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Kylotan · 08-03-2010, 06:10 AM

The problem is, you need to nail both of these things, and the latter is not as much of a problem as the former.

My MUD (Abattoir) is pretty moribund. Hardly anybody plays on there now, yet there is still a steady trickle of new players. And when I watch those new players, some leave because they see the game is empty, but more often than not they struggle with the interface. They don't get as far as realising they're alone because they're too busy trying to work out what to do when the room description has scrolled off the top, they have no help button to click for a list of commands, there are some cryptic numbers that appear before each thing they type, and so on.

If we were able to keep 30% of our current newbies up to level 10 rather than 1% of them, we'd be as busy as we were in our heyday 10 years ago. In our case at least, it's not a lack of interest, just a lack of retention. And I think it would be both easier and more productive to improve the interface than to try and increase the number of incoming newbies by a factor of 30.

It isn't really about text per se; as several people have stated, most internet users spend most of their lives working with text these days. And many popular games on Facebook and the like are almost entirely text-based. It's just about how we present that text, and a typical telnet window is a pretty poor way of doing that.

08-03-2010, 06:10 AM	#70
Kylotan Member Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Nottingham, UK Home MUD: Abattoir (Smaug) Home MUD: ex-Jellybean (Smaug) Home MUD: ex-Dark Chambers (Merc) Posts: 174	Re: The "Health," of Muds The problem is, you need to nail both of these things, and the latter is not as much of a problem as the former. My MUD (Abattoir) is pretty moribund. Hardly anybody plays on there now, yet there is still a steady trickle of new players. And when I watch those new players, some leave because they see the game is empty, but more often than not they struggle with the interface. They don't get as far as realising they're alone because they're too busy trying to work out what to do when the room description has scrolled off the top, they have no help button to click for a list of commands, there are some cryptic numbers that appear before each thing they type, and so on. If we were able to keep 30% of our current newbies up to level 10 rather than 1% of them, we'd be as busy as we were in our heyday 10 years ago. In our case at least, it's not a lack of interest, just a lack of retention. And I think it would be both easier and more productive to improve the interface than to try and increase the number of incoming newbies by a factor of 30. It isn't really about text per se; as several people have stated, most internet users spend most of their lives working with text these days. And many popular games on Facebook and the like are almost entirely text-based. It's just about how we present that text, and a typical telnet window is a pretty poor way of doing that.