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Old 05-04-2013, 04:45 PM   #123
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

It's a combination. The client is meant to help users transition more gracefully into a full-blown text experience because ultimately, that's the way they'll experience our games for 99.9% of their lifetime.

The way we learn how to transition them into our games is by testing and by tracking. We use KISSMetrics to track events happening with our games and then slice and dice the data, particularly by cohort (so that we can look at how a group of users that started this month performs compared to a group of users that started 3 months ago before feature Z went in, for instance). It's extremely useful. Mixpanel is another alternative there. Unfortunately, neither are free, but you can get Google analytics to do a lot of what they do for free if you're a ninja about it (GA just isn't as good for dealing with the entire user acquisition funnel and you can't drill down to the individual user level with it). You can also roll your own tracking system, though having been down that route previously, I can tell you it's a lot more work than it may initially seem.

Beyond that, it's just a load of work in-game. Imperian is the furthest along of our games, and they've completely revamped their newbie intro, revamped their newbie areas, etc. When we first redid their newbie intro, we A/B tested it too, meaning that we sent half the new players to one intro and half to the other to see which one performed better. Then we'd refine the better one, and test the refinements against itself pre-refinement. Rinse and repeat. That method won't help you build a great game, but it'll definitely help you figure out, objectively, how to bring newbies into your game more efficiently.

This subject, which I actually think is the key to "bringing MUDs into the 21st century" is much more about process than content, graphics, though content, mechanics, and the graphical packaging you put around your MUD (website, client) matter, a lot. I strongly believe (and am putting my money where my mouth is) that MUDs have the potential to appeal to a LOT more people than they do today. The trick is finding ways to effectively reach those people, and then ensuring that you keep as many of them as possible by making the newbie experience as compelling as possible.

We might fail. It might turn out that we're spending all this money and time and we still don't discover how to profitably acquire users. We're making measurable forward progress on the problem now, but who knows if we'll run into effectively a stonewall where we're not far enough yet and we can't figure out how to move the needle further.
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