View Single Post
Old 08-03-2010, 03:40 AM   #10
Molly
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: 4 Dimensions
Posts: 574
Molly will become famous soon enoughMolly will become famous soon enough
Re: old guy looking for MUD?

A bit off topic, but...

Average player age in a mud is a pretty interesting topic, even if it is a bit hard to offer any statistics, since there is no way to determine whether a player is truthful about their age or not.
So even if for instance New Worlds has 18 as minimum requirement, it's not really possible to enforce such a rule.

It's also sometimes hard to determine age by assessing the maturity level of the players, since a 30+ player can act a lot more immaturely than a 10 year old - it's in fact quite common.

I think most muds nowadays have a generally much older playerbase than they did 10 years ago. My own one certainly has. When we first went into business, we had a pretty mature staff, but most of the players were around 15, and we had a couple of 11 year olds that were surprisingly successful. Today the average player age is well over 20, since many of the youngsters stayed on and grew up, and the inflew of new players is a lot less nowadays than it used to be.

I'm not really certain of it, but the impression I get is that even the newbies are generally older nowadays. I really doubt we get any 11 years at all, those go directly to WoW.

Text muds used to be a hobby for high school kids, today it's for old geezers.
Does anyone else have the same experience?
Molly is offline   Reply With Quote