[Verbannon]

Career, world size ect. Help long term but won't hook people in in their first day of playing.

Also, 'geek' lost meaning like ten years ago. There is no stigma attached to retro gaming. Like none, seriously. And if you are worried abut people thinking of MUDS as primitive, I think educating people is the only way to fix that.


Let me just get back to my point. I don't think graphics are going to make a difference. But more importantly, its not going to act as a gateway mud. Muds are essentially 1D gaming (as opposed to 2D and 3D. Nearly all reservations regarding MUDs have to do with that fact. And graphics won't change that the mechanics are still one dimensional.

But MUDS have changed, they are modernizing, as time goes on new ideas are put in, new clients are being developed. Your graghics are just part of whats already happening. They aren't a solution because the problem they are trying to solve doesn't exist. Stronger computers are allowing for more complex calculations. If you were to bring someone to today's MUDS from ten years ago, their head would explode. They would not recognize anything.

Even existing MUDs are changing and developing and modernizing. 1D gaming is not getting old. If you are looking for problems in MUDs keeping away new players they are as far as I can tell the following.

1. directions. Everyone knows how disconcerting it can be to first try a mud without those maps and try to figure out your way around. There is an actual physiological issue going on with your brain when this happens, that will take at least 2-3 hours for your brain to adjust to. Static maps help, adding an actual map modernized mini-map seems to solve the problem completely. The only problem is for some reason all the MUDs I've played with mini-maps, have sucked in the exploration department. Like super sucked. They have no place worth exploring. Everything is simplified probably to make it easier on the mini-map.

This suggests implementing such maps in MUDS is very hard. Probably require a completely different coding type skill set then building.

That means any MUD that uses a map, whether they do it well or not cannot be a gateway MUD. As there will be very few good muds out there that use maps, that means limited options and these MUDS won't teach a player how to play on any non-mapped mud.

And I've spent so much time on this point I forgot my others. I'll say them when I remember them.

Anyway, point is interface does not seem to be a solution to modernizing MUDS.

But you know what might help modernize MUDS? Some actual advertising. I have never seen a single mud advertisement out of a mud site like this. Nor any word of mouth spread. So what gives about that?