of providing a service rather than releasing a standalone product.

In any case, I think what I take from this discussion with regard to what I put out there as a possible 'next level' for MUDs, is what I have taken from all MUD discussions on new ideas or directions I have been involved in.  To do anything requires an amount of work, and until you have done it and shown that it can be done, all you are going to get is speculation about how it can be done badly or why it might not work.  Which is perfectly justified, given that there is nothing of substance to show otherwise.

But I was more interested in any other parties who might have gone someways similar, or be heading there, than doing it myself.  Like Medieval Kingdoms; it is a pity they are not more open about their efforts.  I agree 100% with the comments about the only people likely to do it being people who have fleeting interest and the only way I could see myself working on something like it, is if I were employed to do so.

[KaVir]

Originally Posted by But I was more interested in any other parties who might have gone someways similar, or be heading there, than doing it myself.

Well I'm certainly doing some of the things you describe - a room-less world with automatically generated descriptions (much inspired by Nathan Yospe's PhysMUD, which you also mentioned in your post). I'll probably add generated settlements in the future as well, but I'm not interested in taking the "simulation of life" approach, or adding an economy or such.

My comments were really in response to your statement "...but I see no reason that it could not be done by someone with the motivation and the skill", as I can see a number of reasons why people would choose not to go that route, even if they had the motivation and skill to do so. I'm not saying it can't be done (because obviously it can - I've done part of it myself), only that many people wouldn't consider it worth doing.

[Alexander Tau]

I have to say Noodles that some of the things you would like to see have always been passions of mine as well. I like games where there are interlocking layers of simulation for the players to push and pull against.

But I also agree with KaVir that many times people who try to really take new ideas to the extremes quite often never finish what they start. My approach to this problem is to work with existing code to a degree, but then extend it as far as I reasonably can.

So in my new game it is quite likely there will be 'Rooms' but since they will also have coordinates. So instead of just typeing the exit name and leaving the room, it will start you walking. When you reach the exit it will preform it's normal function and move you to the next location.

For outside areas however I plan to bypass the exit system completely and do exit transitions on the fly based on coordinates.

I like the overall simulations model because it naturally creates systems that react to player actions without the need for a lot of specific code. If supply and demand controls the prices of resources then when someone starts to buy a lot of something the price will go up. I see it as providing the tools of the real world so that players, and GameMasters, can spin stories that have a real impact on the Universe.

If a Colony, or Village, makes money on a daily basis because of specific actions of the NPCs that live there you create such a system. If someone can kill, or just get in the way of whatever the Villagers have to do, they have a way to put pressure on the Colony/Village/City/Castle. The Village in turn must try to protect it's citizens. If a single NPC can become really important, say the one person who really keeps something vital going, then all sorts of things can just naturally happen.

It does not require the help of a GameMaster for someone to consider, and attempt, a kidnapping of this important NPC. The players of a Colony will have to attempt to get this NPC back. Not a Gamemaster set-up, a natural part of the environment.



A.T
(-)