[Xerihae]

Surely this whole issue is almost impossible to prove one way or another? You could go round every single MUD listed on TMS or TMC, gather average player numbers, and it would still be pointless because no-one did it 10 years ago. This is assuming, of course, that every MUD admin told you the truth. Otherwise you'd have to spend a week or so at each MUD to figure it out yourself accurately, and you'd have to do it twice in a year since MUD player numbers generally go up during the big school/uni breaks, and does anybody really have the patience and interest to do it?

You couldn't even say "Let's do a census now" because how, exactly, are you going to get every MUD admin involved? Not all of them read the TMS/TMC boards. Many of them wouldn't be bothered, many wouldn't want you to discover their listing of "Average online players 10-25" is more like 2, and some are insular enough that they have no interest in the MUD community as a whole. Some may even allow or encourage multi-playing, in which case the 10 characters online might only be three or four actual players. How are you going to determine this if you're not able to check the IP address of everyone connected?

Extrapolating based on a selection of different MUDs, whilst an acceptable statistical gathering tool, is one of the reason statistics are often distrusted and are mentioned at the end of the phrase "Lies, damn lies, and statistics". If you select your representative sample carefully enough, you can get statistics "proving" ANYTHING.

Most of the argument seems to stem from certain people believing the number of MUD players hasn't declined but just spread out more as the number of MUDs has increased over the years, whereas others argue that just masks the fact the number of actual players is in decline. At the end of the day I don't see any statistics that either prove or disprove any of the theories, and I don't think any will be forthcoming either.