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It's a good question, how to get them to play. You get them to play buy walking them by hand through the game and showing them what they can do. Mud schools are nice, but nothing beats a real person showing a new mudder around. Help files are good, but rarely do people stop to read them.
How to get people to connect? Well you advertise. You pay for it if you charge money to play your MUD. It's easy and it's great and places like TMC and TMS will gladly take your money. If you are free to play and don't want to shell out of your own pocket for advertising, you list your game on sites that advertise as free game directories etc. I promise you this will get you more hits per ad than either TMS or TMC. Have you ever wondered why TMS doesn't post their numbers? Even using the rankings, for example, here at MT we get what, maybe 100 'out's to our website in 2 week intervals, where as we get thousands of pageviews a week from the free game directory sites. That's still more than the top ranked mud here at TMS.
If you look at stupid online games, where its just some cheesy set of asp or php pages with a lame economic system and basic attack, defend system, there are hundreds upon hundreds of kids online playing it. Because all you do is click click click. That is all the majority of internet gamers can do these days. All they want to do is try and get the highest score, they don't care about interaction, descriptions, adventure, challenges or puzzles.
So hey, if you want a ****ton of players just focus it on the majority of internet gamers, they are immature and illiterate. That's not to say they won't growup and become intelligent and literate, but that's what most middle school kids are. Personally I would rather have 30 smart, fun, nice players on my MUD than 300 morons.
Another key is a client. Telnet sucks and will drive away 99% of new players. Don't give people the easability to connect via telnet!! Ignoring internet hype... people goto the store, they see boxed software, say DnD Online, it's in a pretty box with a CD rom of software that they use to connect to the MMORPG. Well, if you had a client out there that was packaged and easily installed, people would be more inclined to play because they see it more as software, a real game, than some online system far far away. That is why java clients are also so popular. When you play it, it looks as if you are playing a web-game.
Tank
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