[John]

The mud I play at has been fairly lax when it comes to advertising in the past and has decided to increase the amount it advertises (mainly because of the players funnily enough).

So I'm curious about what sort of advertising methods other muds use and who actually does the advertising? Is it mainly staff or do the players' push for more advertising and do a lot of it themselves?

[Sally]

Originally Posted by (John @ Mar. 09 2003,06:40) The mud I play at has been fairly lax when it comes to advertising in the past and has decided to increase the amount it advertises (mainly because of the players funnily enough). So I'm curious about what sort of advertising methods other muds use and who actually does the advertising? Is it mainly staff or do the players' push for more advertising and do a lot of it themselves?

What I've usually done in the past is given incentives to players for advertising on other games.

There's also banner ads that you can post on various sites, and reviews on some others. That's what I've always found works. That, plus great word of mouth

[Valg]

What I've usually done in the past is given incentives to players for advertising on other games.

I hope you don't mean "Log onto Game B, and tell everyone possible 'Game A is great!  You should come play Game A'".  Personally, I find that obnoxious- it's their game, and you shouldn't be taking advantage of their resources in that manner.  We don't allow that sort of advertising, and we discourage our players from doing it to other games.

To John: There's a number of sites around (this one, its affiliates, others) which offer a forum for reaching new players.   I'd recommend making sure you are listed on all of the major ones, and putting one ad up on each.  Focus on what is different about your MUD- very few people are going to respond just to a MUD being 'new', but they might prefer certain features or styles.  If you want a sample ad, there's a number of them on the 'Advertising for Players' forum on this site.

We've gotten good results from this- a number of our players cite our ads when we poll them about how they found us.

[Tezcatlipoca]

I appogize ahead of time if its not what you ment, but Valg is more then correct on the issue of advertising on other muds. For as long as ive been playing/admining, it has NEVER been anywhere near acceptable to advertise a MUD on another MUD. Just about any codebase you can download has a law written down somewhere, as a stock law, that it is HIGHLY illegal in that mud to do such a thing. On the MUD i admin for, when i catch someone doing that, they recieve heavy reprisals from extensive "####" time (a week min) to possible deletion of character or banning. Although harder to gain evidence for it, if i find out for certain that they were advertising my MUD on another, they recieve the same punishment or worse.

Sorry for not answering your initial question John. From my experience, advertising in general is a tough thing. ESPECIALLY if your trying to do it without a budget . If you have some cash to spend on it, then banners on various RP related sites can draw new potential players, but be ready to deal with lots of newbies. Banners on MUD specific sites (which are limited mostly to TMS, MudConnector, MudRanger, and kyndig) may get more experienced players, but may not draw as many, as most are already well entrenched in their own games it seems.

[KaVir]

Word of mouth is always the best form of advertising, so you might try asking your players to tell their friends. However, as has already been said, you shouldn't get your players to recruit new players from other muds (doing so - or even ignoring players who do such - will give your mud a bad reputation).

Another good approach is to submit articles and quality posts, both here and on other mud-related websites and discussion forums (as well as usenet). This will draw positive attention to you (assuming you follow the rules of netiquette), and encourage people to check out your work for themselves. I know that I've checked out a number of muds following thought-provoking posts by their creators, and I've also had people email me in the past expressing interest things I've posted about.

Other than that, I've heard that banners are quite successful. As well as placing them on mud-related websites such as TMS, you could also encourage your players to put banners on their homepages. You could also do what myself and some others have done, and create a TMS avatar - then suggest that any other staff or players adopt the same avatar while posting here.

There are also some muds who believe that any publicity is good publicity, but I would recommend against that train of thought, particularly considering the type of player your mud aims for.

[OnyxFlame]

In addition to having players put banners on their websites, you could encourage players to add newbie help sections to their websites, and such.

DM has spawned at least 5 or 6 player-created newbie help sites, one of which allows players to submit descriptions of their chars so the owner can draw them and post their histories (kudos to Maia for being such a #### good artist ). And someone even made a DM-related flash movie. You guys already have BaoBob, but there's really a lot more creative stuff your players could do.

And as far as advertising on other muds goes, I'll say this much: on DM now and then we talk about other muds (usually about how bad they suck ) and I've told people that if they ever get sick of DM they should try Arm, hehe. We don't do it in an "advertising other muds" way though, we just tend to get into discussions about it every once in a while.

[Sally]

Originally Posted by (Valg @ Mar. 24 2003,22:46) What I've usually done in the past is given incentives to players for advertising on other games. I hope you don't mean "Log onto Game B, and tell everyone possible 'Game A is great!  You should come play Game A'".  Personally, I find that obnoxious- it's their game, and you shouldn't be taking advantage of their resources in that manner.  We don't allow that sort of advertising, and we discourage our players from doing it to other games.

No, that's not what I mean at all.

If people play on other games that encourage cross-game avertising, that's where it comes into play. Only if it's already an accepted practice. Like on M*U*S*H with their ad board, or OGR. Etc. Anything is obnoxious if it's just assumed to be right and isn't.

[Sally]

Originally Posted by (Tezcatlipoca @ Mar. 24 2003,23:50) I appogize ahead of time if its not what you ment, but Valg is more then correct on the issue of advertising on other muds. For as long as ive been playing/admining, it has NEVER been anywhere near acceptable to advertise a MUD on another MUD. Just about any codebase you can download has a law written down somewhere, as a stock law, that it is HIGHLY illegal in that mud to do such a thing. On the MUD i admin for, when i catch someone doing that, they recieve heavy reprisals from extensive "####" time (a week min) to possible deletion of character or banning. Although harder to gain evidence for it, if i find out for certain that they were advertising my MUD on another, they recieve the same punishment or worse.

I think that this may be more of a Mush thing than a Mud thing, where many RP games have boards specifically for the promotion of other games, etc.

I see where the confusion lies. I was pretty curious by the odd responses.

[Sanvean]

I think part of the confusion is that when you say "advertising on other muds", those of us who have experienced players doing it in a disruptive fashion go GAH, NO. On one hack and slash I admined, people would make characters and then spam advertisements on channels like gossip. On Armageddon, though it's been rare, we have had one admin of another RP MUD get on and start OOCing that people should come play that game and promising them noble roles, which was pretty disruptive for everyone trying to play.

Posts on a board intended for that purpose makes perfect sense to me - I wasn't aware that's common to MUShes. But I wouldn't get on someone else's discussion board and advertise our game, and think it extremely rude when I've seen cases of other games doing it on ours.

[Sally]

Originally Posted by (Sanvean @ Mar. 25 2003,17:17) Posts on a board intended for that purpose makes perfect sense to me - I wasn't aware that's common to MUShes. But I wouldn't get on someone else's discussion board and advertise our game, and think it extremely rude when I've seen cases of other games doing it on ours.

I couldn't agree more, and can definately see where the reaction could come from