[Spoke]

I have been playing MUDs since '96. When I started I was starting college in Colombia (Spanish speaking country for those who did not know) and my English proficiency was comparable to the Spanish proficiency of the average American high-schooler. This said, I plunged into MUDs because there was someone in the computer lab who was playing too, and so I was walked through the rough beginning. Now, I took the fact that the game was in English and that I needed to do well in the TOEFL to graduate as an excuse to keep playing and soon enough there were about 6-8 of us playing at some point or another. After all this time (graduating, going to graduate school, etc) I think of the 20ish people I have introduced to MUDs I think only 3 remain playing, that I know of. This is even after they spent considerable time in the games mind you, some of them had played for a few years with me to just banish after some cool graphical game hit the shelves (AoE, AoE II, WC3, SC, WoW, etc.) I myself have been largely absent from MUDs for about a year and a half.

Why do I say all this? I do believe that it is very hard to retain a large number of players in a consistent basis, in part because of what the_Logos points out about Graphics vs Text, but also, I believe, because there are numerous graphic alternatives that do not require your undivided attention for long spans of time (I am excluding games like WoW, Ultima on Line etc) or the graphic multi-player games make it easier for you to share with friends (in the sense that since graphics appeal to a greater pool of people, there is a bigger chance you can play with RL friends than there is with text games.)

The other thing is that any new MUD I have tried takes a while to get used to, even after playing them for 12 years, hell, even coming back to a game you played for several years (to an already established character) takes some getting used to. I do think the challenge is more with how people are used to receive/obtain information now (or rather, how many are used to be spoon-fed everything with the smallest effort on their part), you not only need to entice people to remain in the game, but if you want someone to stay long, you need to make sure this person is going to be able to help him/her-self in the long run.

What I have done as a player (during the times I cared about it) to try to keep people in is to go an extra step when answering questions by doing it in detail, but following up immediately with a link (finger pointed ...) to a help file so that they know the answer was at their disposal anyway. This is much like the approach I take with a toddler, not just say: "Do it yourself for Christ's sake!" but rather, "Here, let me do it WITH you the first time, I will show you how you can do it next time." Another big turn-off is the initial spam many games have, you are inundated with information that is very much meaningless to you at the time, even if you are experienced MUDder but new to the game, I think letting people choose the amount of information they will receive (maybe in an indirect way) might do the trick, like, if you have an INFO channel, maybe do not threat all INFO the same way but allow for different levels of detail, that way you can turn off much of the spam while still keeping the important stuff. But then again, there is the other extreme, and this I found the two or three times I tried to start a player in IRE games (not a flame but more like feedback), I did not find human interaction during the newbie process, it is very nicely done, well written and the storyline is appealing, but maybe because I just was checking them out and not actually eager to play or because of the feeling of disconnect from the actual world, I ended up breaking the link before actually trying the game.

Sum-up:
1.- I think it is to be expected that retaining players on text games is a difficult feat, mainly because graphical games are also available to those people and its easier to play with groups of people you know on graphics than on text.
2.- I think one of the big advantages but at the same time disadvantages of MUDs is that they require you to be immersed deeper and for longer time in the game. I believe most MUDs require more knowledge of details than the graphical counterparts (should I whirl whirl slash or whirl whirl thrust against this dragon? -GW2- vs should I click on sword or spear?)
3.- The initial spam may be overwhelming, a judicious review of how much of what a new player sees is actually important to that player during his first couple of hours in the game can make a difference between me staying in or out of a game.
3a.- Public channels are one of the first thing that may turn me off, if they are not reasonably moderated. Public channels that consist on illiterate morons insulting each other's mother most of the time mean Alt-F4 (or Ctr-C) for me.
4.- Both beginners and old timers can benefit from a helping hand in the first few minutes of the game, as an old timer I would ask for key help files so my start can be faster, as a beginner I would usually ask questions about how-to, and would relish when the person would give me links and helped me help myself.

I hope this is worth something for those of you studying ways to keep people in