[Lasher]

Interesting thread. I can tell you that I never planned to run a mud. I'm not much of a roleplayer and found at the time (1993-1996) that most of the "well run" MUDs tended to be more serious and a lot of the "just fun hack and slash" MUDs were the kind that appeared and disappeared overnight, or the kind where there were often a lot of questions about imm behavior or all kinds of admin drama, fall outs, muds splitting. Or, they went too far the other way, I think there was a mud called 'insane mud' or similar and a couple like it.

I know this is a generalization and I'm sure those muds existed at the time, I just didn't find them. So I found a small little MUD I liked to hang out on called "Aardvark" and it became very unstable to the point it was unplayable. Having done a little coding on that MUD I took a copy of it and put it online elsewhere. The original MUD went down a few days after that and never did come back up. Interestingly, that is also why the name became "Aardwolf", it was because of "Aardvark" and was never a play to be an "aa" mud for list ordering - although that might have been why "Aardvark" was so named, I never did find out.

Anyway, there was no plan to run a MUD and certainly no plan to run a big mud. I loved adding things to the MUD and kept doing so. People kept playing and it grew. We didn't even advertize, there was a listing on TMC and that was it. We didn't even list on this site until 2003 - I believe it had already been up 2-3 years at that time. We really did nothing special and I never did understand the growth, I'm still not sure I do. We tried very hard (we've made our mistakes) to do all the things you see in every MUD ad - listen to good ideas, treat people with respect, have fair and consistent rules and be stable.

I know some people see the top few muds on TMS and are discouraged by it, "they get so many players because they're ranked so high". I believe it is the other way around, "They're ranked so high because they have so many players". This is certainly the case for Aardwolf - average online is lower than it was when we first listed in 2003 (as it is for a lot of MUDS). At this point there is kind of a feedback loop there I do agree, "You have more players so you get more votes so people notice you first", but it took something to get those players in the first place, and it wasn't massive advertising, it can only have really been word of mouth.

I suppose the point of all this is that back in 1996 if I had sat down and thought, "Do I want to start a MUD?" I probably wouldn't have - there were already well over 1,500 MUDs on the net and I wouldn't have felt I could do any better. On the other hand, I couldn't find the mud *I* wanted to play so saw a gap, kind of fell into adopting another mud so combined the two and the rest is history. At the time we had 5-10 people online there were already long established MUDs with hundreds online, the same situation that exists for new MUDs today.

I'm not sure if I'd start a new MUD in 2009, but it wouldn't be other MUDs existing that would make me think twice, it would be all the other things now available to potential players that makes it hard to get new players to try any MUD.

If you really see a gap in the suite of existing MUDs and you think you can fill it, go for it, don't let the number of existing muds on the net stop you. If you offer something new that people want, whether that is your codebase/features, your community, the "feel" of the mud or something else - it will grow. Maybe slower than you'd like, maybe faster than you'd expect. Don't underestimate the amount of work involved either, the code is the easy part, you control it and it does what you tell it (although figuring out exactly what to tell it can be a challenge at time) - your players and your staff don't.

One other point to never forget, and I surely struggle to remind myself of this from time to time too - Just because someone is "whining" doesn't automatically mean they're wrong.