[Milawe]

We've touched on this topic briefly in another thread. Some believe that MU* games are a dying breed that are slowly being crushed out of existence by MMOs, but I think that a lot of us believe that MU* offer something that MMOs are incapable of offering such as enforced roleplaying, persistent worlds and plotlines, and non-static character development. In addition, I think most people agree that the mudding community tends to be a tad bit more mature about their gaming environment than some of the MMOs that do not even bother to deal with name violations on RP servers.

The great thing about MMOs, or one in particular, is that they have now drawn in a ton of players that didn't exist for online gaming at all. Now, after taking the initial hit of population drop from World of Warcraft, shouldn't the mudding community be able to draw from WoW and the graphical game community? I know when I was playing WoW, there were always people looking for "more" from the game: more content, more flexibility, more immersion, etc. I often suggest text games to these people, and I'd say that the majority of them had no idea what text online gaming was about or that it even existed. I sent several people to look at various websites, and they always came back impressed with the content and the stories. It's just VERY hard to get people to initially understand why there are so many people involved and interested in text gaming.

Is there anything the MUDding community can do as a whole to attract these players? Once upon a time, the people who were playing MMOs had usually played MU* or had done some sort of online gaming before their first MMO*. Now, some people have never done any gaming, let alone online gaming, before playing WoW. Will all commercial MUDs ultimately have to go the way of graphical MMOs, or can MU* ever successfully draw from the MMO community?