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Old 04-20-2008, 08:18 AM   #25
Jazuela
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: New England
Posts: 849
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Re: The "Health," of Muds

Most of them end up going to World of Warcraft. The same thing happened back when Ultima Online came out. They left in droves from Gemstone to UO. But Simu maintained a healthy player base even then. Last time I checked, there are still more people logged in to Simu games now, than there were before they became an "internet" game. Prior to that they were only available to play through the online services AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. When they "went internet" they had a second boost (their first was when AOL became unlimited access for no extra charge, which didn't last very long), and the population shot up again. Then the novelty of playing via internet wore off, and Simu had some administrative and staff changes, and various other things happened, and the spike dropped somewhat.

At their peak they hovered around 2000 accounts logged in during the popular time of day, if I recall correctly. That's all on one server.

Now, if my memory serves from reading discussions on their "unofficial" forum, they are usually less than 750, and usually more than 400, with occasional spikes when there are game-wide official events.

That's still more than when I used to play, and in fact when I played from Prodigy the server was closed to new logins after it hit 100 players already logged in. You'd have to just keep typing "enter" and hoping you'd slip through if someone else logged out.

Also important to note that many people who play Gemstone have multiple accounts they maintain. So that 400-750 isn't individual players, it's accounts logged in. It -could- just be 200 players total. It's probably closer to 500 though
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