Easing the process for new players.
 

One of the main things we have been trying at IRE is get our games as true newbie friendly as possible. By newbie I mean the player who has never seen or heard or playing a game in text.

Over the past year we have slowly changed our entire process for getting new players. We have pointed our ads to landing pages that allow the user to create a character quickly via a html page. We then auto log them right into our flash client (fMud) and place them into a character creation sequence.

We have begun to 'MXP' the introductory tours of the games (only Imperian currently). This is an effort to guide the new players into the text experiences, teaching them how to play via typing, rather then just clicking. Hopefully it will result in more new players sticking around long enough to get interested.

After the intro the player is prompted to complete 'tasks' which get them doing things in the game right away. As opposed to not really knowing what to 'do next'.

You can see what I mean here:

That page starts the process.

1. Character Create
2. Auto Login
3. Pick Starting Race/Class/ect.
4. Begin the MXP intro.
5. Graduate Intro and begin tasks

So here are my questions.

1. What do you think of the MXPed intro. Too much? Not enough?

2. What other things do you think can be done ease players into the typing/text/mud experience?

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

For a long time, one big advantage of muds over other online games was that they didn't require any downloads before you could start playing. With the telnet client being dropped from the default Vista installation, new players today are more likely to have a web browser than a telnet client - and the former has the added advantage of providing a far prettier interface than the latter.

So I think using a browser-based client is definitely worthwhile. No downloads means a lower entry barrier, and the interface is likely to feel more familiar and less archaic than a simple telnet client. Even if your target audience has never played a mud before, they may well have played browser games.

I think downloadable clients are still definitely worthwhile, particularly if you customise them (like Aardwolf did with MUSHclient). But this can be left as an option for later; it'll just be another hurdle to jump over if you throw it in front of a newbie.

I've not done anything with MXP (although I support the protocol), and actually wasn't even aware that FMud supported it. I may have a play with it at some point though, it looks like you can do quite a lot with it. I wouldn't suggest using it just for the introduction, however - either use it throughout the game, or not at all. Otherwise the newbies are forced relearn how to navigate as soon as they've finish the introduction, and that can be extremely frustrating.

Do you support MSP as well? I wasn't too keen on adding sound at first, but it was requested by several blind players when I was trying to make the game more accessable, and after I had a play with it I find it surprisingly effective. Graphics and text are both visual, so it can sometimes be difficult to integrate the two together, but sound can simply be added on. Many browser games also have sound, so if you're trying to appeal to the same market it's definitely something to consider.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

Whenever I'm in the library I typically read the first page of a book, and if it's good enough I take it home. I think this is the major downfall of MUDs, mediocre descriptions that don't draw in anyone with a love for reading.

The next issue is that MUDs haven't evolved past being a bunch of rooms with descriptions, and NPCs you can kill. Newbies often try all kinds of intricate forms of interaction with a MUD, only to find out that all they can do boils down to: n, e, s, w, u, d, l, and k.

The screenshot provided by imperian unfortunately emphasizes these two points:

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

We use a lot of MXP in Maiden Desmodus and I think it works really well. I specifically designed the web interface so that new players can use the mouse almost exclusively if they want to, at least initially. For example you can move around by clicking exits, interact with objects and NPCs via right click menu, click keywords during NPC conversations, and even perform attacks and other common commands using a (configurable) hotbutton bar. What is interesting is how many of the experienced mudders who check out the web client use the mouse rather than typing commands when they start the game.

Another thing I did was to implement a simple server side targetting system so we can have hotbuttons in the client for commands which require a target. This means you can click an NPC to target them and then click an action button to stab them (for example) which I think is more intuitive if you're not used to MUDs.

We use sounds in the web client using our own protocol which loads them from the server on demand. It means there can be a slight delay the first time for each sound effect, but the client would be huge if we embedded them. The server also supports MSP and we have a sound pack available for people use other clients.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

So essentially you are turning into a dumbed down graphics game. One thing we really stress against with upgrades and web interface on NWA.

We (NWA Staff and Game) don't want to compete with WoW or Runescape. They own the market on online RPG's with graphics and sound. It would be like a publisher of books having music and video clips inside the book as you read it. No thanks.

For those muds that want to gear this way, go for it. I commend IRE for attempting to make things clean for people brand new to text only games. We are moving in that direction as well having a type of directional start up for brand new players to text vs. experienced text players.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I think you've missed the point. What I was talking about (and you even quoted me) was using a mouse for command selection. This has nothing to do with being a "graphics game", dumbed down or otherwise. There is a distinction here between input and output. WoW for example isn't a "dumbed down text game" just because you can type commands on it.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

Most muds incorporate both text and graphics (although text muds are usually limited to ASCII graphics) - so it's really just a question of degree. Personally I don't see how replacing a text prompt with an energy bar or an ASCII map with a proper graphical one would dumb down a game.

Even your own mud has graphical images on its website - do you think it would dumb down your mud if the maps could be accessed directly from within the mud, or if some of your artwork was included in the help files? You wouldn't even necessarily need to use pictures - you could just use it to format output into nice tables, or extend the number of available colours, or provide a thematic medieval font, etc. Or perhaps the only graphics are the background, which looks like the open pages of an ancient book.

Back in the old days there were people who hated the idea of adding ANSI colour to muds (after all, novels aren't written in multicoloured text!). But over time colour has become a fairly standard feature, and I believe we'll gradually see the same acceptance extended towards certain graphical elements. No doubt some muds will spurn all graphics, just as some still refuse to add colour, but I think the hobby on the whole will adapt.

Like it or not, you are competing with WoW and Runescape. But there's a large market for , and players' graphical expectations are far lower than for regular MMORPGs. I think even a primarily text-based mud could pull in many new players with some careful marketing and a pretty browser-based client.

And don't forget, the browser client would be optional - your existing players could stick with their own clients. You wouldn't be giving anything up, only opening new doors.

Finally, as I mentioned previously, sound support is very popular among blind players - and that is one audience you're not competing with WoW over.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I think the point is to make it easier to introduce players to the mud experience, rather then trying to 'clickify' everything. Obviously they will still have to type when every the talk to anyone and when they start to get deeper into the game.

On IRE we put in some tracking to see exactly at what points in our newbie tours people quit. A significant number of people quit when they ran into something a little tricky to type. For example, there was a mob in one of the intros players had to send a tell too, the name was complex, and the new players had trouble spelling it just right. Not understanding the problem, a huge number of people quit. We changed that part of the intro and it significantly cleared up the problem.

I agree that we are directly competing not only with WoW and Runescape, but with every form of entertainment on the web. There are thousands of free games, facebook games, flash games, console games, etc, for people to entertain themselves. If muds cannot instantly catch some attention in the 'first page' (good analogy Scandum), the we will always loose to games that provide a better, cleaner, faster interface.

Also Scandum, thanks for pointing out that wonderful graphic. We have a better one here (), but your point is taken. We are actually going to be spending a significant amount of time the next few months redoing our websites and really focusing on things like that.

As for MSP, we have not really done anything with that. I think my rapture guy would kill me if I asked him to add it at this point. Trying to get MXP to work across all the plethora of clients out there has been quite a bit of work. However, I do think we will start adding sound in the future. We will probably confine it to the client. Things such as background music, mouse click sounds, button roll overs, and such, to get a feel to user reaction to it.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I think you missed my point entirely. When I say "dumbed down graphical game" I'm talking about Text Games that try to incorporate graphic bars and maps, and images, and sound like that of WoW but leave a lot to be desired. What you essentially get is a "dumbed down" graphical game.

No, no we are not. Not in a market share sense. Unless you are speaking so globally that Monopoly is also competing with WoW because they are both games, or Mcdonald's online is competing with WoW online because they are both "online", which is rediculous in market strategy.

We have an online web based client, so I'm not sure who you are talking to.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

We may not be competing with them in market share, but we're definitely competing with them in mind share and time share. If they're playing World of Warcraft 8 hours a day, they're probably not putting much time into MUDs.

Why not make our genre of games easily accessible to as many people as possible?

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I disagree. We are competing directly with games like WoW. On the week that WoW came out (and this is probably true for all MUDs) I can track an instant decrease in our online play times for all our games. Without a doubt I attribute it 100% to WoW.

I think we are competing with McDonalds online as well. Luckily however, they have nothing of worth to keep people on their site, instead of ours.

Basically, we compete with any form of entertainment that keeps people from our games. When people have some free time and are wondering what to do, we want them to think, 'Hey, I want to become addicted to an online game', opposed to 'Hey, I think I will go to a movie, or play a board game.'

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I think that MUD developers need to get out of the mindset that "telnet clients" are what define MUDs. MUDs and their kin do compete against other forms of time-sinks. So, capturing the hearts and minds of the next up-and-coming 20 somethings is going to require an understanding of how THEY do things -- not how WE think they should do things. These folks are a group who like to point at and poke things with their mouse cursors. Typing is practically a secondary experience. The interactive social media/entertainment platforms that are popular today are not popular because the users have to navigate the interface with a series of typed commands. They are popular because users are easily connected to the information they desire, interacting with it through mostly a series of mouse clicks/gestures/etc. Typing certainly comes into play, but at a lesser extent. Please realize that I am referring to how users interact/navigate with the content of their choice --- not how they actually create it. Obviously they must use their keyboards for posting, emailing, twittering, etc. ;-)

Furthermore, graphics and sound are highly useful in assisting the users reach their goals in getting the information they desire - be it an exclamation point over a MOB to indicate a quest, a "DING" sound to let them know they've bumped into a wall, or a highlighted icon to let them know they have mail. People now-a-days expect these things. Counting these sorts of features as impure or not-useful in your game world because they "don't fit the genre" may cause the genre to slowly go the way of the dinosaur.

To me, the bottom line is making an attempt at understanding what the users of today and tomorrow actually do by habit. We need to evolve our MUD clients/interfaces to facilitate these habits. Zero install, browser based games are huge in popularity! I applaud any MUD creator who is actively targeting the browser and the multimedia capabilities offered through the browser platform.

One might draw the parallel between MUDs and books. "Books" are really more a concept -- in the sense that they are written words, placed on paper. Now-a-days, though, its getting mighty popular to interact with those same words on a webpage, an ebook reader, or some other electronic medium. You see, the general concept of reading has not changed -- but the way a person interacts (The interface) with those words certainly is evolving!


Cheers,
A/P

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

Nice response ArchPrime, I agree 100%.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I think this is where the biggest divide is. One group sees MUDs as an imaginative immersive experience. The other group does too (or so I assume?), but believes exclamation marks over mobs, ding sounds, and glowing mailboxes will improve this immersive experience, where as the former group believes it detracts from the experience.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

It's not about immersion, it's about the user interface. After all, ASCII colour doesn't improve the immersion of a game, but many muds still find it a useful way of drawing attention to important information. Likewise, some muds use the bell character for private messages, or ASCII graphics for login screens and in-game maps. This is really just an improvement on such methods.

Having said that, personally I find that sound effects can be used to improve the immersion of a game. Background sounds from the terrain you're walking through, the noise of a storm raging overhead, even the roar of the monster you've just encountered or the ringing sound of your sword leaving its scabbard - I find all of these add to the atmosphere of the game. But if you disagree, if you hate sound, you don't have to use it! It's completely optional, it doesn't impact anything else or give a disadvantage to those who don't want it. You don't "lose" anything from adding it, except the hour or two spent adding sound support to the server.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I think it's important to make a distinction between interface elements and the rendering of the world itself. I agree that a world described in text makes for a more imaginative and immersive experience than one rendered graphically, but that doesn't necessarily have to carry over to how you interact with that world. A conventional MUD prompt with numbers isn't automatically more immersive for the player than a graphical bar, in the same way that typing "get sword" isn't any more immersive than selecting the sword with your mouse.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

This.

I would agree that trying to turn a text game into a "dumbed down graphical game" would generally be a Bad Thing, but I think it would be an Even Worse Thing to develop a MUD that was a dumbed down text game.

Blogs, IM, social networking sites, and the like have all shown that people are still very receptive to textual communication online. But they have expectations for some ability to interact with that text that isn't available on the printed page. MUDs that can meet those expectations will probably lower the threshold for acceptance for new players.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

What attracted me to my first text game, was that I wasn't watching TV. In other words, I started with text, specifically for the purpose of avoiding graphics. Since modern socialization revolves around graphics, I don't know how valid my opinions are. However, here's a thought, just the same:

Don't automate. Make the players actually do each thing necessary. Don't "put them in a special room" where some mobile tells them what to type in order to pick up the broadsword, wield it, and kill a kobold. Instead, focus on the help file system. Make it as intuitive as possible, with enough cross-referencing to cross your eyes.

If someone comes from a graphics game where they click a clickie and it shows what they have in their inventory has grown by 1 item...

Then include references to get, pick, take, hold, drop, give, accept, and use in the inventory helpfile. In the use helpfile, include all ways someone can use something, in addition to the actual use command: wield, wave, drop, give, hold, equip, break, throw, etc. etc.

Help files should be succint, but they should -also- provide a list of other help files people can refer to if they're looking for something different, but related.

The help files should -also- be on the website, categorized and sorted alphabetically, PLUS numerically, PLUS by category, and within each category, alphabetically. So the entirety of the help file list should be accessible in any number of ways, because players will look for a single file in any number of ways. Excel can do this with ease, most spreadsheet programs can as well. Plus they can be transferred to html nicely so there really is no reason why every mud's help files aren't set up in a multitude of cross-referenced lists.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

In the IRE games, we've found that we have great success with a mixture of both hand-holding and liberal help file referencing.

Just referring them to the help files alone is rarely sufficient. We like to tell them what to do (pick up the sword, kill the kobold), congratulate them after they've done it, and then provide them with the information about the help files so that they can reference it later.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I wasn't talking about the user interface, if people new to muds prefer using the mouse that's fine (I personally dislike having to move my hand back and forth between the keyboard and mouse). Books that give chapter titles and page numbers a different color aren't a big issue either. It's when random words or paragraphs are highlighted for emphasis that it starts to annoy some people, particularly builders making forest descriptions green is something that baffles me. Exclamation marks over quest mobs and quest logs takes most of the fun out of questing / exploring, so it's both immersion breaking and dumbing things down to a grade school level, which I guess is fine if that's your target audience.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

The key is to design and implement the interface (both the output and input) such that it's unobtrusive and simultaneously intuitive. I agree that random highlighting and colorization can be quite jarring.

I'm not quite sure I agree that clearly delineating quest mobs and/or providing quest logs can take most of the fun out of questing, though. Again, it has to be done well and in a manner that fits your game design, and I suppose every game can be different. It's all about accessibility for me. If I'm having compelling content added to my game in the form of quests, I want to make sure that players are aware of that content and know how to find it. I don't think it's dumbing anything down to find some way to subtly point out to your players that there's something important that they can do.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I just posted an article on the Anvil Blog regarding some things we did that I thought helped ease players into text MUDs:

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

At Armageddon, we're also working toward improving the new player experience, and we added FMUD to our website back in October.

We've found that although we have a lot of new traffic coming to our website and even creating accounts, that hasn't translated well into actual players. Part of this is due to the fact that Armageddon is a niche-market game; only a portion of the total market will be interested in things like the desert theme, permadeath, etc. And we'll likely never see the number of players that popular H&S games do, because most players have been conditioned by graphical gaming (both single- and multi-player) to find gaming fulfillment in level or skill advancement, which we obfuscate.

Nevertheless, it's clear that we could be doing better, especially in the arena of getting players into the game and oriented with the mechanics.

Once that hurdle is past, though, the number one factor we believe contributes to retaining new players, is how much interaction they get from other players. After all, that is why they're multi-user dungeons, rather than single-user.

Perhaps the stereotype of the 'lonely, unattractive, socially-inept geek gamer' is less accurate than it once was (I certainly think so, based on the Armageddon players I've met - we're a hawt group) but people are still coming to these games for socialization. We live in a world where we communicate more by texting, Facebook updates, and IMs than by face-to-face communication, so it shouldn't be that hard to sell text-based gaming, if we can make people feel like they belong and enable them to foster friendships.

In some ways, I think that games with larger playerbases are handicapped in this area, because their games are more like a big city than a small town. I know I started out on Dragonrealms, a Simutronics game, but the last time I went back to try them out, I left again because of lack of player interaction (and their average number of players online is about 10x that of Armageddon, with a gameworld maybe only twice as large). None of the people I'd played with years ago were still around, and I found it hard to make new friends there - so many players focus more on skill macros/scripts than on interaction, those that do interact are very cliqueish, and there's little in that world that encourages cooperation and interaction for more than the few moments it takes to cast a spell on someone else.

By comparison, in a game like Armageddon, making social contacts with other PCs is hugely important to a character's wealth, influence, power, and ability to remain alive. And players are interacting with the same people every day for months, so they have a sense that their character belongs, and that by extension, they do as well. Our players have a strong sense of community and even family (a dysfunctional family, perhaps, but a family nonetheless).

To illustrate this, about 40% of our new players come to us by word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends. But this group makes up 57% of the players we retain. Those new players are sharing a new common interest with their existing friends. What the challenge is, is to facilitate the new people coming in, in creating friendships with those who have an existing common interest (the game).

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I thought it was a good tutorial, overall. In a few places the dialogue felt patronizing, especially in the two shops. A few times I felt held back by the slow pacing of the tutorial, especially right at the beginning and end. On the other hand, the librarian's speech went by rather fast, and having lagged out for a few seconds at the beginning, it was difficult to catch up because the flash client kept wanting to jump back to the end although I was trying to scroll up. I felt like the history was conveyed a bit repetitively, especially given the big chunk the librarian does - it doesn't really need to be repeated multiple times in one tutorial.

I think that you should either walk players through guild selection, or drop them in the game and leave selection until later. It felt like that was a fence to climb before entering the world.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

You mean that your MUD is a desert of filler space so vast the players need guidance to cover the distance to the next location where they can have some brief interaction.

Which unfortunately is the case for 100% of the MUDs out there.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

Good points, especially the guild selection part. We decided not to leave it out until later because we would like them to be in a group that will start talking to them right away (the guild members are notified when a new member joins that way). However, you are right, that part could be smoother over considerably.

Thanks

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

In that case, you might want to have the selection up-front with the race selection, where it's a bit easier to read all the options without the list of options scrolling off the screen...there's just too many options to read more than 4 or 5 of them before this happens.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

Yeah, Lusternia does that and we have considered doing that as well.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I sent mail to a few MUD admins about this but since there's a thread I'll reply here too:

I think the best way to make the newbie process better is test, test, test. You can't test your own MUD -- you already know how to play it! What's obvious to you is complete gibberish to someone else. So the best way would be to get people who haven't played your MUD to test the newbie process, and then give you feedback on what confused them personally, where they got lost, where they gave up and lost interest, etc.

I would LOVE to do a one-to-one feedback exchange with any MUD admin who wants it. You come try my MUD for an hour and I'll come try yours. Then we swap notes on how we felt about the process.

Who's in?

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I may be interested, however, it may be a few more weeks/months from now when I finish one of the noobie schools in my MUD. I am building 3 at the moment, one per alignment that includes history/religion/politics of the alignment faction, so that new players can also learn about the real storyline of the game. It is a RP Enforced MUD and it is currently under development. But the evil newbie school is nearing completion. I will let you know when it is done. I will also have to run this by several other staff members, as we haven't made our address public yet.

But, ultimately, a fresh look at the newbie portion of the game would be very helpful.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

A graphical introduction of the sort you've demoed for Imperian and the other IRE games is something we've discussed a lot for Lithmeria.

It's undoubtedly a gorgeous introduction and whomever made it should be commended for doing a truly wonderful job. It's also a great way of getting people into the 'feel' of Imperian's Lore and giving them a crash course in the races, cities and so forth.

The concern we have is how to draw the line between making an awesome introduction that sucks players in... and creating an introduction that creates an unrealistic and soon dashed expectation of what the game is going to be like. I've played IRE games for more years than I'd admit to an age appropriate female and I can say with confidence that IRE games reach their 'fun' peak well beyond the first week of gameplay. After a player goes through your incredibly shiny introduction and reaches the actual game, they're going to be faced with plain old (comparatively) boring text and the prospect of typing 'SMITE ZEALOT/BAKUL' for 15 levels.

This isn't a bad thing in and of itself and I think the newbie zones in Imperian offer a cool, gently sloping learning curve for newbies. What concerns is me is how many will be instantly turned off, to the point of quitting, by the contrast between the sleek, shiny graphics of your introduction and the text-based game itself.

I think to some extent IRE can get away with this, because they're so well established that they have a lot of look-ins coming in anyway... and they've got a reputation solid enough to keep someone playing for an extra ten minutes, long enough to get over the shock of the transition and maybe get hooked on the game proper. As a new game, we just don't think we can pull that sort of thing off.

I guess we, and I suspect much of the MUDing community will be looking with interest to see how this front-end interface works out for IRE's games. Do people like it? Do a higher percentage of new players stick around post change? What's the feedback? Etc.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

Ok, took me awhile, but I created an account on these forums to specifically answer this thread.

First, a little background. I'm in my late twenties, and one month ago, I had never played a mud ever. I was completely new. I had only once attempted to play some MUD based off the Lord of the Rings when I was 17, and it was a total disaster. My friend tried to get me into it, and he "rushed" me through creation for me, and I was dumped in a game with little to no clue to what I was doing, and I walked into some important Lord's castle wield a weapon and was immediately killed by some super guards. I tried maybe logging in once or twice after that, and bagged it.

Now we fast forward about 10 years ahead, and I was on my Mac doing some work, and wanted to play some games. I dual boot it so I can play games, but it was such a pain to reboot into windows for just 30 minutes of gaming, to reboot back into Mac and open everything up again. So I thought "I should try one of those muds again." I did some googling, found TMS's top mud list, and ended up connecting to New Worlds.

I know the NW owner posts here, and he is very vocal about certain aspects, so I just wanted to disclaim that first. But it is safe to assume that for the vast majority in this forum, their days as a "beginning player" are well behind, and I thought my perspective could be useful.

A few things I noticed that NW does very well in helping new players:

1) Putting them in contact with a REAL human being within second of creating a new player. A guide or another player simply say hello in the question channel, and tell the player they are there for us. I cannot tell you how useful this was in learning a mud for the first time. It also helps establish a commodore with other players quickly. there is a connection when someone helps you over the "question" channel, and then you see them in the tavern.

2) The "creation / intro" process doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. You just go through a series of rooms that have short descriptions of different things you can do. You practice putting, getting, looking, all the very basic. However, if you don't need a specific area, you can just go "north." The process takes a max of maybe 10-15 minutes if you are new, maybe 20-25 if you really struggle. But it doesn't seem long or tedious.

Also, there are no "timer/timed" things in the intro, slowly giving you text. Both when I tried Archaea over telnet, and Imperian's web client, that drove me nuts, and eventually I didn't put up with it and stopped mid way through the intro, never making it out of the intro for either. Some new players might like the stream of text, but I prefer the small batch of text, and then my action lead to the next batch.

3) The starting town, Gahlen, is also the main town and hub of activity. A new "immigrant" in Gahlen will often run into several new players, who introduce themselves and help them out. Creating these relationships with real players helps a lot with the retention factor, I know it helped me a lot.

4) The town layout is super basic and easy to understand. For a new player, this was the most daunting tasks for me, just bloody moving around. I could get turned around so easily while trying to build these internal maps in my head. I know that MXP has mapping capabilities, but unless it used 100% through the MUD, the process of learning how to navigate a MUD is a crucial skill to learn, and so making an easy to learn town is very helpful.

5) Tours are offered and given to new players when they finish the creation process. Mine was super helpful, and showed me all the different places I would want to go to, and how to navigate to them. It also, once again, is a tool to help create that connection to the rest of the player base.

I recently gave a tour, only after being around for about a month, and that new character messages me over tells several times ICly over several days with simple questions, like finding a leader of the local religion to learn about joining, and how to find a merchant to repair his equipment.

6) Color is used, but the majority is not colored. I think the creators did a good job nailing the use of color in their game. The different colors carry different themes, and "key navigation spots" have color hints to help make certain intersections memorable, and each intersection with colors is different, as to not get confused between them.

7) Everything you need to get to level 10 and join a guild is within the city walls. A special place is created to be more "forgiving" and helpful to newbies to combat. If you die in these training grounds, you can get a new set of equipment to go back in right at the entrance. The place you hunt is very close to the place you train your skills and level. The city was built basically to be easy for new players.

8) There are signs everywhere in the starting areas with short, concise information that a new player would need. I learned very quickly that if there is a sign, I could read it and it would tell me everything I needed to know about that room.

Now, it isn't all sunshine and rainbows over at NW, there are a few draw backs you have to mitigate to making their system work. Support heavily relies on the players of the game, which comes with a slew of challenges.

1) The A**hole Syndrome - Lets be honest, some players are strait up asshats at times, and veteran players just ignore them. However, there was an instance where I was in the tavern talking with other people, and another player entered, I spoke to them for a bit, and he left. Then over the OOC chat channel, he made a remark something to the tune of "why some new players ever bother playing their worthless characters." I knew that remark was about me, and it was frustrating being "looked down" on by a 'veteran' player.

2) The Nazi Syndrome - The rules are pretty strict about certain things that happen in game, especially when it comes to Roleplaying. At the time I had joined a guild, and was working hard on getting my character to a certain level so I could join some of the harder fights, I was discussing all the work my character was putting in ICly. Talking about "game mechanics", such as level, xp, hp, etc., in an IC context is extremely taboo and against the rules in NW. A veteran player walked by and her one sentence of our conversation, and walked on. Then over the OOC channel he stated, to the entire server, that "doing blah blah is really bad RP and ruins the game." Then it spun up all sorts of heated discussion on the OOC channel about the issue, and being called out like that over a single sentence which in context of the conversation was completely fine was frustrating. Its okay to guide new players, but being nice about it is super important. Players that are critical of new players in a rude way, no matter how justified, can demoralize new players.

3) The Elite Syndrome - You can have many players who have played for multiple years that can have their groups of friends and such, which is normal. What can be a challenge is when a new player comes in, and really can't break into a group of friends. I honestly don't think most players intend to do this, its just easier to RP and play with an already established group of people. But if your game relies heavily on RP, it can be hard for new players to fit in.

I think NW does a pretty good job with these issues, but they do exist.

Hopefully my insights and opinions can be helpful.

Re: Easing the process for new players.
 

I don't have much to say regarding extremely early attraction of brand-new players.

However, I've noticed several issues — specifically in IRE MUDs, but I'm sure they could crop up anywhere — which nevertheless effect the retention of these brand-new players far more so than retention of new (but experienced) MUDders. That's because experienced MUDders are wise enough not to be put off by what I'm about to outline.



The first problem I've noticed is simply that two of IRE's MUDs have far too many player guilds and/or organizations (cities, etc.) available. Lusternia has 24 guilds (soon to be 26), to serve a player base that averages approximately 80 people online at any given time. That's an average three online players per guild at any given time, but naturally, some guilds are more popular than others. Thus, the least popular guilds are completely empty during the quiet hours, almost empty during off-peak times, and maybe see a bit of activity during peak times. Even the more popular guilds are spread rather thin, no matter the time of day.

Imperian also has a lot of guilds (26), and its player base is actually 12% smaller than Lusternia's. The same difficulties outlined above apply to it, too.

This is a problem because guilds aren't just a character class in IRE MUDs. They're a critical and essential part of gameplay, and having active members within your guild is important. You get a brand-new player in one of these deserted guilds, and they may quit on you because of it... if not immediately, perhaps later.

The solution is fairly simple: Bite the bullet and downsize these games to properly fit the player base. Having an oversized set of guilds doesn't help the MUD grow, instead hindering it by spreading players too thinly.



Another significant problem I've seen in IRE MUDs is private OOC clans and equivalents. It's probably far too late to get rid of these, as doing so would anger older players, but I feel that they're detrimental to the MUDs.

While OOC clans look good on paper, they turn quite a few people (and groups of people) into great swatches of silence that brand-new players don't understand. The newbies don't realize why people are so (relatively) quiet on IC channels or at places where players tend to congregate.

In Lusternia, for example, I have stood at my organization's nexus (major congregation area) to observe the SAYS in that room, the org's main channel, my guild's main channel, all of the org's various sub-channels, and the newbie channel.

Complete silence can reign for minutes at a stretch (longer during quiet hours, shorter during peak hours).

As well, keep in mind that these two issues actually compound and reinforce each other. Having a ton of guilds and/or too many orgs means even fewer people on the various chat channels.



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Well, that's all I've got for now, though I can't help feeling I forgot one more item. I hope these constructive criticisms are least give you some food for thought.