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Old 10-06-2008, 05:24 PM   #18
lotusofro
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Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 17
lotusofro is an unknown quantity at this point
Re: Design and Success

Design is most assuredly an important aspect of a successful MUD. It is not the only important aspect.

I've had a lot of success with my MUD in the 16 years or so it has been up. I've had the mud fill up to the point that you had to wait until someone disconnected to connect and had a point where there was no one on at all when I logged in to check on the mud. I've had times where there were consistently between 30-50 people on. I've had times were the average players on was less than 5. Currently we're averaging 8 on at once (averaging meaning taking every hour in a day and how many average playing in that hour and dividing it by 24, our highs are 20+ on at a time, lows are 1+ in the wee hours of the morning). Compare that to a year ago when the number was 3 (highs were just over 10, lows were 0). We're well on our way to getting back over 10 on average if we continue doing all the things we're doing right.

What are the differences between the "success," of RO (my mud)?

1. Administration. The high times we were extremely well administered. I was around hours a day, and other immortals were consistently on. The immortals were well organized and design was ongoing towards ever improving the code, world size, etc.

2. Advertising. The low times were points when I allowed the MUD to fall off lists. Falling off the Mud Connector list or TMS or Mudmagic, etc. The low times also coincided with the time when I did not even have a web page dedicated to the MUD. The MUD kept going though. We've been blessed with some die-hard players over the years. Word of Mouth is still the best advertising tool out there. Build up a decent pbase, and your players will tell others about your MUD and slowly it will build up. Having the MUD listed on TMS and TMC is a huge help, and being ranked helps. We devote our time to being ranked on TMS and not TMC.

3. Design. Believe it or not but I can trace times when the mud was at 30-50 and on the decline to bad design decisions that bothered players and forced them to go elsewhere. At the time I was not the Admin and the job was being handled by someone else. The coder and Admin had decided that a significant change should take place where players would never know the exact stats of items or themselves. So instead of a number based statistical system that the MUD had run on for ages the MUD moved to a "verbal description," that was extremely vague. The first thing I did when I took back the Admin job was to eliminate that code and move back to a numbers based system. It immediately helped in player numbers. So it is important to understand your pbase and design FOR THEM, not for you.

Over the years I have seen code changes that have positively helped the pbase and negatively affected the pbase. Changes that extremely hurt "balance," were generally always negative if never fixed. Design is important.

Now adays we're extremely organized in our design process. We use "BaseCamp," to keep our design team all on the same page. Builders know what the coders are working on and vice versa. Things are discussed long before implimented to help make sure that in the long run everything is "balanced." We've been doing this for the last 7 months and it has been extremely helpful.

4. Improvements. I can also look at every downturn and see where building died off and code changes stopped. Stagnation can hurt if allowed to happen over an extremely long period of time. Obviously if you have a great MUD based on incredible code and incredible game play with a great world you can let things remain the same for longer periods of time. However at some point the players will get tired of "the same old same old," and move on.

5. Player Cycles. Player Cycles are the length of time a player stays and plays the MUD. Player Cycles are all based generally on the above. However the most successful times of RO have been when Player Cycles were at their longest. People have lives, but if you can increase the Player Cycle then you increase your pbase.

So success is not luck. Luck may play a part in getting someone to "login," but it's design & administration that gets them to stay. Luck may also affect the time when they login. We all have good hours and bad hours in our player flow. If that new player logs in and sees 20+ on they generally stay longer. So luck is a part, but not a huge part.
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