[Throttle]

I prefer a middle ground.

A playerbase can be so small that it hurts the game and severely restricts what the players can do, and the quickest way to turn me away from a game is to present me with large amounts of time spent waiting for people to log in (or for the playerbase to grow) so that I can experience parts of the game that I can't alone. One example is TorilMUD. In its glory days, Toril had a large playerbase with 200+ players online during peak hours. The game was built around this, both because there was a hard divide between "goods" and "evils" who could only interact on confrontational terms, and because a large percentage of the game world was built with big groups in mind, with areas that required parties of 20 or more players to succeed. Now TorilMUD's playerbase has dwindled to a fourth if its prior numbers, leaving much of the game's content beyond reach, groups - especially for lower and mid levels - very rare, and the population severely imbalanced. As much as I loved that mud, I've now deemed it all but unplayable for the newcomer, and a waste of time for the veteran.

At the other end of the spectrum is Aardwolf. I gave that mud a decent try a few months ago, trying to get into it and see if it was as good as it is popular. While I recognized its well thought-out and innovative code, the game was just too impersonal for me. With online numbers often exceeding 400, noone knows you and you don't know anybody. I prefer tight-knit communities, so when after a month I still didn't really know anybody, I gave up trying to get into the game and went to look for a mud where I wasn't just another unidentifiable drop in the sea. Apart from that fact, I thought it was an excellent game for its type, but it didn't have the mud feeling so I thought that I might as well go play WoW or Everquest.

Then there are muds with pitifully small playerbases; I try out a lot of muds, but I admit that if I log in around normal peak hours and find 3 online, I don't even give it a shot.