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Old 04-25-2013, 06:28 PM   #94
SnowTroll
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Posts: 183
SnowTroll will become famous soon enough
Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Yeah. I stopped paying attention to the finer details a page and a half ago.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Graphics are a red herring. It's not pictures or lack thereof that's attracting or deterring users. If a user wants a "regular" video game, he's not going to play a mud even if the client is graphical, unless the interface and experience is so completely changed that the game is barely recognizable as a mud. You'd practically have to turn a mud into a browser-based Facebook game or a Green Dragon clone.

The key is the whole entire user experience. I don't need a stock photograph of an Elf or a Kobold in my view window, but if you're going to make my experience better with some non-text elements, a mini-map sure would be nice. And let me click on my map to move rather than typing n/s/e/w. If you're going to make anything into a picture, do it to my inventory so I can drag items around and arrange them in an order that makes sense to me, and click on them if I want to look at an item more closely and read its description. If you're really organized and your room text output displays mundane text, mobs, items, and players separately, let me click on people and objects to look at them. If you're really sophisticated, let me configure the client so I can left click to look at someone (or something), and right click to open up a menu where I can select give, tell, etc. if it's a person, get, search, etc. if it's an object, kill, ask, etc. if it's a mob. Clean up your syntax. There's only so much you can do in a mud, and if there's some obscure thing outside of the norm that someone has to type to accomplish something, then one of your area builders was a real jackass.

If you get things set up to where the only thing I have to type long-hand is the stuff I want to say to other players, and the client's chat interface is really smooth and easy to use (maybe let me separate room/in character text from various channels in other windows, and store tells in a separate place -- that way, I don't have to type say X and chat Y and tell A blah blah blah. I just type my sentence in the right window and that's what happens), that cuts the entry barrier in half. Then, the main thing turning people off from muds would be roleplaying. People outside of our circle still think that's strange and geeky.

Maybe some or most of this is out there somewhere, but I personally have gotten used to just typing crap in Gmud. But I'm almost 34, not 15, a closet roleplayer, and looking for a creative outlet online.
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