Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

There's been some good discussion lately about reaching out beyond text MUDs. I don't know how many of you actively try to spread the message beyond existing text MUD users but I thought I'd share the specific results of an experiment we just ran.

We want to start paying an ad agency per registration they deliver to us. To be clear though, by registration we don't mean someone who just creates a character. In our games, registration is when you're asked for your rl details, which doesn't happen until you've finished the newbie intro for the game. So, a player has to stick it out through the newbie intro before we'll pay this company for that player.

In order to set a price per registration what we did was run a small test where they'd deliver 11224 click-throughs to us (there's a reason we used 11224 but it's not interesting or relevant for this discussion). I believe it took about 1.4 million impressions to deliver those clicks. (For reference, the actual creatives we used can be found .)

Each of those clicks went to the and from there to opening our Nexus client, then to creating a character, then into the game and finally registering. The numbers worked out like this:

Those 11224 clicks cost us 5 cents/click, which means we paid $561 for 51 registered players, or about $10/player. However, the source site mattered greatly. For instance, on one set of sites we got closer to about $5/player while on others it was more like $30/player. The small sample size of registered players probably guarantees large statistical errors here though.

We don't have any idea yet if those registered players are actually worth $10 each of course and won't truly know for over another year (as we have to watch how people spend first).

The first big problem I see here is our portal. A ~20% rate to just click on one of the 'Play Now' buttons is terrible and we're going to completely redo our portal to try and improve this. Shame, as I rather like our portal but the numbers are pretty unequivocal.

60% of players completed the character creation process which is fairly good I'd say, so I'm not too worried about this aspect of things. I'm guessing it's high because the creation process is graphically-driven in Nexus, with character portraits and that sort of thing to select from.

Then things get ugly again. 51 out of 1297 players is about 3.9%. That means 96.1% of the players who finished character creation dropped out soon after being put straight into a mainly text environment (our Nexus client puts at least somewhat attractive graphics around the text output area but it's still mainly a text output area, of course).

It's very hard to know what the issues are in the last part. The fact that players are suddenly in a text environment when they were previously on a graphically-oriented webpage or in graphically-driven character creation is almost certainly a big part of it. Who knows what else plays into it though. There are so many factors that could affect this, from the style of prompt a MUD uses to the colors (or lack thereof) it chooses to the length of room descriptions, down to whether it uses UK or American spellings (colour vs. color), etc etc etc. In theory we could change one of these at a time and run tests to optimize but that's not really economical sadly.

What we're considering is possibly having illustrations done that give the general 'feel' of the general area you're in when you start playing, and display those in Nexus. We'd then display illustrations less and less as the person goes on in the game until finally (probably once you're done with the newbie introduction) they're not getting any at all. The idea here is to kind of slowly shepherd someone from a mainly graphical environment (character creation) to a fully text environment and minimize how 'jarring' the experience of going from one to another is. I have no idea how effective this will be (or even, at this moment, of whether we'll go ahead with it or not) but it's what's come up in discussion after seeing these numbers.

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

In the past few weeks I've had a number of newbies log on and start asking how they can "view" things - once they discover that the mud is text-based, they start screaming about how it sucks (and quit shortly afterwards). I'm guessing that someone mentioned my mud on a forum for graphical muds without bothering to mention that the mud is text-based.

It's made me wonder if I should put together some sort of blurb about the advantages of text-based gaming - the old "book vs movie" comparison can be used to make text-based muds sound a lot more appealing, IMO, although as always it'll depend on the sort of audience you're targetting (I could see it working quite well for your Feist mud, for example, if you were trying to appeal to fans of his books).

I think if players log on to a text-based game with the expectation of playing something graphical, they're likely to have a more negative response than if they're eased into it more gently with phrases like "interactive novel".

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

We were just discussing this today too. Is it better to keep someone as long as possible with shiny graphical goodness in the hopes that they will come to like or tolerate the text interface and suffer losing the ones who feel misled or is it better to drive home up front (and lose a bunch of people by doing so...but you very probably would have lost those people anyway) that it's a text game so that you're not creating false expectations?

I really don't know frankly. We may create two similar versions of the portal - one that pushes that the games are text and another that doesn't - and run split-tests on them to see which works better.

One of the big problems with telling them it's text is that it is very hard to effectively to communicate that text MUDs offer things graphical ones do not, especially because you only have a couple of sentences to do it before most people lose interest. You can say all the obvious things (greater depth, roleplaying, immense worlds, systems the big guys don't implement, etc) but it's hard to be convincing. It's so much easier to communicate 'coolness' graphically.

Random thought that someone had today was to stick a little flash movie on the front page that shows text flying across the screen "Matrix-style" with a label below it letting the viewer know that he's watching the intense speed of combat (this only works for MUDs whose combat is very fast/spammy), and then freeze the text (with some nice Flash effects of course) on a line indicating you just killed another player. "You reach down and rip still-beating heart out of your victim." (or whatever). As I said, random idea for trying to show that text MUDs can be 'cool' as opposed to telling people, which is rarely as convincing.

--natt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

When I was a kid I used to pull random books out of the bookshelves in the library, check the summary, and if the summary seemed interesting read the first page, which had to be both interesting and top notch in order to take the book home.

While creating an interesting summary should be easy, as kavir pointed out, I assume the actual first few screens of text the players have to read might be disappointing. Keep in mind the reading type of people are spoiled. Hiring a skilled author, for example, to write the introduction area, might yield better results.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I'd say that's a pretty insightful take on how people get interested in things in general.

Well, that and repeated exposure I suppose, which is the only way to explain the appeal of phenomenons like the sport of cricket, Barbra Streisand, Lindsay Lohan, and MySpace. ;)

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

My staff voted last year that when we're ready to open we'll try recruiting from ONLY non-MUD sources because of the general low-quality of players we've seen coming in from those venues as far as knowledge of our setting and willingness to learn a setting. We're going to try targetting those interested in the theme rather than those interested in MUDs in an effort to attract players with the maturity and knowledge to RP characters within the setting of our game correctly rather than those who can RP but not beyond standard medieval-fantasy cliches.

Won't be able to say how that works out until we open in 2009/2010 though. :)

Jason

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I've been trying to draw from the population of WoW players on the Earthen Ring RP server for text-based games, but, as one might expect, that has met so far with limited success. Mostly, we've gotten interest from people who knew what MUDs were before and played for a sense of nostalgia (and, secondarily, an affinity for the game themes).

I'm hoping to find more success through exposure of the OtherVerse Wiki and MU*Wiki at Wikia.com. My feeling is that by showcasing these sites in a mix that includes comic book fandom sites, Star Wars and Star Trek canon sites, and EQ/WoW fan sites, we'll have better luck snaring 1) people who are already rather Net savvy and 2) people who are fans of text-based environments and 3) people from interests outside the existing talent pool of MUDers.

A player's perspective
 

I have been playing MUDs since '96. When I started I was starting college in Colombia (Spanish speaking country for those who did not know) and my English proficiency was comparable to the Spanish proficiency of the average American high-schooler. This said, I plunged into MUDs because there was someone in the computer lab who was playing too, and so I was walked through the rough beginning. Now, I took the fact that the game was in English and that I needed to do well in the TOEFL to graduate as an excuse to keep playing and soon enough there were about 6-8 of us playing at some point or another. After all this time (graduating, going to graduate school, etc) I think of the 20ish people I have introduced to MUDs I think only 3 remain playing, that I know of. This is even after they spent considerable time in the games mind you, some of them had played for a few years with me to just banish after some cool graphical game hit the shelves (AoE, AoE II, WC3, SC, WoW, etc.) I myself have been largely absent from MUDs for about a year and a half.

Why do I say all this? I do believe that it is very hard to retain a large number of players in a consistent basis, in part because of what the_Logos points out about Graphics vs Text, but also, I believe, because there are numerous graphic alternatives that do not require your undivided attention for long spans of time (I am excluding games like WoW, Ultima on Line etc) or the graphic multi-player games make it easier for you to share with friends (in the sense that since graphics appeal to a greater pool of people, there is a bigger chance you can play with RL friends than there is with text games.)

The other thing is that any new MUD I have tried takes a while to get used to, even after playing them for 12 years, hell, even coming back to a game you played for several years (to an already established character) takes some getting used to. I do think the challenge is more with how people are used to receive/obtain information now (or rather, how many are used to be spoon-fed everything with the smallest effort on their part), you not only need to entice people to remain in the game, but if you want someone to stay long, you need to make sure this person is going to be able to help him/her-self in the long run.

What I have done as a player (during the times I cared about it) to try to keep people in is to go an extra step when answering questions by doing it in detail, but following up immediately with a link (finger pointed ...) to a help file so that they know the answer was at their disposal anyway. This is much like the approach I take with a toddler, not just say: "Do it yourself for Christ's sake!" but rather, "Here, let me do it WITH you the first time, I will show you how you can do it next time." Another big turn-off is the initial spam many games have, you are inundated with information that is very much meaningless to you at the time, even if you are experienced MUDder but new to the game, I think letting people choose the amount of information they will receive (maybe in an indirect way) might do the trick, like, if you have an INFO channel, maybe do not threat all INFO the same way but allow for different levels of detail, that way you can turn off much of the spam while still keeping the important stuff. But then again, there is the other extreme, and this I found the two or three times I tried to start a player in IRE games (not a flame but more like feedback), I did not find human interaction during the newbie process, it is very nicely done, well written and the storyline is appealing, but maybe because I just was checking them out and not actually eager to play or because of the feeling of disconnect from the actual world, I ended up breaking the link before actually trying the game.

Sum-up:
1.- I think it is to be expected that retaining players on text games is a difficult feat, mainly because graphical games are also available to those people and its easier to play with groups of people you know on graphics than on text.
2.- I think one of the big advantages but at the same time disadvantages of MUDs is that they require you to be immersed deeper and for longer time in the game. I believe most MUDs require more knowledge of details than the graphical counterparts (should I whirl whirl slash or whirl whirl thrust against this dragon? -GW2- vs should I click on sword or spear?)
3.- The initial spam may be overwhelming, a judicious review of how much of what a new player sees is actually important to that player during his first couple of hours in the game can make a difference between me staying in or out of a game.
3a.- Public channels are one of the first thing that may turn me off, if they are not reasonably moderated. Public channels that consist on illiterate morons insulting each other's mother most of the time mean Alt-F4 (or Ctr-C) for me.
4.- Both beginners and old timers can benefit from a helping hand in the first few minutes of the game, as an old timer I would ask for key help files so my start can be faster, as a beginner I would usually ask questions about how-to, and would relish when the person would give me links and helped me help myself.

I hope this is worth something for those of you studying ways to keep people in

Re: A player's perspective
 

Good clients is the way to go! Easy to use, nice for the eye, and features that just don't drop you into a disguised telnet window.

Graphical maps, equipment windows, status bars, etc etc. Those things attract players more than a dull black window with spamming text and may keep them playing just a little bit longer to get the chance to become hooked.

Take a look at the BatClient we've built for batmud. Beautiful!


IMO, adding illustrations into the client sounds like a great idea. Even if it is just in the starting areas or similar, just to keep people playing more of those few first critical minutes.

Re: A player's perspective
 

Think I will throw in my two cents here and say that Hephos is right. The client makes a difference. Damn near everyone, except the purists who like "simple", who have ever tried Mushclient won't use anything else. Why? Because you can practically code a fracking mud using its script system, once you get around some of the quirks in how it handles certain situations. Mind you, that is an exaggeration, but one recent discussion has been to make a sort of single player "mud" as a plugin, which could walk the player through the steps of setting up the client to connect to a mud, configuring triggers to handle things that happen from a mud, etc. All possible because of recent additions to the debugging capabilities, specifically the "world.simulate" function, which sends data through the client as though it was being recieved in a packet from a server. The few things that bug the hell out of me is a) no GUI support, for things like specialized windows, etc., b) MXP support is limited, so more than one font, or inline images is not possible, and c) while some people have worked in the path search algorythms for one, no one has had the patience to actually code a mapper for it.

I would also like to add on option I think could help, even if it was just a support dll. A Scene Description Language based render engine. Yeah, I know, I know, its not a 3D game, but a text game. But... If you are going to use images at all, it doesn't make sense to me to rely on hundreds of megabytes (or gigs) of static images, or even what is almost certainly going to be gigs of image based texture data and mesh data, when the one thing that makes muds superior to graphical ones, supposedly, is that you can change things on the fly and quickly design new areas. Sure, it still takes a bit of time, but its a lot easier to alter the "color" or "size" of an object, or add a few extra bits to them, using primitives (or prims as SL calls them), than to spend hours adjusting the "shape" of a curve in something made for DirectX or the like. And still images... You definitely have to pay someone for, since that is as time consuming, and poorer quality a lot of the time.

Point being. Why use something that requires paying an expert to do it, and/or which you can't change when you *need* to? I really don't think either "standard" option for adding graphics makes much sense in a game designed to be changed "on the fly".

Re: A player's perspective
 

That is indeed a pretty client, though Batmud needs to work on their download speed to take advantage of it in the case of hooking people new to text MUDs. It took me over 5 minutes on a fast broadband connection to download their client and it's only a 5 meg client.

One question though: I notice it requires Java 1.5. What kind of penetration does Java 1.5 have, any idea? I found this breakdown of penetration but it's from 16 months ago. It's not pretty for Java. According to the study that site ran, Java had slightly over 50% penetration, but half of that was Java 1.1.4. I can't comment one way or another on the likely accuracy of that study or how much the situation has changed in the last 16 months but that makes even Java 1.1.4 (which is what Nexus uses due to its higher penetration) less-than-ideal and makes Java 1.5 quite a bit less than ideal.

After looking into this some I'm starting to wonder if one reason our conversion rate between people clicking through to the IRE portal and people opening Nexus by hitting one of the 'Play Now' buttons is so low is because people are being asked to download Java and just leaving. Any time people have to download and install anything you're going to lose a large percentage of them.

We're going to run another test and measure how many people click Play Now vs. how many people actually manage to load up Nexus. Presumably most of the people lost between those two actions are lost because they don't have Java and choose not to download it.

I have to say, what would be awesome would be a Flash mud client. Flash is nearly ubiquitous (97%+ penetration for Flash 8 I think). Unfortunately I'm told that the cross-section of people who are both excellent Flash developers and who are good at software development is not very high. It's one thing to display pretty text with Flash and an entirely other thing to deal with telnet implementation, and possibly a server-side proxy due to the same kinds of permission problems that plague Java when run in a browser.

--matt

Re: A player's perspective
 

None of that really matters for the sake of interesting new players in text MUDs though. Asking prospective new text MUD players to download a third-party application is a no-go from a marketing angle. You need a really big 'carrot' to overcome the resistance people have to installing software and part of the marketing problem with text MUDs is that we lack a way to really effectively communicate what the 'carrot' is (depth, roleplay, etc).


I'm not sure how to respond to that. We pay experts to do all sorts of things, from art to engineering/coding to world building to facilitating roleplay to website creation to dealing with taxes, legal issues, and so on. I realize hobbyists are not in a position to do the same though and that it seems to be a lot harder to get volunteer help on the art side than it does on the building or coding side of things.

Our newbie intros are only changed every few years so that's not much of an issue (recall that I was proposing we might layer in illustrations only for the newbie intro).

Hundreds of megs? Gigs? God no. For the purposes of attracting and keeping more true text MUD newbies there can be no extended download, which hundreds of megs or gigs would certainly require.

--matt

Re: A player's perspective
 

You can never be sure about statistics, but I have a feeling that site is completely off regarding Java. My own sites have been above 90% for both Java and Flash penetration for quite some time now. Adobe has the most reputable stats I could find for Java and Flash in and (bottom of page) with 98.7% Flash and 87.5% Java penetration for Mar '07, although there is no mention of the Java versions.

Personally I do think Flash mud clients would be more appealing than a Java client. I have seen so many more interesting effects done in Flash over a Java applet, and with Flash, I don't get that few-second hang as I do whenever I start a Java applet.

Re: A player's perspective
 

I got windows telnet working better than the average mud client for my own mud, but Microsoft decided to no longer enable telnet per default in Vista.

I'm not sure if luring players with pretty graphics is going to work very well. There are several free mmorpgs out there and someone might actually think, wow, this is the suckiest mmorpg I've ever seen!

Some nice ascii art could be impressive though.

Re: A player's perspective
 

You do yes, but I presume we are talking about a more generic solution for "all" muds, not just the ones that can afford to do that. ;)

True, but I am not sure that's going to work. And I can think of some cases, like puzzles, where text... quite frankly sucks at getting the point across that well. lol

Again. This presumes you are only using it in "some" places. Sure. That may be the case, but my own opinion is that its not going to work that well. There is a reason why things like Space Quest buried games like the original "Adventure", and it wasn't just how complex the stories where. Just saying, why not aim for something that has more options, instead of aiming for the lowest target, only to discover that there wasn't actually one that low? lol Seems like, to me, some people can be such purists about keeping things text that they may sometimes lose sight of basic reality, kind of like movie producers that thought talkies where a fad, or some TV companies that didn't think anyone would actually *want* to buy an expensive color TV, so where still making B&W shows at a point where more and more people where buying color TVs.

Your idea is interesting, just not sure how well it would work. It kind of presumes the, "Wow! I like the picture on the cover!", theory of getting people to buy a book, only in this case, you may be doing the equivalent of arguing that Grey's Anatomy, might work better if it was written, instead of illustrated. Well, OK, perhaps not *that* extreme, but I think you get what I mean.

Re: A player's perspective
 

Yeah, that's another point. lol As for ANSI art.. Kind of miss some of that from the days of games like Tradewars 2002, but most clients can't correctly support it, the fonts available often won't, even with unicode, being in 99% of cases a non-fixed width, which you need for ANSI art, and its damn hard to get certain things like "blink" to work correctly, along with text positioning, etc., which you kind of have to support, to do decent art (especially if you plan on any sort of animation). Not impossible, just not easy at all.

As for all the talk of Java.. First off, MS Javascript "looks" like java as far as most sights are concerned, but that is about like trying to code VB applications in BASICA, from a DOS 1.0 disk. Your going to pull your hair out making a "working" client that will run on Java and Javascript. That means that at some point they will either a) have to have installed the real thing, or b) install it, and your imho better off downloading a more controllable, less limited, and *smaller*, when you include Java, stand alone client, than rely on one that sits in a browser, has to be downloaded itself when ever you use it (its not going to stay in the cache forever), and may have security holes related to the browser itself. The average user wouldn't know any better of course, but the average user still can't fracking figure out that opening unknown email attachments will get them infected with viruses.

Now, one solution would be to employ something like a few MMOs do for their game data, "Download as you play, or download now." Start with a simple stub, something that is small, downloads fast, isn't much bigger than MS Telnet, then, as they play, have it patch in additional features, until you have a complete client. Set up a custom file server, so that it only uses "idle" time, when the user isn't typing commands. Have any transfer in progress suspend "if" they type one. Its almost silly to even think about it, but for someone on dialup, waiting 10 seconds to load the stub and start playing is going to be nicer than waiting 5-6 minutes to install a client. For someone on broadband.. Stop fracking complaining. It would take you longer to type a complaint about using 3rd. party clients than it would to download one. lol

Re: A player's perspective
 

You can actually do that through the java web start feature. Make it download things in the background while you start the application. It is also one of the goals for upcoming java versions to make startup much faster and the ability to deploy your applications in a "startup" bundle with very small download size.

People have to understand there is a difference between java "applets" and "applications" as well. Applets tend to be a bit dependant on the browser in which they run. Also, applets have had bad startup times in the past, but it is one of the things they are trying to fix for new versions of java.

Java 1.5 is as far as i know pretty standard on most computers right now, but it isn't optimal. New versions of java will be so much better in performance and features. Sun is now also working hard to get java better integrated into the operating systems and coming as default.

Here is an article that might be worth reading at the sun site regarding the java JRE.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Hmm, though... If your advertisements for bringing your players to your portal is "graphic intense" or in other ways cater to people that play games on their computer, they are likely to already have java installed. In fact almost anyone with a semi-up2date computer should have java 1.5+ running on it.

I can't imagine anyone coming to your portal looking to play a game (and are in someway a gamer) are running a computer that doesn't even have java 1.1.4...

Re: A player's perspective
 

Hmm. Interesting to know. Now If I just was a bit more fond of Java. lol And yeah, I know that there is a difference, but the difference doesn't often matter. Same with Flash BTW. Some times it works, some times its horrible. I have had a few sites I go to where they have pulled Flash ads, simply because, as neat as it is, it will screw up the page load for 1-2 minutes, even on broadband. Why? Who the heck knows, it just does.

But yeah, with progressive loading, that might be nice. The only issue I can see with it is that a custom system would be adaptive to what actually needs to happen, to limit the lag someone on dialup is going to get, while most progressive systems presume they have some significant amount of the available bandwidth to work with. A fact that is only true for the broadband users. For dialup, anything more than say.. 20% being used to do something in the background is going to lag things badly enough that you won't like the result, and the newbie is probably not going to *get* that it was the fact that they clicked, "download as I play", that is causing it. Definitely quite interesting that they are adding something like that to Java.

Re: A player's perspective
 

I wasn't, no. I started the thread as a discussion of one way we're trying to reach out. There is no generic solution for all muds, I'd imagine, given the vastly different resources at their disposal (coding expertise, builders, money, etc).


--matt

Re: A player's perspective
 

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Well, we'll find out!

Do you have a feeling for how people tend to get java 1.5+ onto their PCs? Does it tend to be bundled by OEMs or what? It's not included by default in Windows anymore is it?
--matt

Re: A player's perspective
 

It's nice, but it won't matter a whole lot to people who are textually challenged and who'll drop out once they figure out what it's all about, which seems to be what happens since 96.1% quits after pcgen.

MS telnet is indeed somewhat ugly, but PuTTY is already a big improvement.

Books for adults don't need pictures and lots of nice fluff to be read, the only requirement is that the content is good. Why would an adult interested in a textual game world reason different?

Re: A player's perspective
 

You're comparing apples and oranges. Someone who is already aware of the existence of books and is into books doesn't need pretty pictures to hook them, although even there cover art influences book sales.

If we were only looking to target existing MUD players then the impetus to prettify the experience would be less important. It'd be more along the lines of pretty cover art on a book.

The problem here is that these adults are not interested in textual game worlds. They're usually not aware they exist at all to begin with and the interface is immediately unfamiliar and frankly, not very friendly compared to GUI. The idea is to keep their interest as long as possible to increase their comfort with the interface. We all know that at a certain point the text interface stops becoming a barrier and becomes quite natural. It's about trying to keep people around that long.

Most of those people aren't textually challenged. They're not illiterate or unwilling to read. When you've never seen a game/world whose interface is dominated by text input/output you may not even recognize what it is you're playing since the interface is so unfamiliar for a game.

And on a practical note, retaining even 4% extra of the people who finish character generation means we just cut the cost of obtaining a registered player in half. Small increases can lead to big results.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I hadn't realized that Telnet wasn't active in Vista by default. Gotta say this is worrisome to me. I know raw Telnet is the ugliest format possible for a MU* to be viewed in, but that direct link was often a common method of having folks "accidentally" discover a MUD. Now they'd need to know about the existence of MUDs so that they can install Putty, MUSHClient, SimpleMU or some other client software.

Really makes me want to front-burner plans for a web-based front-end for my games.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Hire us :P

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Although it isn't live here yet, this change in Vista telnet was the main reason I added a field for "URL to client" in the new MUD database ... so they can quickly check out a MUD using that when telnet itself doesn't work.

If nothing else, most MUDs should be able to put up a simple JTA based client as a telnet replacement. I still have long term hopes for Ajax ... but implementations I've seen done with it so far are very slow and jump through a lot of hoops to emulate a telnet connection.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Wow, I didn't realize that either.

I share your concern. I don't think all that many people came in 'accidentally' so to speak but the fact that telnet was essentially omnipresent on almost all computers was certainly a plus for text MUDs.

I know it almost certainly won't do any good but I'm going to try and get in touch with someone(s) relevant at Microsoft and at least let them know the consequences not including the tiny telnet application has for the original virtual worlds. Getting a behemoth like that to care is probably wishful thinking though.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

What about Flash? I'm hopeful a Flash client could be done, if not super-easily due to the fact that it's not the easiest thing to work with. The plus side is that it's light, essentially ubiquitous, and is really good at presenting text. For a long time I don't think its text rendering was fast enough to keep up with the speed of output that many text MUDs require but people who know more than me about its technical capabilities have opined that with Flash 8 it may be fast enough.

Anyone have a lot of experience with Flash?

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I love the intarweb.



Click 'Play This Game', right hand side below the top ad banner.

Courtesy of:



Well, courtesy of Google, really.

Some notes:

On the page you get to from the first link the developers say it took two coders 2 months to write the client in C++ and actionscript.

In FF 2.0.0.1 I had a little trouble with the scroll bar (to move the viewing window down so I could see the input line) but using the 'end' key on my keyboard worked a lot better.

I think this has a lot of potential.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

You...rock. But not as much as confirmation that Flash can render text fast enough.

That client is a piece of crap and is buggy enough that every time I moved by browser view down to see the input box and buttons at the bottom it popped my view back up to the top of it, but that's just polish. The core functionality seems to be there, barring what I was able to find about it potentially really eating up memory.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I had the same problem with the moving the browser window down, but overall this is a very cool thing to see.

Been a while since I learned a new language, and I do have a fully licensed CS3 for other web work. Hmmm .... so many projects, so few hours in a day.

EDIT: Just found this link:

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Sweet. Thanks for finding that.

It seems to require Flash CS3, which probably doesn't have huge adoption yet, but this shows that new Flash versions are adopted pretty darn quickly.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Sorry for the delayed jump into the discussion. I haven't read through the whole thread yet, but this struck me as very true. I've encoutered this a few times where someone likes the graphics on our site, logs on all eager to play, creates a character, and then start asking about how to get into the game.

It's probably even worse if they can actually create from the website while they're staring at the pretty graphics. If this happens, I think we've pretty much lost the player because then he or she feels as if s/he has been tricked.

Honestly, though, this hasn't been a wide-spread problem for us. Most of our players that recruit from the graphical games usually emphasize that it's a text, roleplaying-enforced game. I'm unsure, though, if having a disclaimer on our site would actually help. People seem to skim and then try to log on as soon as possible. It couldn't really hurt, though, if you end up with a player like me. I spent a week reading my first mud's website before my friends told me how to log in because they wanted to make sure that I didn't mess up. :confused:

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Regarding clients.

IMO, easy, fast clients do have negative effects as well. If you do not have to put any effort into gaining the game, you are so much more willing to throw it away if it does not look good immediately. If you have to download 100 megs to play the game (like most "normal" games) you tend to get people that are genuine interested in it. You might loose a bunch right before the download, but do you honestly think they would get hooked into the game anyways? I tend to say no (just a guess). The people that shows a real interest to try it, those are the ones that are going to stay.

A ****load of people may click a "click to play" button without having any clue what they are getting into, and when it is only text they shut it down right away.

I believe it is better to have people play the game with an already knowledge of what it is about. Show screenshots! You have to show the players what it is before they try it out. You wouldn't go buy a game in the store without some kind of idea of what it is.

I'm a strong believer that it is more of a quality than quantity thing with getting players hooked into text muds.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

With all due respect, that's like claiming that the cinematic trailers that video games put out pre-release don't help because they make players feel like they've been tricked since the in-game graphics aren't as good. You ever seen the original WoW trailer, for instance? It bears almost no relationship to how the characters look in-game and yet I'll bet you almost anything you want that it was very effective at peaking people's interest. There's a reason that Blizzard has, literally, an 85 person strong cinematics team.

It's about keeping people's attention, however you can within reason. The longer you can keep their attention, the greater the chance that you're able to communicate your true value proposition to them.

I also can tell you from personal experience that it works. When we implemented our fairly pretty Nexus client and took out our older, ugly-but-also-java-based client, there was a statistically indisputable increase in retention both in completing character creation and completing the first hour of gameplay.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

That doesn't make any sense. The people who are going to tolerate the 100 meg download are also going to tolerate the 1 meg download. At least some of the people who will be turned off by the 100 meg download will not be turned off by the 1 meg download.

Most of them will but that's not too relevant.

The point isn't how many quit, because the ones who aren't interested in text don't matter, and they cost you very little/essentially nothing since they quit right away. The point is the ones that do stick. Having a huge bloated client is, in absolutely no way whatsoever, an advantage. It may be necessary for a particular product, or at least the outcome of budget + circumstances, but it is in no way an advantage. I don't mean to sound like I'm just dismissing your point of view here...but I am. There's really no debate about this. A smaller barrier to entry will result in more players, all other things equal, than a larger barrier to entry. I mean, you can posit all the "what ifs" you want but I don't think you can point me to empirical evidence where increasing the barrier to entry in MUDs/MMOs has resulted in more players than lowering the barrier to entry.

If you don't believe me, try running a simple experiment. Track your conversion rate with your current client. Then, increase the size of the client by 10x by just including a bunch of garbage data. Are you seriously telling me that you think the larger client is going to end up getting you more players?

If you want some great examples of how important a low barrier to entry is when you don't have $20 million to spend on marketing, go look at Runescape, Gaia Online, Habbo, Neopets, Club Penguin, and so on. Now try and find me a single online game community with comparable development budgets (no comparing WoW, with its 9 figure budget, to Runescape, which started as one guy in his parents bedroom...and has more players than WoW today) that even approaches their size that requires you to download a huge client before you start playing. (No need to look. There are none.)

If you don't want to restrict yourself to online games, that's fine. Look at the 50 most popular websites in the world. Tell me how many of them require you to download and install a client to use them vs. using a client technology that almost all users already have installed (browsers, flash, etc). (Again, no need to look. There are none.)

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

IMO, it can be. Text muds require a lot of more inital time before you can get hooked into them compared to graphic games. If you have downloaded a game, and spent some work into getting into it started, I believe you are more willing to give it a fair testing. At least i would. I'm so much more willing to shutdown a game if its started from within a browser, compared to if i have installed it off a cd or a download, (and even more so if i spent money on it).

However, I'm not saying light clients are bad.

You could have both worlds.

*Click here to play NOW!"* (opens lightweight java applet, or flash thing)

*Click here to download our FULL game, 1 gig* (real application, with an awesome screenshot showing the benifits of downloading)

Edit: ofc there have to be some content in the client, not just "bloated". I am pretty sure there will be people using the real app client over the browser version, and im pretty sure those are the ones that will be higher % getting hooked into the game...)

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Well, there's a difference. They are at least both graphic mediums. You don't see novels being advertised with much in the way of graphics or trailers.

I think the whole discussion should focus less on the players, and more on the medium. Books haven't gone away because they provide for a storytelling experience that movies can't match. So, what is the gameplay experience that MUDs provide that MMOGs can't match?

One is cost. It takes much less to create and run a MUD. This is passed on to players (hopefully) as games that are either free or cost much less too. Given that most MMOGs run in the $10-15/month range, MUDs should probably cost no more than $2-3/month. I'm not saying whether MUDs should be free or no, but just from a new-player point of view, this is probably the number I'd say you'd have to have to use price as a competitive advantage. (And if you know my previous posts, transparency about the expected costs is key too--pay for perks with an unlimited upside is a way to turn this competitive advantage into a disadvantage if people feel they've been duped.)

The next advantage is required bandwidth. I'm not sure how much this turns into an advantage though. But MMOGs are notorious for 100+ MB downloads that take some people forever, depending on their connection, particularly dialup customers, of which there are still many. Also, must MUDs are lag-free, something that most MMOGs can't say.

A possible new market, because of the text interface, is the thin mobile client. Let people play on PDAs and smart phones (though ease of input is a factor here). There are a lot more of those devices out there than computers. Also, due to low bandwidth requirements, that means playing on your laptop in a hot spot is perfectly reasonable.

But the above are all "structural" advantages. Where I think MUDs have to focus in on is why play a text game over a graphical one? And this is where you should start thinking the whole book/movie difference.

To me, it's RP. To have all the tools of RP (dialogue, emotes, personal descriptions, etc.) as being the fundamental interface of the game is what makes RP so much more possible on a MUD than in an MMOG. I take it one step further and only play on MUSHes, where there is no PvE environment to speak of, and generally speaking, a cooperative PvP environment (or player-run PvE) where there is often little in the way of coded combat/health. And, ironically, this is what makes any combat I engage in more weighty, as MUSHes almost all have permadeath.

After RP, it's a story that players can engage in. And by engage, I don't mean progressing along a static storyline that everyone else does, like an MMOG quest structure. A MUD should play like a interactive novel, not like the cloning of single player computer RPGs that you see in MMOGs. One thing that MUSHes do a lot of is player-generated content, as most allow players to create rooms, objects, and even NPCs. The low (almost non-existent) development costs for content, and the ability for players to create their own is what allows for a dynamic game environment.

Finally, in terms of "losing" aspects to try to get players... I don't really see having a complex combat system as being a draw. With a text interface, having to type longish commands to react to events seems like a losing proposition to people who play the MMOGs. Granted, maybe it's because I'm not a real fan of graphical twitch games, but if I'm going to play twitch, it'll be graphical. I'd say the same for a grind. If I have to grind up levels, I'll do it in an MMOG (though, to be honest, I refuse to play a grind anymore in any venue).

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I'm working on a java client for my SE P990i. Not full of features. But will be nice to use as immortal to control the game server. (With a small qwerty, i think it will work nice on the p990).

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Actually, I imagine the experience of trying to run a game on a PDA and cringe. First, the screens are small enough that its not practical to provide 80 columns of text, any less of which is imho not optimal for playing a text game. Second, because of the screen size, graphics is actually probably easier to deal with. Third, unless its one of the newer phones, with complete keyboards, commands in games are often screwy enough that even the "guess what I am trying to type" system texters use isn't going to be that useful. And finally... Until there is some standardization in those devices, in both the file systems, APIs and code execution (which ain't likely to happen), there is no certainty at all that coding something that will run on a Palm, for example, will also run on a Nokia phone, or a Motorola, or what ever. You might manage to get the same language on the phone, only to find that the critical socket protocols are not accessable from *that* language. As someone that has tried to just code a simple calculation program to figure out what I have to charge + the broker fee, to match the current prices on the markets and EQII, and couldn't bloody find anything which didn't have an endless list of stupid limitations to it to do that, trying to code a web app for one gives me hives. lol But heh, good luck with that. ;)

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I think this is a very fine line. The comparison above isn't quite applicable, since at least a graphical trailer for a graphical game uses the same medium as the game to attract players. And even then, sometimes games do worse than they would have precisely because they raise expectations too high with trailers and intro videos that the game itself cannot live up to.

But like I said, it is a fine line. There is definitely a certain level of graphics (or sound for that matter) that can entice and maintain interest. An especially good client that provides some sort of graphical interface for the entire game creates enough continuity between the graphical web site and the text based game that the player won't feel "tricked."

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

This is such a huge and important point I think it deserves being quoted in full.

People get so focussed on WoW they fail to understand that there are actually a lot of games (and sites) out there that are enormously more successful - not only in terms of number of users, but in profits. WoW has a freakishly huge budget. They pay a lot of money for each customer they have. Club Penguin was just bought for $700 million (assuming the game reaches various sales targets) by Disney and is tiny in budget compared to WoW.

A lot of these successful games obtain their success by being ACCESSIBLE. Heck, even WoW owes a lot of its success to the fact that it was more accessible than its MMO forbears.

A nice, pretty UI is obviously very important, but easy of use and lack of complicated setup/download is also enormously important.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Based on what? Do you have some experience showing that simply, say, increasing client size by 10x increases conversion rates?

I mean, if you believe what you're saying you'd be busy packing garbage data into your client right now since you're asserting that bigger download is somehow going to get you a better overall conversion rate from people who view your site to people who stick in your game.

This misses the point. You're talking about the conversion rate of people who have already downloaded the client. I'd agree that the rate of people who stick who have bothered to sit through a fat download is likely to be higher than the rate of people who stick who didn't have to go through it.

That's just not particularly relevant. The rate you need to be concerned with is the rate of conversion between initial contact and sticking in the game and I don't believe you're going to be able to present a single piece of convincing evidence that demonstrates that pumping up the size of a client increases that ratio.

Again though, if you believe that a bigger client will increase your conversion rate, why not just fill your client full of useless data and pump it up to 100 gigs in size?


Yes, which again misses the point. You are talking about people who have already jumped the barrier to entry in the case of someone who has already downloaded the client or already spent money on the client (in the case of WoW, for instance). The point is that the higher the barrier to entry the fewer people will jump it. You might convert those few people more efficiently but again, what matters is how many people end up playing your game, not how efficiently the people who did download the big client stick with the game.

But again, I encourage you to test out your theory by pumping your client way up in size and comparing how many players X dollars in ad spending to people previously unfamiliar with text MUDs nets you compared to the same amount of ad spending when pushing people towards a thin client. If having a bigger client is, all other things equal, an advantage then you should find that the same ad spend gets you more players with the big client.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

One final point: There's nothing wrong with a full-featured client that looks great. That's fantastic. It should NOT be presented as a monolithic download though. Get the bare minimum to the player and then stream everything else in as-needed in the background. It's the initial download that is the barrier to the player, not what happens subsequently and (mainly invisibly) in the background.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Ok, so how many successful books do you notice that are released with unadorned covers? I know when I go to Amazon and search for books I am presented with all sorts of images of books. The cover art is deemed important enough, in fact, that it's often changed up to appeal to different audiences. Have a look here, for instance, to see the MAJOR differences between the US, UK, and UK 'Adult' versions of the recent Harry Potter book:

This seems very speculative. I'm not sure how you're able to derive how a game would have done without CGI trailers.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Maybe I misunderstood what was being postulated.

I thought the possibility being discussed was doing a lot more than just a pretty cover. I mean, a web site with graphics is pretty much the analogue to a book cover, right? Then it is another step further to have a fully graphical character creation system. Then it is yet ANOTHER step further if one tries to make the newbie tutorial graphical as well.

My point is, there comes a time where in a text MUD you just have to own up to it being text. If you try to wow them with graphics too much, you're just wasting their time (and yours).

That is why I said there is a line somewhere that has to be drawn. The key if figuring out the balance between enticement and bait-and-switch.

Graphical web site is fine.

Graphical character creation is probably also fine, but starting to push it.

Graphics beyond that starts to edge into the bait-and-switch category, because now you are talking about actual gameplay that is not representative of the actual game.


Well, I admit I don't have the time or inclination to dig up the citations, but I've seen numerous games get absolutely savaged in reviews (print, internet, and tv) precisely because the trailer/intro movie were too outrageous in misrepresenting the game (in content, features, or graphical quality). Now reviews don't outright determine sales, but they do play a role in helping or hindering sales. From personal experience, I've played games whose graphics wouldn't have bothered me if not for the trickery of a trailer that grossly exaggerated the looks of the game.

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Perhaps, perhaps not. I really don't know. I'm not really aware of anyone that has tried this and kept good stats on the process. I suspect the trick may be (who knows though of course) trying to 'fuzz' the line so that it isn't just a jump from some graphics to no graphics. I imagine, for instance, displaying attractive pictures that are illustrative of the general environment one is in (rather than trying to illustrate specifics or actions) that are displayed more frequently -> less frequently over time (probably over a not-very-long period of time for pure practicality reasons).

I just strongly feel that there's a point at which the text interface ceases to become a burden for people, allowing them to enjoy the world/game itself and getting to that point takes time. That this point exists for most people is speculation on my part, but if it does exist then I think that if you can keep people long enough to reach that point you're going to keep a lot more of them.

--matt

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

Nice thread and my apologies for reviving it,but I just saw it.
There is another issue MUD owners need to keep in mind:

for those of us coming/still playing graphical games, roleplaying is not usually what MUD consider roleplay.
So even if new players pass the tutorial and such, they still have a 95% chance in quitting because of some Muds hard core roleplay.
Just take my example. I have tried many times to stick to IRE muds or to Carrion Field,but because of the required roleplay, I get bored, get frustrated not being able to talk and such

Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs
 

I would also like to show my findings of advertising beyond MUDs. Somehow my MUD managed to get added to Online Games Inn (I didn't add it). This site isn't really meant for MUDs.

With 1072 visits, the average time on the website was 3min 31sec. This is 64% better than the site average (this doesn't mean it's good though, could just be people trying to figure out how to play). The bounce rate (people leaving the site from the entrance page) was 9.33%, which is 77.10% worse than the site average. Although that could just mean they saw the address & port, and loaded up the MUD client to connect. But a bounce means they never clicked "Play now".