[silvarilon]

There's also a third major factor.

Imagine someone knows how to read, but doesn't read novels for fun. You say "Hey, dude, read a book. It's awesome fun!" and then you hand them your favourite book.

What book is that? The bible? Tale of two cities? Neitzsche? Animorphs? Lord of the Rings? - all great stories, for their appropriate target audience, and all really terrible choices for the wrong audience.

So even if you *can* get someone to try a mud, and even if they can get past the hurdle of the new, often clumsy, interface, you still need to hope they "hit on" a mud that they are going to enjoy. For me, it doesn't matter how great the hack & slash is, if a mud doesn't enforce roleplaying, I'm not going to stay. For most players, enforced roleplaying is something new, and probably daunting.

The difference between MUDs and books is that, as has been pointed out, we use our first long-term mud as a measuring stick. I'm not properly able to give advice about which muds are good, because I haven't truly experienced them to the same degree that I've experienced my own mud.

Maybe we need some sort of "choose your own adventure" type of selection tree. A new player finds a mud, and we can have a handy warning: "Various games can be very different to each other. Follow this link to answer some questions, and we'll recommend a game you might like." - we could then get some idea of the new player's tastes. Direct them towards a more graphical game if that's important to them. Towards a fantasy or sci-fi game if setting makes a difference. Towards PVP, PVE, or socializing games.

For that to work, we'd need participating muds to quite actively direct players *away* from their own mud. Which is a hard thing to ask. New arrivals to my mud would be told "Hey, we might recommend a different mud. One you might not even have to pay for. Why would you stay here?" - in the long term, any player losses would be more than made up for with a larger mud playerbase. And player tastes do change.

In Skotos, we have a collection of affiliated muds, one account gets you access to all the games. I notice that players regularly get "burnt out" on one game, and move to another game. They'll stick around for a few months, then usually go back to their original game. Sometimes they'll stay at the new game. It seems that this "set of games" effect helps keep players. Instead of a player being so burnt out or frustrated that they leave, they stay as part of the same community and focus their efforts elsewhere.

Of course, I can't see the behavior outside of the skotos community - for all I know the people who leave skotos keep playing other muds elsewhere.

But even so - I don't *want* the players who don't suit my mud. Players who are looking for something different might contribute to the game, but are also going to pull it in an undesirable direction. They're going to actively work against the goals staff are trying to achieve. I'd much rather direct those players to a mud that suits them, and if that mud does the same, directing players that suit my game to me, then we're both winning. And most importantly, the player is winning, by finding a game that is more likely to be enjoyable for them.