|
I forget the name of the mud already, but 2 or 3 weeks ago some mud that suddenly appeared in the top 10 was found to have about 3 players. The admin was from Russia, and, not to malign Russians, but that area of the world is awfully big on talented script-kiddies (if that's not a oxymoron).
That's definitely the case with the average player. The average player also never votes in most muds. Certainly in all the muds at the top, the average player is rarely voting. In the cases of all three of our games, and Aardwolf and Threshold, if the average player voted the vote totals would be a LOT higher. Usually it's the players who are most enthusiastic about supporting the mud that vote, in my experience at least. In our case, for instance, a lot of players do actually seem to realize that voting can be their way of paying us back for using a business model that lets a lot of people play without ever paying.
With all due respect Molly, you have no idea what you're talking about. I don't believe your mud has ever been in a position to actually gain much benefit from the site, because it contributes little traffic to the site. It may not be useful for what you personally want it to be useful for, but it's definitely useful when looked at for what it is (ie a traffic exchange).
Achaea has 1149 characters in our database that heard about us from Topmudsites (so the number of created characters from Topmudsites over time is much higher, since most created characters get nuked from inactivity), and 342 customers. Achaea only started running banners a few months ago, and they are significantly less effective than being #1 or #2 is in terms of bringing in players. Heck, just in the last 7 days we have 167 characters that said they heard about us on Topmudsites. And that's only first-order referrals. Our biggest method of customer acquisition is word of mouth, so each person that heard about us on TMS is likely to bring in over 1 extra player, on average. Topmudsites is awesome, which is why we're willing to spend significant effort sending traffic to it and help contribute financially with banners (got 6 running right now, soon to go to 8 or 10).
--matt
|