[Vanth]

At Armageddon, we're also working toward improving the new player experience, and we added FMUD to our website back in October.

We've found that although we have a lot of new traffic coming to our website and even creating accounts, that hasn't translated well into actual players. Part of this is due to the fact that Armageddon is a niche-market game; only a portion of the total market will be interested in things like the desert theme, permadeath, etc. And we'll likely never see the number of players that popular H&S games do, because most players have been conditioned by graphical gaming (both single- and multi-player) to find gaming fulfillment in level or skill advancement, which we obfuscate.

Nevertheless, it's clear that we could be doing better, especially in the arena of getting players into the game and oriented with the mechanics.

Once that hurdle is past, though, the number one factor we believe contributes to retaining new players, is how much interaction they get from other players. After all, that is why they're multi-user dungeons, rather than single-user.

Perhaps the stereotype of the 'lonely, unattractive, socially-inept geek gamer' is less accurate than it once was (I certainly think so, based on the Armageddon players I've met - we're a hawt group) but people are still coming to these games for socialization. We live in a world where we communicate more by texting, Facebook updates, and IMs than by face-to-face communication, so it shouldn't be that hard to sell text-based gaming, if we can make people feel like they belong and enable them to foster friendships.

In some ways, I think that games with larger playerbases are handicapped in this area, because their games are more like a big city than a small town. I know I started out on Dragonrealms, a Simutronics game, but the last time I went back to try them out, I left again because of lack of player interaction (and their average number of players online is about 10x that of Armageddon, with a gameworld maybe only twice as large). None of the people I'd played with years ago were still around, and I found it hard to make new friends there - so many players focus more on skill macros/scripts than on interaction, those that do interact are very cliqueish, and there's little in that world that encourages cooperation and interaction for more than the few moments it takes to cast a spell on someone else.

By comparison, in a game like Armageddon, making social contacts with other PCs is hugely important to a character's wealth, influence, power, and ability to remain alive. And players are interacting with the same people every day for months, so they have a sense that their character belongs, and that by extension, they do as well. Our players have a strong sense of community and even family (a dysfunctional family, perhaps, but a family nonetheless).

To illustrate this, about 40% of our new players come to us by word-of-mouth recommendations from their friends. But this group makes up 57% of the players we retain. Those new players are sharing a new common interest with their existing friends. What the challenge is, is to facilitate the new people coming in, in creating friendships with those who have an existing common interest (the game).