[Molly]

I've been sceptical to statistics ever since i read a book titled 'How to lie with statistics'. It seems people - politicians in particular - can and do twist statistics to fit whatever they prefer them to show.

That said, I too think that Text Muds are declining. Actually I think they have been on the wane ever since it was made so easy to download, start and run a stock mud. In the old days, when it still took some coding skills, the 'community was kind of 'self regulating', because every Tom, Dick or Harry couldn't start their own Mud. As it is, they can - and do - just because they can.

I have no statistics to back it up, but my general feeling is that the total number of people that are playing Text Muds is declining, and consequently the Muds tend to prey on each other. I also have a feeling that the commercials are sucking up a larger percentage of the total player base, because they can afford to advertise, and because players generally are very faithful to their first Mud, regardless of the quality.

I generally base this feeling on what I read on various discussion boards and what I see in my own Mud. In one way we could be described as heaving a 'healthy' playerbase, because it is relatively stable, and our players usually stay very long and also tend to return after they strayed. But is has never been very large. partly because we consciously target the 'smarter' players. Still, when I look at our player base now, it is only about half of what it used to be around 6 years back. (It's true that we have had some specific problems lately; we lost over half our players when our server disappeared from the face of earth some months agoand the Mud was closed down for ten days. We still haven't recovered from that totally, even though we've had a small but steady inflow of new players lately. But in general the tendency is pretty clear - a slow, but steady decline).

So what could be done to improve the situation for text Muds?

I know that I probably will be flamed for 'elitism' for saying this, but my belief is that the biggest problem for Text Muds is the sheer number of pretty crappy, next-to-stock clones that swamp the net. A player, who is totally new to Text Muds, wouldn't really have a clue about what to look for, and the statistic chances are high that they'd just make a random choice and land with one of the stock clones. If they repeat that a couple of times, they will probably be convinced that all Text Muds are more or less similar, and not very good either. The comparatively few high quality games that exist drown in the line noise.

I think the best service that the Mud listing sites could do to the community would be to filter out at least the majority of this 'line noise'. There is only one realistic way to do it, since no list owner would have the time to actually review all the listed games, and that is to make a separate, and less displayed list for 'new muds', and put everything newer than 1 year on that list. It takes at least a year's work to create an even remotely decent Mud, and most of the fly-by-night Muds disappear again before they reach that stage.

And it wouldn't be a totally negative even for the new games, since there actually are players who like to test-play, and who consciously seek out the new games even now.