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Old 05-04-2013, 04:22 PM   #122
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Yes, because that's the defining characteristic of our MUDs. Redesigning our MUDs to work in a fundamentally different way would be worse than a waste of time. It'd alienate our existing playerbase and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Far better to start on a new project in that case, which is exactly what we did when we decided we wanted to make a graphical MUD. We built an engine for 3d MMOs and then built designed a game on top of that infrastructure, which was built with the audience size and fundamental game experience in mind.

What I'm interested in is development and publishing patterns for building and publishing online multiplayer games (almost all of which are equally valid for games run as hobbies, so it could be phrased as "for building games that can attract an audience at least at critical mass size"). I know what the pattern looks like, roughly, for most of us would call text MUDs catering primarily to MUD players, as I've done that commercially for 16 years now. I know what the pattern looks like for what most people would recognize as 3D MMOs, as I've built them and run them too.

What I don't know yet are the patterns for:
* Reliably and repeatedly marketing to and converting non-MUDers into players of MUDs. This is a non-trivial problem. 10 years ago, we could slap up ads on online comics sites and we'd get multiple times are money back in credit sales. The market for online games is completely different now from 10 years ago though. Click-through rates on display advertising is at least an order of magnitude lower than it was before, and being a "free online multi-player game" is no longer a selling-point, as it's the default model for games. Beyond that, the online ad market is much more efficient today. You can't afford to buy users at any kind of scale (even the small scale that MUDs operate on) unless the lifetime value of your users is very high, since then you can afford to pay more for a user than the other guys. In our case, we have extremely high LTV and so in theory we should be able to profitably acquire users, but it's a matter of really smoothing out the onboarding process for new users, and that is a lot of experimentation, testing and work.

* Successfully publishing a hybrid product, like one that was shown earlier in this thread. Layering 2d graphics that are supposed to be at all representative of what's going on in a text MUD experience is just a bad idea for the most part. It kills your ability to produce content quickly/cheaply while delivering very little in the way of additional benefit to the end user. A static graphic that doesn't reflect what's happening in the game isn't of much value in my opinion. I would love to see a game that has somehow managed this (ie attracted and kept a critical mass of players across time) that isn't Kingdom of Loathing, as I don't their 'hand-drawn' (to be generous) graphical style really works in games that take themselves seriously (ie most MUDs). That's not a slam on KoL, just a function of their content style and audience. That audience loves breaking the fourth wall, loves meta-puns, etc.

To bring it back to the start, the reason I'm not willing to mess with the core of how users interact with text MUDs is because I've seen no evidence that publishing hybrid products works, whereas I know how publishing and developing more traditional MUDs work. I believe the first of the two problems above is much more solvable and with less up-front risk than the latter.

--matt
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