[MightyK]

I think many of us will agree that the heyday of MUDs might be behind us, and we can all look forward to more competition as the F2P visual-graphic MMOs grow in number.

One thing I have seen in some well-established games, especially games that once enjoyed a high playerbase but are now comparatively languished, are mentalities of enforced scarcity upon the newbies.

It is my belief that the number of newbies trying games has declined but has not declined significantly, and that newbie bounce (newbies trying a game briefly then quitting all together) in many games has increased significantly due to solidification of MUD-wide aristocracies and something I call the golden ladder mentality.

The golden ladder mentality starts with the person that says, "things used to be so much harder in my day." This might be true, given that staff usually tries to ease the load for newbies over years.

The golden ladder progresses with "things used to be so much harder in my day" and moves into "you have had it so easy, I have more skill/had to do more/had to prove more to get where you are." and then twists into something worse, punishment to the newbie, which I have seen in three MUDs I am most familiar with.

Golden ladders can involve the following:

A) the downing of skills and abilities for low level people, but not for people at the high end. It can even coincide with the shifting of those skills to the high end, or the creation of new skills for the most "elite" or capped characters. This scenario usually involves staff adhering to the golden ladder mentality.

B) the arbitrary hiking up of requirements to enter an organization, beyond any historical level, or without taking to account MUD-wide changes (shrinking base, for instance) that might make such a hiking more difficult. This scenario can involve the staff or the players, depending on how much PC control is given.

C) Possibly the harshest and best example of the golden ladder -- the demarcation of a "migration date" where certain people who are below a certain age (have joined the MUD beyond a certain point in time) are simply not eligible for a skill/organization etc.

I call it the golden ladder because players often have an overly-romanticized opinion of their past in a game, and this mentality includes the wish to pull up the ladder behind them, or lengthen the spacing of the rungs. In our current environment, keeping the old players and the playerbase alive should be a priority, but it should not be at the expense of newbies. There is a bit of a caveat emptor here: newbies need to know just what they are getting into and not everything will be handed to them, but in the mechanics of a market things need to be made to compete with the free graphic MMOs even if that includes giving breaks to the newbies that weren't historically given.