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Old 04-09-2013, 08:49 PM   #15
plamzi
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Home MUD: bedlam.mudportal.com:9000
Home MUD: www.mudportal.com
Posts: 292
plamzi is on a distinguished road
Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

This is a remarkably telling post. It captures the prevailing attitude among many MUD admins. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that you can do a thousand things to go after new players without changing the in-game experience for your 20-year vets. Let's forget that one of those things, forking off a separate server instance, takes about 30 seconds. Let's instead assume that all of your current players will quit the moment you offer a Facebook app with a single picture in it, or the moment your game starts auto-posting events to its FB wall, or the moment you offer a way to sync in-game player alliances with people's FB friend lists.

The basic motif here is that any change is bad because it may alienate existing players, even if (or maybe especially if) it brings new ones! There's something fundamentally wrong about a game that believes it owes its current players unchanging, lifelong entertainment. It's an almost irrational viewpoint given that players, even in RPI games, are consumers of entertainment that the admins provide/enable. And given that virtual worlds live and die by their ability to attract new players, letting yourself be held hostage to what you feel your current players want, assuming that any gesture to appeal to a non-vet is an act of betrayal, those are all the makings of a virtual world that will be a little more dead tomorrow that it was today.

Twenty years from now, veteran mudders will be twenty years older. There will be even fewer of them than there are now to fight over. There may still be thousands of MUDs running, just because it's so easy to keep a server going indefinitely. There will be some amazingly detailed worlds floating out there, and a dozen 50 and 60-year-old children server-hopping around, hoping to meet another human being they can play with.
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