[plamzi]

Did you miss the parts of this thread where we discussed making the client more visually appealing to today's teenagers? If you think things are fine as they are, do you also think that we have a healthy, growing community of players that will ensure, among other things, that *your* favorite MUD won't suddenly close doors one of these days?

Probably not the best way to start a post. If you are not paying attention and seem proud of it, then why should we pay attention to what you have to say?

You can't prove a point by repeating it. Show us some evidence that non-graphical games have the same conversion rates and comparable player bases as graphical ones. I think you'd be hard-pressed to do that.

I believe that the only way anyone can believe what you believe is if they are so steeped in their own subjectivity that by "users" they mean experienced mudders, and exclude 99.99% of gamers.

I agree with the first part of this statement. A contemporary gamer with no prior understanding of MUDs is not likely to settle for a wall of text with graphics around it. They will want a graphical interface that looks like that of other games they are used to playing.

As others have mentioned in this thread, I have made a graphical client for iOS that even experienced mudders barely recognize as an interface to a MUD. This was done without compromising in the least the ability of experienced mudders to play the game using a variety of text-based client. In fact, many of the usability improvements that I made for casual app users, with very slight tweaks, became improvements for everyone.

On to your second point. For the most part, I agree. But given what I've already done for mobile, I believe there's a way for a MUD server to drive a UI that *looks like* a typical Facebook game, but which *unfolds* into something a lot richer for someone who keeps playing.

For some of the more technical folks here, what I'm urging them to see is that the servers driving some of the most successful browser-based social games today probably look like MUD servers with a frontal lobotomy in terms of content and gameplay depth. Yet, they do better than all of us combined, just because they play nice with today's gamers expectations from an online game.

Instead of arguing whether "the essence" of a MUD is lost when it has a browser-based graphical interface or when it integrates well with social networking sites, people should consider some very simple marketing truths. Packaging matters. Going where the customers are, matters. If you are making great-tasting honey, but it looks like mud, and you just tell people to find your house in the woods, and scoop the honey out of a barrel using "whatever they want", then the mediocre-tasting honey packaged nicely and conveniently, and placed on a supermarket shelf, is going to win everytime.

I know this may be hard for any mud vet to grasp (since nowadays they're so used to being courted by devs), but you are emphatically *not* the target audience of any of the efforts I've been discussing. For experienced mudders like you, even if someone spent hundreds of hours building a client to your specs (we're getting pretty close to them with our advanced web app), chances are you will still go back to your Gmud. Chances are, you will never switch games because of the custom client. You're not even going to switch from Gmud to a more modern MUD client like Mudlet or MUSHClient. Am I right or am I right?

Again, I believe that any efforts to bring MUDs into this century do not include appealing to experienced mudders like you. In fact, I believe that many of the efforts by admins to appeal to people like you are holding the community back because that same effort could have been spent on trying to reach people born in this century.