Thread: New & Shiny!
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Old 05-13-2011, 10:39 AM   #2
SnowTroll
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Posts: 183
SnowTroll will become famous soon enough
Re: New & Shiny!

Hi there! Kudos on having the drive to start a game, and good luck.

It's been my experience that nowadays, nearly all muds get new life in two ways. Word of mouth, and this listing (and maybe a few others like it). Very few people looking for a mud to try out go to Google and type MUD into the search engine. People either hear about muds in general or specific muds from friends, come to these forums and see the muds people are recommending, or go to the TMS list and pick one to try based on the rankings and descriptions.

If a mud gets advertised on the forums, the TMS forum regulars usually try it out, and if it's any good, unique in any way, or does some things well or poorly, they're good about feedback and good about recommending the mud to others if it meets what someone is looking for. Once a mud makes the first page of the TMS rankings (which really isn't that tough to do nowadays if they ask their players to vote), it'll also see some new life from people that skim the list looking for new muds to try out.

So the best ways to inject new life into muds is to tell all of your friends about them, post about them on internet sites you frequent, vote for quality muds so they rank high enough that people will try them, and recommend good muds to people looking for the types of things those muds offer. Getting players to try a mud isn't hard. Keeping players is more of a challenge. I've seen a lot of muds start yelling for players to try them out when they're nowhere near ready, some not having a clear picture of what exactly they want to offer to the mud community. A poorly done or incomplete mud can be even more frustrating to an experienced player than to a new one.
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