Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Plamzi wrote a in the " In defense of all MUDs" thread that raised an interesting but tangential point. I felt it deserved its own thread rather than derail that thread.

The wrong answer is transforming MUDs into graphical Facebook social games. That would alienate the people who love MUDs the way they are. There are actually a lot of pros to the traditional pure text interface that most MUDs use.

I probably would not make a *NEW* game using that kind of traditional MUD interface, but I'm not going to take one people have loved for almost 20 years (speaking of Threshold) and warp it into a graphical or pseudo-graphical game. That's not what my players want, and I think it is totally wrong to take away what they've loved and supported loyally.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I was thinking about this after reading the recent responses to my LFM thread. There are a lot of F2P MMORPG games out there, and they offer what a lot of no-RP MUDs have along with music and graphics. A lot of the players of those MMORPGs are willing to shell out money for micropayments to get an edge in equipment, abilities, and levels. Ask them if they'd try out a MUD which offers more or less the same thing, and they'll say "no" because there's no graphics in a MUD.

I figure the trick is to offer what no other multiplayer game offers. In a gaming world of free games with modern graphics a mere download away, why would someone want to play a MUD?

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Why would someone want to play a MUD? Because they want to play a text game. Why a mud as opposed to a graphical game? Because it's their preference. Same reason why they'd want to play a graphics game over a text game. Same reason why they'd play Monopoly over a graphics game, or poker over Monopoly. Same reason why some would prefer to go hunting, over playing a game about hunting.

Different strokes for different folks. They want different things. Just not that many people interested in text games.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Over time, more gamers will expect graphics. Kids don't have to blow cartridges or deal with very low frame rates every time there's an explosion on the screen anymore. Modern games offer what many MUDs have, plus graphics and music.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I play Muds just because a Player's actions have a better chance of actual consequence in a mud much more then in any graphical game simply because its faster to change stuff around in a MUD.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Good point.

Someone tell Amazon to stop making Kindles and Barnes & Noble to stop making Nooks because people are done with text. They only want to watch tv.

That's sarcasm, by the way.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of games are graphical, and most gamers want graphics, there are still a lot of gamers who like the text experience. Text still has a number of unique gameplay benefits:

Converting existing MUDs with happy players to some kind of graphical hybrid would be a grave disservice to them.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

One thing that I really hate with most graphic games - and cartoons, for that matter - is actually the sounds. They are annoying, stereotypical and disturbing for the environment. If I want to listen to music, while playing a game, I want to choose my own music.

That's just me, of course, but I suppose there are others like me. Plus those that want to play a game discreetely, without everyone else in the same room knowing what they are doing. So adding sounds to a Text Mud is not a way that I'd recommend, even though it probably is easy.

We've added graphical sidebar maps to my Mud, those are really a help while exploring, (providing the rooms are linked in a reasonably logical way, of course). "Buttons" for frequently used commands would probably be nice too. That's as far as I'd like to go into the 21 century.

Anyhow, books survived films and TV, and it's starting to look like text muds will survive graphic games too, albeit with a far smaller total playerbase.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

It's pointless to talk about modernizing MUDs on TMS because the games we're discussing here are retro by definition. This has more to do with presentation, user interface and gameplay rather than just a lack of graphics.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

The interface is handled by the client, and most muds have little interest in which clients their players use.

If you want graphics and sound, then just download a mud client which supports graphics and sound. Mud owners can certainly make this process easier for those who want it, but it's not going to have any impact on those who prefer a pure text interface.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Not everyone wants music and graphics. Graphic games and text have been running at the same time for a couple of decades now, and muds haven't died out yet. That indicates pretty strongly to me, that some people really just don't want graphics and music in their RP experience. If they did, they wouldn't be playing muds.

Some people like the option to do either - and so they play graphics games sometimes, and text games sometimes. Sort of like how sometimes I play text games, and sometimes I read a book instead. Because sometimes, I want to be directly involved in the story, and sometimes I just want to be the observer in someone eles's story.

I have -never- wanted to play graphics games, other than King's Quest series when it first came out, and Myst. I've never been interested at all, in multi-player graphics games. At age 52, I'm guessing I won't be suddenly waking up one morning with a burning desire to play one any time in the future either. I'm fully entrenched in text, and will remain happily and thusly entrenched until they tell me at the old age home that the computers are gone and I have to revert back to playing parchese with Nurse Dorothy and Marvin from next door.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

When Everquest was new, my best friend really got into the game. He had never played a mud before, but we’d grown up playing table top games for ages. He’d been our GM for years. The reason he got into Everquest versus text-based muds wasn’t because the game had graphics (the graphics were subpar anyway). It was because the game had millions of players, an enormous amount of content, and the backing of a major company. It was a real live official computer game, rather than a retro hobbyist’s project he had running in his basement. He didn’t choose Everquest over muds. He didn’t know muds existed at the time, but even if he did, he would have gone with the established, huge MMO game that millions of people, his friends included, were playing. And the reason behind his choice wouldn’t have been the presence of graphics. Everquest resembled the D&D/AD&D games we grew up playing. It was cool navigating a world in first person perspective, but other than the ability to walk around Quake-style rather than typing your way around, the graphics really sucked butt.

My wife and I had a stint playing Legend of the Green Dragon (LOGD) on some server somewhere that I forget. We played for quite some time, actually, and she really liked the game. It’s not so different from a mud, being 99% text-based, except that it’s browser-based and has some mouse-clicking you can do if you don’t care to type the first letter of your menu options. She didn’t know muds existed at the time, but even if she did, she would have gone with this game instead, and it didn’t even have graphics. It was an easy game, with a low entry barrier and learning curve, it had the look and feel of a real live official computer game, rather than a retro hobbyist’s basement project, and a community of other friendly people played it. But my wife thinks actual in character roleplaying is weird and nerdy, and reading room descriptions in a mud is too much reading, so games like LOGD were the limit of her foray into RPGs, unless you count playing Final Fantasy on our Playstation. Same deal there: a real live official game with a following and a playerbase (even if it’s a single-player game, it has a following and a playerbase), rather than a retro hobbyist’s basement project.

Aardwolf did something smart not all that long ago. If you don’t know what muds are and you’re bumming around the app store on your cell phone, you’re going to come across Aardwolf on your list of apps. Not a general mud client, but an actual “game” you download called Aardwolf. The app just logs you into the mud from your phone, but people who don’t know what muds are think they’re logging into a multiplayer app from their phones. A real live official game, rather than a retro hobbyist’s basement project.

Threshold is on the right track by starting a company and making some other games (however simple and uninteresting some of them might be to a hardcore roleplaying mud aficionado). If I didn’t know what muds were but I stumbled across Frogdice on the internet, I’d think I found a real live official game rather than some outdated nerd hobby. If there’s an official looking website, a browser-based interface, and a fairly simple learning curve, I could almost trick my wife into playing a mud if she weren’t roleplaying-adverse.

The reason the public’s not into muds isn’t because they lack graphics. It’s because muds are sitting all exclusive and walled off in a corner. If a mud styled itself as a game like any other, rather than some special category, had a web interface or an easily downloadable client that I automatically acquired from their website when I tried to play, lots of web documentation, a really low entry barrier, and a site that made the game and company look like some big official and well accepted thing, there’d be more public interest from people who just plain don’t know what a mud is, but would be turned off if they knew that a game is 20 years old and an outdated hobby.

But most mudders here don’t want the general public coming in and joining their games. Most of us like exclusive, roleplay-required games. We want people who know what a mud is, know what roleplaying is, and are looking specifically for a roleplaying mud to find our game and join it. We don’t want strangers on the internet who don’t know the first thing about muds or roleplaying showing up in large numbers and ruining the atmosphere and games we’ve come to love. We say we want that, but we don’t really. At best, we maybe want former table top gamers, RPG console nerds, and other people who are heavily into RPGs but possibly unfamiliar with muds to give us a try. But we definitely don't want my wife and her friends stumbling across your favorite RPI on the internet, thinking it's a "regular game," and polluting your atmosphere.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Amen my brotha.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

NO NO NO NO NO

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I'm going to chime in, here, in no particular order:
Muds will always have a home among the blind and visually impaired, if nothing else. That's not the main point, but I seem to have gradually become the mud accessibility advocate, so I mention it where I can.

I can count on one hand the number of muds with a unique gameplay feature. Unique interface? no problem, but unique features, that is features that stretch the boundaries of the medium, are rare. They have been rare for as long as I've been playing muds--the most unique feature I've seen is godwars2's lack of rooms (this is pretty unique). The second most unique feature is possibly avendar's alchemy system or Lost souls's subjective world. I'm ranking them by how they might affect the player, that is how someone might look at them and go "Wow, that's cool," and how they affect strategies. Don't get me wrong. Other muds have unique features, they just don't stretch the boundary of text much.
I'm going to come at my point from an unexpected direction. let's talk about graphical games for a moment. Graphical games tend to offer, for starters, positional combat--is that an incoming fireball? we can dodge it. This isn't based on the dodge skill, it's based on the skill of the player. I can move left/right/etc. Everything tends to have polish. The graphics, in the bigger MMOs, or so I've heard, can be quite impressive. Weapons look different, as do attacks. I have input over what happens in combat at the cost of worse RP.
let's compare this to muds. In most cases, you type kill rabbit. You get back "You hit the rabbit. The rabbit hits you. You miss." What. That's informative. Maybe I'm using a light saber, maybe I'm wielding the honest to god moon itself. The mud doesn't care, I still "hit the rabbit." In many cases, that is just about every warrior class I've ever seen, you can get by and often do by just watching as your character goes right along hitting the rabbit and the rabbit hits you, and then: "You die." Sorry, but where's the immersion? In the graphical game over there, i can watch as the sword wielded by the giant animated glowing soldier thing chops my head off. There's probably blood. My character might, in some of the ones rated pg13, scream. Everyone and most of the mud websites go on about how text is better because you can imagine, but for 95% of muds, there's not enough to work with to get to that point.
What about this, instead, just as a starting point--I'm coming up with it on the spot. A chacrum, which I may be misspelling or misremembering the name of, is a medieval bladed disk, a bit like a Frisbee:
Camlorn winds up and throws the chacrum, spinning it around his wrist before skillfully letting it go.
<a few seconds later>
The chacrum (thrown by Camlorn) glances off the helm of the knight of oblivion, striking his hand edgewise as it falls (type retrieve to retrieve your chacrum).
<I wait too long>
The knight of oblivion retrieves your chacrum before you can retrieve it, spinning it around his wrist. With a flick just so, he releases it.
It strikes your unprotected head, and you feel an instant of pain as the Chacrum's edge penetrates your skull. You see yourself from above, the chacrum splitting your head down the middle like some sort of ghastly dinner plate, inserted into your brain pan. Congratulations, you have died to your own weapon.
I think that that's a good example of what I mean. I'm not going to outline a hypothetical combat system to go with it, not unless someone really, really wants me to for some reason, but I think it makes my point. It looks like a novel. We could advertise it as a game that focuses on deep immersion through text with an emphasis on placing you in the position of a barbarian hero, with simulated gruesome combat. We could make quests that act like stories instead of just go get the 5 newt eyeballs for the alchemist. We could put it on the IiPhone. We are now above many of the games on the iPhone in terms of quality. Nowhere in my description did I use the word mud. Nothing stops someone from adding sounds or throwing inventory icons in or making combat animations. You could animate the player and his opponent or opponents on a 2d plane with 2d graphics, and (as final fantasy 13 did) not allow the player to control movement. This is still at heart a mud, and a text interface could still be offered.
I was going to go on more about stretching the boundaries of text--I have ideas about this and how it could be implemented--but I'm' going to wrap up with this. For once, I have to disagree with KaVir. Interface is a lot. It can change the way the game is played. It's quicker to click a mouse for starters, and if the server wants it can just assume that the client already knows how to display the messages. I'm not going to say that a mud with a graphical custom client isn't a mud, but the line is blurry. I'm sure that there's cases where knowing that a player is using graphics will change game balance entirely, and where knowing that a player is using a mouse may limit or allow the expansion of a complex gameplay feature or puzzle.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

This is a remarkably telling post. It captures the prevailing attitude among many MUD admins. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that you can do a thousand things to go after new players without changing the in-game experience for your 20-year vets. Let's forget that one of those things, forking off a separate server instance, takes about 30 seconds. Let's instead assume that all of your current players will quit the moment you offer a Facebook app with a single picture in it, or the moment your game starts auto-posting events to its FB wall, or the moment you offer a way to sync in-game player alliances with people's FB friend lists.

The basic motif here is that any change is bad because it may alienate existing players, even if (or maybe especially if) it brings new ones! There's something fundamentally wrong about a game that believes it owes its current players unchanging, lifelong entertainment. It's an almost irrational viewpoint given that players, even in RPI games, are consumers of entertainment that the admins provide/enable. And given that virtual worlds live and die by their ability to attract new players, letting yourself be held hostage to what you feel your current players want, assuming that any gesture to appeal to a non-vet is an act of betrayal, those are all the makings of a virtual world that will be a little more dead tomorrow that it was today.

Twenty years from now, veteran mudders will be twenty years older. There will be even fewer of them than there are now to fight over. There may still be thousands of MUDs running, just because it's so easy to keep a server going indefinitely. There will be some amazingly detailed worlds floating out there, and a dozen 50 and 60-year-old children server-hopping around, hoping to meet another human being they can play with.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

In my opinion what is really needed is some way to play muds off a browser that non Pay to play mud can access. The biggest barrier in my opinion to increasing a Mud's population is quite simply the inconvenience of having to download a client. It might sound petty but inconvenience is a huge barrier. Because when trying to attract new players Muds aren't competing with the likes of World of WArcraft or anything like that. Muds are competing with the likes of Runescape and Kongregate and the other millions of relatively easy to access games meant to mostly pass the time. Mud do have the potential to lead to far deeper experiences, especially in regards to roleplay, but still people need to try muds before they have any chance of 'liking' muds. And they are far more likely to try a mud if it doesn't require a prior download.

Thats like the only modernization I think MUDs need.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Some muds have java browser clients. I know Armageddon has one, and as far as I know, it's always had one, and it's been around for almost two decades so it isn't something new. You just go to their main website, click the Play button, and log in right on your browser. I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of other MU*s that have their own browser-based interface.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

There already is - TMC and MudGamers have a built-in browser client that allows you to connect to any mud in their listings.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Regrettably, those clients, as well pretty much any web GUI for a MUD I've seen (mine included), fall into the category of "refuse to look like a normal game".

I think what will really move us forward is a portal site with a very visual web app (minimal text in its "newbie mode") and at least 6-7 participating games that can pool resources together for promotions on web gaming portals and for some actual paid advertising.

Ideally, this web app will also double as a Facebook app and will support different views branded after different games so each game can deep-link directly to their own version of the app.

I already have a lot of code to contribute towards such an app. I have a that supports compression and GMCP. I have a websocket proxy that can be used to connect the app to any telnet server. I have a minimap renderer that can be passed location data, render surroundings, and call back the parent frame with click events (to support movement via click). I am also running a fantasy art server that can be asked for "a gargoyle" at 200x200 res, and will return an image for it.

I have too much going on to be a lead on such a project, but I can also contribute free hosting (with MySQL & SVN for development), basic maintenance, and maybe some web design work.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

A word of advice is to copyright everything you mentioned. That way you don't loose it,.

darren Brimhall

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

camlorn: Wow. You've been playing some crappy muds. You need to expand your horizons. Take the 10 or so "best muds." There are more unique features in those games than in every single MMO ever created - combined.

Your description of MUD combat is worse than MUDs I played 20 years ago. So please: branch out! There are far better muds out there than the ones you described! :)

Straw man. That isn't what was said.

Forcing/requiring a graphical UI in an existing successful game is a bad move and disrespectful of the loyal gamers responsible for your success.

If someone wants to "go graphical", they really should just make another game to complement their MUD. Forcing players who LIKE a text game to play a graphical game is not a solution.

Another Straw man. Nobody said that and nobody does that.

MUDs change rapidly. That's part of their charm. It is easier and faster to add content to a MUD than to a graphical MMO precisely because you don't need new graphical assets.

Just because people may not agree with the changes YOU want to happen doesn't mean they are opposed to change. There are a lot of MUDs that are very forward thinking both in features and even in accessibility.

is 17 years old and in the last year our usage has increased by about 50%. Our new user creation rate is back to near peak levels.

So I'm going to disagree with you on the basis of both principle and factual data.

Granted, we've done a lot of things to make this happen.

The gaming landscape is very competitive. You have to constantly bust your butt to get people to discover your game.

Trying to be something you aren't isn't a solution. MUDs are text games. Some optional graphical UI bells and whistles can be nice and convenient for some users. But beyond that, you're taking away what actually makes MUDs special and different, while you alienate loyal players.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Funny you should say that. Not only can you play Threshold in a browser:



But you can also play Threshold through Kongregate:



I definitely think giving people more ways to play your game is very important. There are actually quite a few MUDs now that have custom web browser clients. And for those that do not, the TMC browser client can do the job as well as some other options.

And on mobile, Blowtorch for Android is really quite good.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Not really relevant to the point I was making. The post I responded to claimed that "what is really needed is some way to play muds off a browser that non Pay to play mud can access. The biggest barrier in my opinion to increasing a Mud's population is quite simply the inconvenience of having to download a client ... people need to try muds before they have any chance of 'liking' muds. And they are far more likely to try a mud if it doesn't require a prior download."

My point was simply that such an option already exists, and is in use.

Personally I would be more inclined to go with the FMud or DecafMUD web clients, as they support MSDP, which is more clearly defined and more widely and consistently supported (probably because it's available as a snippet). AFAIK there are only about 8-9 GMCP muds in total, most of them owned by the same company, and I think they've all got their own web clients already.

Copyright is automatic, and difficult to lose.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I wouldn't necessarily recommend FMud as it's a Flash app and I think HTML5 would be a better bet going forward. FMud will be 5 years old in a couple of weeks and the technology has definitely moved on.

I've been and while a lot of the code is pretty ugly anyone is welcome to use it in their own projects.

I think people are missing the point with the text vs graphics debate. Lack of graphics is only a small part of what makes MUDs unappealing to modern audiences and while a fancy web client certainly won't hurt, it's not going to change the nature of the beast.

Whether it's Bedlam's client, Batmud's or IRE's new(ish) HTML5 offering, they all look pretty enough but it's still just fancy wrapping around a terminal window. You still type commands at a prompt and the game play still dates from the 1990s.

This isn't a criticism of those games and they all have their market, but it's a mistake to think that lack of graphics is the the reason why MUDs aren't more popular with modern gamers. If you really wanted to bring MUDs into the 21st century you'd need to fundamentally change how users interact with the client and how the text is formatted and presented, as well as the actual game play itself.

is an example of a modern text game that has 20,000 monthly active users. The reason it's more popular than all MUDs combined isn't just because it has graphics as well as text.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Flash is on the decline due to what seems to be a general sense of inevitability that it will never leave the desktop. HTML5 is clearly the way forward, and it can already do all that Flash only could do several years back. I'd venture a guess that more of us know JS + HTML than Flash.

I understand where this comes from but it's not a reason to go Flash. My HTML5 app already can read MSDP, and sending can be added in a matter of minutes. It's pretty trivial to add multiple protocol support once the binary data transfer piece is working.

MSDP may be better-documented, but it is prescriptive and restricted. If the client is MSDP-only, the protocol specs would need to be expanded significantly in the process.

I know for myself that if the UI logic is in JS, GMCP/JSON would be a constant temptation. You can send any kind of information in JSON, and parse it natively.

There's nothing wrong with a cocktail of protocols. That's not something the end user sees or cares about (in the wider world).

There are two points here. One I agree with 100%, that we need something that does away with the terminal window.

The other point I agree with only to a degree. The nature of MUDs does make them hard to adapt to a modern interface, but it's not an impossible task or a foregone conclusion. And I don't think anyone has tried to tackle the challenges with a team.

Some existing MUDs probably lend themselves a lot more to becoming drivers of a graphics-only interface. But you're right that the input/output layer would have to change, in some cases dramatically. I'm not optimistic that I'll find a lot of excitement there. Ours is an enthusiast field, and we pick our battles. We also tend to pick at each other rather than team up, so the chips are not stacked in our favor. But at least we're talking about what I have for a long time considered to be the elephant in the room. Who knows, maybe

Looking at successful browser-based games can be very educational. To me, it helps to think of a MUD as a next-gen server for a browser-based game. It supports real-time communication / push data, and hundreds of commands instead of several dozen. It has an actual "spacial" world to explore, with thousands of entities, and complex systems for questing or crafting etc, each of which will have to be visualized in an organic fashion. These elements make any MUD a big challenge to harness visually, or present in a way that appeals to casual players, but what if it can be? That would be pretty awesome.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Browser-based games are definitely the place to look to see where muds ought to be going. I’ve thought about this a little more, and like most of us, I’m 100% certain the issue isn’t “graphics.” Some people like games with awesome graphics, some people don’t care. You’ll never win a person looking for awe-inspiring CGI movies over to muds.

The issue also isn’t entirely interface. That’s part of it, because as mentioned by someone above, it’s a little inconvenient to download a client. But it’s also “weird” to download a separate program that’s not a game itself, but a program you use to access a bunch of games that fit this strange category. That mentally places muds in this strange, set-apart classification, so that they’re not “normal games.” A lot of mud players like that separation. They don’t equate muds with the type of game, so much as with a telnet interface and a bunch of text. They'll tell you that if it has graphics and isn't text only, it's not really a mud. In their mind, telnet=mud.

But a browser-based way to access your mud, built right into your webpage (while a good start) doesn’t fix what I think the biggest barrier is. Muds are just plain difficult to learn and get into. If you’re not a hardcore gamer looking for the latest title for your PC or console, then odds are you’re looking for a simple game to pass the time. Having to learn a bunch of text commands and type them long-hand into a terminal window (versus clicking on things, typing the first letter of things, moving around with directional keys, etc.) is hard. Chatting with others isn’t so different from a chat room or forum (though it comes across as weird to have to type “say” in front of things), but remaining in character, writing a background and description, and roleplaying with everyone you meet is hard. That’s a huge entry barrier. You can’t just log into a roleplaying mud for a few minutes the same way you can go play a few fun flash games online. Roleplaying muds are something you really have to learn and invest yourself into. If I’m not a former tabletop RP gamer and I’m just looking for a fun game to pass some time on the internet, and you put Threshold on Kongregate next to some Bejeweled clone (just an example – no hate for Threshold here, and definitely no love for Bejeweled), I’m not going to take the time to learn muds and roleplaying. Muds are only appealing to pre-existing roleplayers. Very few casual gamers are going to invest the time to learn, and to play make believe on the internet.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for non-roleplaying muds, though. Especially with a sweet client that lets you click a bunch of things and type one-letter hotkeys, maybe with a built-in minimap. If people will take the time to grow a farm on Facebook, they’ll play around killing and crafting things and chatting with other players in a browser window, as long as it’s easy to learn and they don’t have to do any of that nerdy roleplaying stuff.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I just found out the mud I play is actually on the mudgamers site.




I am actually talking about this with tthe MUD I play on the forum and I got this response

So maybe my statement is actually still valid?

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Some free (as in beer) web based MUD clients for you to choose from:
I've no idea what that guy is talking about re port 21 and java or flash clients.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Free beer? What does 'free' (As in beer) mean?

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

While I do think that moving muds into the browser is the answer, I don't think it's good enough to just slap a java / flash / websocket telnet client onto a web page as an alternative (and probably inferior to a dedicated telnet client) way to play an existing mud.

I think the legacy of telnet is holding muds back because no matter how many cool things you can do for your browser client users or in your custom client using out of band protocols you're still stuck supporting the lowest common denominator of your telnet users.

I don't think we'll really start to see what's possible with browser-based muds until we build new mud engines specifically for the web and move on from diku / circle / smaug / lp / etc.

The ability to have full control over crafting the user experience of our games is lost if we're trying to have one foot in 2013 and the other in 1996.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

@Verbannon,

Shaitan, 'supporting Telnet' is a bit of a illusion I think. Notwithstanding that most muds don't support half of the Telnet protocol anyway, there already are good examples of ways to differentiate the player experience all with the same core mud. Take . It's a Diku, but it'd be hard to tell if you were using the iOS app to play it.

I'm sure many will disagree but I think differentiating the experience -- allowing people to play the game to their taste -- is a strength of muds, not a drawback.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Oh, okay. Thanks!

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I can't speak to the quality of the game, but 20,000 monthly active users is maybe the top 3 or 4 muds combined - not all muds combined.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

They don't have to be specifically for the web, but its definitely a good idea to start making new mud engines.

Primordiax had a new engine and it was awesome. In fact, it was so awesome, we realized we were wasting it by using it on a "traditional mud." That's part of why we decided to put Primordiax back in development and it is going to re-launch eventually as something extremely different.

All of this is great when applied to NEW games. I'm all for it. There are some people who feel like existing games need to be massively transformed into Facebook games, or graphical games, or graphical browser games, or what have you.

That's what I think is a titanic mistake.

You don't have to rip away something people love in hopes of making something more people will love.

You keep what people love and work on another thing people will love.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I don't think the engine is the limiting factor. A websocket proxy like websockify is all you really need to turn a MUD engine into a browser game engine.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Agreed. It's a purely a technical preference, the player wouldn't see any difference.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Maybe someone should write a websocket snippet? ;)

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

This is not by any means a new issue, either- way back in 1998, when I started playing Ancient Anguish, my first mud, I used a java web applet to play. I'm not sure I would have made it through the process of downloading and figuring out a client to play initially.

The graphical interface issue is certainly interesting. I enjoyed Thornlands and Primordiax, but both of those games suffered from ease-of-use and approachability issues. Muds, though text based fully, are much more easily used. However, I'm a long-term mudder so this familiarity may be bred from that, and new users may find a graphic-text hybrid interface more user-friendly.

I have always found that no picture or 3D interface can replace my imagination, though, or the depth of autonomy muds give through emotes and commands.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I find this a pretty revealing post. Now imagine that we had a few dozen really strongly promoted "gateway MUDs" that take full advantage of all modern means to promote an online game. And that also present interfaces that "feel like" familiar browser-based games, only they manage to deliver the complexity that only MUDs have reached.

I understand Threshold's reservations fully, but the bottom line is that if you play the 0-sum game of going after MUD vets for your game, then you are not introducing new players to mudding, and so you are effectively contributing to its slow death.

Posting a glorified online telnet window is not likely to bring in anyone except people who have played MUDs in the past. I have yet to see a MUD GUI that doesn't assume, on some level, that the user already knows how to play a MUD. Even my iOS GUI does that when it comes to some sophisticated gameplay actions, just because there are too many commands to pack visually.

But, again, the steepness of the mountain should not deter us. It is do or die.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Did you miss my earlier post in this thread?

That's not playing a zero sum game at all nor is it simply going after "MUD vets". We are aggressively doing things to bring to people that aren't currently part of the text mud community. It is working extremely well, and it is working without alienating our existing players by warping Threshold into something completely different.

There are other muds doing similar things. I seem to recall a recent bit of news where was pushing their skinned Blowtorch client for Android really hard on the Google Play store and on Google Plus. That's a really smart move.

If you want to make a graphical game, then make a graphical game! That's what we're doing at Frogdice. In May we will publish our 3rd graphical game (Dungeon of Elements) in the last 12 months.

Alienating your existing, happy playerbase by taking the game they have supported and warping it into something completely different is a recipe for disaster and failure.

Ask Star Wars Galaxies players how worked out.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I did miss your earlier post. My impressions were based on a long list of responses to LFM threads, as well as on your OP, in which you pretty much said that bringing social networking into your MUD is never going to happen. Yet, you seem to have social media links on the Threshold website, so I have to assume they are not doing any warping being there. So I'm curious to know at what point exactly you think the warping will occur...

I clicked on and got a "Server Not Found" so I can't ATM evaluate the effectiveness of your enterprise in bringing fresh blood to mudding. I can only say that, if you are already doing that, via the kinds of modernized spinoffs that I've been advocating, then what exactly are you protesting in my ideas, which, if anything, seem very similar to yours?

I never said you should take your existing game and ruin it by trying to make it 'cool' for teens, that's just something you think I said. What I've been saying instead is that it may be possible to take the most essential aspects of what makes a MUD great, and wrap them in a much more modern interface, one that even today's teenagers won't be called 'geeks' by their peers for playing. If that's what you tried to do with Primordiax, then we're already on the same page.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

As a quick sidenote, Alter Aeon also doesn't fight over the limited pool of mud vets. We get virtually no players from TMS or TMC, and at least half of our userbase is true first timers. I'm ok with that. In a lot of ways, the preconceived notions that most vets have about how muds should be run is more of a hindrance than a help.

I recognized the 'shrinking pool' problem quite some time ago, as I'm sure most of the other major muds have. I suspect most of the major games already have pans in the fire on the problem, or have focused on some niche so as to avoid it. They didn't get big by being stupid.

-dentin

Alter Aeon MUD

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Ok, cool. That explains a lot then. :)

I don't recall ever saying that. Social media is a HUGE part of all of our games. We integrate with social media as much as possible without being annoying.


I don't recall saying that either.


Maybe we're talking past each other a bit.

If you're suggesting that for brand new games, I agree.

If you are suggesting people take existing games with a happy community of players, then I think any radical transformation to a graphically heavy interface is a bad idea.

Primordiax was an entirely new game. So yeah, maybe we are.

Although we shut Primordiax down partly because it was it was too much of a "tweener" between text and graphics. We really should have just gone all the way with graphics at that point - even if the backend was basically a MUD.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

If you want to get new players into MUDs, then a smart idea would be to take some aspects of newer games that my generation are used to playing, say graphics and add it as a plugin to the clients, with something like an option to have a "Full Graphical Output", to say the basic Plugins that God Wars II/Aardwolf have, but put a few stages between, so new players can slowly learn about the gameplay and world, and slowly gain confidence. Obviously, since its a MUD, you would want the playerbase to at sometime use the pure MUD mode for their preference, and rightfully so, which means adding a delay to the GUI, which shrinks with the less GUI options you have, meaning you'll keep the game fair in PvP etc. when you have someone using GUI vs pure text. But this is just my opinion, as most people of my generation slag of 3 year old games for having "**** graphics", so a graphical interface of a god quality is only way i can see of getting them. That would pull them in, and the hardcore people will end up going to the text based play, thanks to no delays, while you keep the casual players.

Another way to bring them in more players would be to have a more conventional system for introducing the players to the game; Rules/Terms & Condition at the start, Character Creation, then a very short forced tutorial or safe area for players to gain confidence in the commands, with some printed movement and other basic commands on screen.

I never played a MUD before, but got to grips with Aardwolf controls fairly quickly simply because I've played/owned about 100 games over pretty much every genre, so was used to the usual controls schemes, but when i got my friend to try, who came from the same MMO as me, she got confused quickly, and had to have me explain the controls to her. Some text files/forums on the website of the MUDs would help new players figure out how big the community is, how active and the basics of the game. Wikis are ok, but forums give a feeling of activity.

Adding a GUI is in no way alienating your existing players if you add delays to balance the newbies and vets. If you implement it well, it should keep most of your players (as it would be optional to play with GUI) and preferable to casual players, and be a good intro for players who'll become more serious and go full text. You could treat using no GUI like Aardwolf treats people using Compression: reward them with some gold/Quest points/etc.

As for getting more players, if you added your games to RetroGamer magazines database with a PLAYER and not a DEVELOPER then you may get more players (i could do this as i have a database account). I'm also just about to write to the magazine about whether they can run a MUD article, and If anybodies interested in me naming some particular MUDs, forum PM me before Tuesday. This magazine is the largest and most major one that can niche games genres, and is probably the best bet for gaining new players, since i've seen them cover new homebrew text adventures monthly in the latter section of the mag. You could also add very minimal graphic schemes to the MUDs or just do a system like God Wars II, and show the progress of the graphics on "the spriters resource" forums (which im also a member of), which will probably yield friendlier, higher quality interfaces and a few players.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Just found this. If you could do something like that for a download client/web client, with maybe a tiny amount of ability to custamise the character (say have 3 skin tones/give him a shirt :P) on top as an option, with a basic animation scheme (1 magic animation, 1 melee animation, 1 dieing animation and 1 block animation) then this would be a perfect way to gain new players, especially if you add incentives like i said on my previous post.

I think Plazmi's got one of the best foundations for this method of gaining new players. If you combined that with maybe the God Wars II plugins for MUSHclient, then you'd have a very good system to introduce new players to MUDs.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

I think you are really insulting both the intelligence of new players as well as well, first I have to ask.

If you have a full graphical client for a mud, where then is the advantage of a MUD over your standard game? The game ceases to be a good option for people with limited bandwidth, weak computers or desiring for the kind of RP that makes MUDs special.

Those being the only three advantages I can think of MUDS possessing.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

Well, if you want the 'kids' you got to think how vain they are. They just want graphics. And, if you want to gain a proper foothold in the Massive Multiplayer scene, you need to make one way for more casual gamers to be introduced, as the hardcore gamers are pretty much established with what ever game they've chosen, and the load of MUDs already existing have spread out the actual core mudders that are left. So either make the game more accessible with a simpler interface or try and find some more ex-mudders, and theirs a far more finite supply of ex-mudders.

If you want to compete with MMOs, then you'll need to have a game thats a accessible. That and the graphics/music are the only difference i experience in MUDs, where MUDs dont come out on top. Graphics pull in the younger people, and even some older people, because they initial base purchases or their time based on screen shots, and MUD screen shots leave them cold. The 2 largest markets are going to be female players, which Nintendo has shown involves a slightly casualler approach (i'm not being sexist, just market research) and those vain teenagers who mostly care for Graphics. I was just suggesting making a friendly way to gain new players to MUDs, but then try and use that to draw them into the proper MUD experience. I wasnt saying completely change the interface. That'd be pointless. But if you want to keep everything as it is, then you will only be pulling from the same small market of players.

An optional graphical interface will initially draw in players, and the underlining aspects on the MUD should keep them.

As by insulting new players intelligence, i know what they look for, ESPECIALLY my age range (10-20). They want graphics and tend not to care about gameplay until their about 10 hours in. This range is also the biggest range for videogames. It is also the one that tends not to read as much, and thats why alot will ignore the MUDs. I'm not insulting their intelligence, alot are smart, but they like what they know, and the MUDs have a very different style to MMOs that they know. A GUI helps bridge the gap for introducing them.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

We are talking past each other a bit, even though we have more common ground than not.

I don't understand why you're hung up on the brand new vs. existing thing. Like I said, it takes 30 sec. to branch off any MUD server. So anyone who wants to keep their "pure" MUD can absolutely choose to do so. It would be absurd of me to advocate that people must morph their existing games. They can, if they want, or they can start with a clean codebase, or they can branch their existing customized or custom code, whatever works in their case...

The end goal here is far more important. As it turns out, it seems that my end goal may be similar to what you tried with Primordiax. I haven't seen its UI so I'm totally guessing here. What I'm thinking about is a game that is driven by a MUD server, with all the advantages that offers to developers and contributing players, but with a UI that matches or beats any modern browser-based game. With HTML5, and with high-quality stock art, this is now more possible than it has ever been. Especially if a team of MUD developers pools their resources.

I think this comment is coming from the "purist" point of view that many MUD vets find difficult to abstract themselves from. Why else would you assume that offering a more visual client insults people who have no idea what a MUD is? Do you really think that a teen in 2013 will log into a graphical game and say, "This is so stupid. Obviously, this game was meant to be played as if I'm in a Linux shell, so why are they giving me all these imagination-limiting visuals??".

Anyway, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and we'll just have to remember that no-one is forcing you to play my game (or any game) with a graphical client, and that I'm not "out to get" your favorite all-text RP MUDs, either. So there.

Keep in mind that I'm not going for full-graphical, really. I'm going for the most graphical hybrid that I can do without losing what I think makes MUDs special and worth preserving for new generations of players. There is still a lot more text than in a adventure/puzzle game, a lot more text than any 2D scroller or 3D MMO, with all the ability to emote and role-play fully intact for both all-text client players as well as for hybrid client players.

With that in mind, many of the advantages of a MUD server continue to apply. It's definitely harder to add new content because you have to have art for it, and it's somewhat harder to implement features in a way that can accommodate full-text as well as hybrid-graphical UI's. But compared to 2D scrollers and 3D MMO's, creating a sophisticated world is a whole lot easier.

Part of the definition of a 'gateway MUD' for me is that it continues to support even simple telnet. So, if you are on a dialup and an 8MB RAM PC that can't run a graphical OS, you'd be able to connect and play via telnet, just like in 1992.

I can think of a lot more advantages than these. I guess that's why I'm trying my best to help teenagers discover MUDs. I wish we could have more ways to wow today's teens, and then tell them, "You know, what you're enjoying so much (because it blows your average BB RPG out of the water) is a type of game that goes back to the early 1990's. And by the way, when you get deeper in it, you may find that the all-text interface is not as 'lame' as it looks on first sight. And by the way, there are hundreds of other games like this one that you may want to explore." That's what I call a gateway MUD.

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

By the way, I'm not a MUD vet, I am 21 right now and started when I was 15-16. I have no clue what purist is by the way. i just know why I started looking at MUDs.

Okay I kind of get what you are going for. Someone browsing around casually, looking for something fun to spend their time on. So you get yourself on someplace like kongregate and get yourself an app, so now you have the foot traffic. Then you get yourself the graphics so new people have this sense of familiarity.

So you've gone and did all this effort. And work and time spent. A massive commitment. So now these people are trying your game out where they haven't before.

When they start playing, what is it about your Mud do you think is going to 'keep' them playing. What unique, can't find outside of a MUD experience they are going to have in the first day of playing, in which they are trying to give your game a chance to see if they enjoy it? Instead of them just thinking its some sort of weird clunky MMO?

Because honestly when I look at the visuals I'm thinking 'Holy Freak! Thats a huge commitment of time, money and general resources!"

Also unrelated, are there any Hybrid Muds out there with like easy to modify 8 bit graphics?

Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"
 

The answer to that is a long laundry list. But to put it very simply: more depth, more content, more community = much longer avg. player career.

I'm sure that if you think of your favorite MUD, you'd have no trouble coming up with a long list of things you can only find there, or else you wouldn't be playing a 20-year-old genre.

As for player career length, it's pretty much a universal feature of all good MUDs, and it is something we should tout at every opportunity. Suffice it to say that you played MUDs for 6 years and don't think of yourself as a veteran. Compare that to most modern MMOs (especially mobile ones) where everyone who has played more than a few months is an ancient, and where the whole game life cycle (game is released, people come, people go, game dies) sometimes unfolds within a year. The exceptions to that rule are the big names that can be counted on the finger of one hand.

You can tell from my app that I'm particularly focused on mobile. Take a look at what passes for a mobile MMO these days, compare it to any of today's top 200 MUDs, imagine a non-weird and non-clunky client for those games, and then see if you still need to ask the uniqueness question.

The same applies to today's social BB MMO's, some of which have player bases the size of all MUDs combined. The gameplay is so thin, limited, and formulaic, that even a stock Diku or LPMud from 1992 would be a revelation by comparison.

So isn't there an opportunity here, if the product is packaged right, and assuming that there are folks out there who would rather play a deep online RPG than a shallow one? I believe there is.

Yes, it's a huge amount of work. I've already offered some major components that I've spent thousands of hours collecting. I don't expect that there would be any interest in teaming up. I expect to just keep going at it solo. But maybe this thread will get some other folks thinking. And if more of us focus energy on this, I strongly believe that the community as a whole will benefit.

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