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Old 04-24-2013, 10:55 AM   #84
Lasher
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Join Date: May 2005
Name: Derek
Location: Orlando
Posts: 357
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

I'm all for making MUDs more accessible to anyone that wants more visual cues while keeping the plain telnet based interface for MUD purists. The work we did on Mushclient has definitely helped bring new people into the game and no doubt we've lost others for whom it wasn't enough and they just couldn't get around "typing so many commands".

Other than the usual time constraint, the main thing that has held me back from going much further into this is the MUDs that have already done it - why aren't they overrun with players? BAT has an awesome client. Plazmi's own work on the iphone is impressive. Avenshar had a great client and you could play the game without hardly typing at all until you wanted to chat. If it's as simple as "go more GUI to get more players", where are the results?

At the end of the day it's all window dressing around a text based game and people will either play a text based game or they won't. That is until you reach a point where you're not a text based game anymore because more and more important features can only be accessed via the GUI - I think that's where the fear of alienating existing players starts to creep in.
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