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Old 08-15-2007, 02:45 PM   #11
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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Re: A player's perspective

That is indeed a pretty client, though Batmud needs to work on their download speed to take advantage of it in the case of hooking people new to text MUDs. It took me over 5 minutes on a fast broadband connection to download their client and it's only a 5 meg client.

One question though: I notice it requires Java 1.5. What kind of penetration does Java 1.5 have, any idea? I found this breakdown of penetration but it's from 16 months ago. It's not pretty for Java. According to the study that site ran, Java had slightly over 50% penetration, but half of that was Java 1.1.4. I can't comment one way or another on the likely accuracy of that study or how much the situation has changed in the last 16 months but that makes even Java 1.1.4 (which is what Nexus uses due to its higher penetration) less-than-ideal and makes Java 1.5 quite a bit less than ideal.

After looking into this some I'm starting to wonder if one reason our conversion rate between people clicking through to the IRE portal and people opening Nexus by hitting one of the 'Play Now' buttons is so low is because people are being asked to download Java and just leaving. Any time people have to download and install anything you're going to lose a large percentage of them.

We're going to run another test and measure how many people click Play Now vs. how many people actually manage to load up Nexus. Presumably most of the people lost between those two actions are lost because they don't have Java and choose not to download it.

I have to say, what would be awesome would be a Flash mud client. Flash is nearly ubiquitous (97%+ penetration for Flash 8 I think). Unfortunately I'm told that the cross-section of people who are both excellent Flash developers and who are good at software development is not very high. It's one thing to display pretty text with Flash and an entirely other thing to deal with telnet implementation, and possibly a server-side proxy due to the same kinds of permission problems that plague Java when run in a browser.

--matt
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