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11-08-2004, 05:57 PM

Well Brody,

Mudding is not casual gaming. The learning curve is steep as heck and on most big muds, to get anywhere you have to devote TREMENDOUS amounts of time-- so much time that if it were invested otherwise it would yield college degrees, published novels, etc. One advantage most muds have is the fact they're free, but they more than destroy this advantage since by choosing to mud, one is basically giving up a 2nd full-time job.
So what am I getting at? We won't do well targeting casual gamers, and that leaves only elite gamers. Sadly, elite gamers are the kind who are WILLING to pay the $20/month for hot elfchick-truckdriver poontang on Everquest. Elitist gamers who specialize in text are VERY few and far between. You've got us mudders... then you've got the roguelikes, and they have a good sized following, but they are getting fresh blood no faster than we ourselves are. The one "fortress" of text gamers is, as someone mentioned above, the utopia-type games. See eg. legend of the green dragon. These games are successful precisely because of their strict limits to turns- if everyone has only 20 turns per RL day, suddenly the "sacrifice social life, sleep, work, food and sex" aspect disappears and you can be quite successful playing for an hour or less a day. Perhaps it would be neat to experiment with setups like this in MUDs.
But another advantage the eutopia/LotGD games have is, again, they've evolved beyond dark ages. Once upon a time, the internet was only accessed through college computer labs and everyone did everything with Telnet, Gopher, or Lynx. Not any more. I'm not saying I agree, I loved those days, but it's over man. The fat lady has sung. That's not to despair though- there's no reason we can't have muds running on http servers. But everyone follows tradition like brainless zombies and churns out identical copies of muds that've been around forever.

11-08-2004, 05:57 PM	#11
erdos Posts: n/a	Well Brody, Mudding is not casual gaming. The learning curve is steep as heck and on most big muds, to get anywhere you have to devote TREMENDOUS amounts of time-- so much time that if it were invested otherwise it would yield college degrees, published novels, etc. One advantage most muds have is the fact they're free, but they more than destroy this advantage since by choosing to mud, one is basically giving up a 2nd full-time job. So what am I getting at? We won't do well targeting casual gamers, and that leaves only elite gamers. Sadly, elite gamers are the kind who are WILLING to pay the $20/month for hot elfchick-truckdriver poontang on Everquest. Elitist gamers who specialize in text are VERY few and far between. You've got us mudders... then you've got the roguelikes, and they have a good sized following, but they are getting fresh blood no faster than we ourselves are. The one "fortress" of text gamers is, as someone mentioned above, the utopia-type games. See eg. legend of the green dragon. These games are successful precisely because of their strict limits to turns- if everyone has only 20 turns per RL day, suddenly the "sacrifice social life, sleep, work, food and sex" aspect disappears and you can be quite successful playing for an hour or less a day. Perhaps it would be neat to experiment with setups like this in MUDs. But another advantage the eutopia/LotGD games have is, again, they've evolved beyond dark ages. Once upon a time, the internet was only accessed through college computer labs and everyone did everything with Telnet, Gopher, or Lynx. Not any more. I'm not saying I agree, I loved those days, but it's over man. The fat lady has sung. That's not to despair though- there's no reason we can't have muds running on http servers. But everyone follows tradition like brainless zombies and churns out identical copies of muds that've been around forever.