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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Advertising
 

Best I've found is listings on some of the main sites (TMS, mudconnector etc) and posting among the various forums where players are looking for muds, or muds are looking for players. Having an accessible website, facebook page, or other means of communication/visibility on the web help a lot too. Generally bad etiquette on most MUDS to advertise, as most take it (fairly enough) as an attempt to steal their players.

Re: Advertising
 

Word of Mouth is one effective means between players as to which Games are to 'Go To' and which ones should be passed on.

Another method I've been toying with for the MUD I'm helping to build is self-publishing, the writing of short stories, noveletas and actual novels concerning the Gaming World. With the Internet, especially Kindle, self-publishing is not only easier but possible to us.

And there should be quite a few plots from your game that should be begging to be made into readable stories. That should bering some people to your site.


Darren Brimhall

Re: Advertising
 

Ooh. That's a fantastic idea. Some of our players (and me!) love writing, and some of the tales are epic... even if not as an advertising tool, just something to add to the website for the rest of the players to read :)