[nass]

I'd be delighted if that were true, but until there are stats to prove it, I'd have to wonder about this. If you look at where they spend their advertising, it's all at TMC and TMS, all the commercial guys. These are both primarily portals which cater to existing MUDders, not portals which bring in new blood. TMC because, well, it's TMC, cool as hell, old as the hills and the place everyone knows in the community. TMS because the voting thing means most inbound traffic comes from mud websites. Not only that, but some of the advertising messages cater towards existing MUDders too "tired of shallow game support etc".

This gets them the best conversion ratios because us MUDders are a geeky bunch and text-based gamer arn't for everyone, as demonstrates. On the other hand, I think they're trying to reach out more nowadays, as tools such as the shows. My suspicion though is that in order to make money, the bigger guys need to attract new players, and the highest conversion rates are for people like us, or people coming through to here from smaller MU*s, who have MUDded before and are familiar with MU*s, rather than non-MUDders.

I guess all this waffle boils down to my personal and profoundly unscientific and uninformed suspicion that what's happening is that the growth in the commercial guys is more down to taking players away from the amateur MU*s than from broadening the community, as such. This is because their advertising dominates the portals, but to be fair, also other factors, ie their clients are better, their playerbases bigger and their games well supported.

*note this is not an anti-commercial tirade or flame opportunity, it's just what I happen to think based on a total lack of scientific data!*