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Old 04-26-2013, 11:18 AM   #100
plamzi
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Home MUD: bedlam.mudportal.com:9000
Home MUD: www.mudportal.com
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

I'd like to try and take this discussion in a new direction, partly because hearing what some people have to say about graphical clients is just making me depressed and pessimistic about the future. And partly because I think graphics is only the biggest, but not only, aspect of a 21st century MUD.

Here's a list of features *unrelated to graphics* that seem to be expected by many online gamers. Some of them may be exclusive to mobile gamers, where the majority of my observations come from. In any case, it may be food for thought for those who want to appeal to younger audiences by walking around the huge elephant of graphics and doing other things:

* A tutorial that can be completed by someone not paying close attention, yet one that teaches all the basics one needs to know in order to gain some form of satisfaction from the first 5 minutes of gameplay (e. g. learn how to kill an NPC and level up). The shorter the better, with absolutely no way of botching it.

* Player guilds and intense inter-guild competitions. Guilds that are easy even for relatively new players to form, with *in-game tools* to reach friends, convert them to the game, and recruit them for your guild.

* Invite codes or other player-facing conversion tools that new players have immediate access to, so they can spread the word while they're still freshly excited by their discovery of the game. Ideally, these player-facing promo tools should be loaded with multiple incentives to convert non-playing friends.

* A friend list, with the ability to add, remove, message offline friends quickly from within the game.

* Some form of compulsory PvP, with built-in protections from being "farmed" at low levels (ideally at any level).

* Leaderboards or other forms of player-facing ranking. The more performance stats by which players and guilds can compare one another, the better.

* Clear progression. It can get increasingly harder to progress over time, but the first few gaming sessions should present clear goals, should make it easy for total newbies to achieve those goals, and then make it clear what to do to get to the next goal. Achieving this can take many aspects working together in unison: in-game tips or easy-to-find help files, enabling easy movement to key locations, easy-to-find support by other players.

If you're thinking about where your game stands in respect to the above list, keep in mind that the target audience we're interested in is virtually guaranteed to have no prior experience with MUDs. Don't be distracted by what your experienced players would call "easy" or "obvious", "annoying" or "blasphemy."
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