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Old 04-01-2006, 10:29 AM   #3
the_logos
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Mill Valley, California
Posts: 2,305
the_logos will become famous soon enough
Let's see, the methods we use are:

1. Word of mouth. I'm guessing we're no different from most MUDs here. Word of mouth is by far the most powerful player acquisition method. As long as you have a MUD people like, you can expect this to work with little effort on your part. Like Medievia, we have flyers and whatnot that people can download and post in internet cafes, military bases, schools, etc.

2. Internet advertising. We experiment with advertising on various sites and have advertised on everything from comics sites like PvPOnline, Nuklearpower.com, Ctrl+Alt+Del to game aggregation sites like . Our next campaign is going to target WoW players on sites like The key here is to try to offer them something that they aren't getting on WoW. Better roleplaying, political systems, the ability to affect the world via admin-run worldwide plots, etc.

3. Press releases. We don't issue a ton of these, but when we do, IGN and other major games sites usually run them. I'm unsure how much traffic the press release pages get on those sites, but they do help keep our name out there among the more general gaming public, or at least the gaming media.

4. Participation in the wider games world via conferences, blogs, etc. This probably doesn't directly get us many players (though we do have some devs from companies like Valve playing, so I guess it got a few at least), but what it does, along with the press releases above, is ensure that the media is aware of us and that when they need a quote for a story or need/want to talk about digital asset sales or about text MUDs, we immediately come to mind. It's pretty hard to quantify these results though.

Overall, getting people who haven't played text MUDs before to play them is a bit of a tough sell. It's a shame, because I'm positive text MUDs have a lot to offer that people just aren't aware of. One of the major difficulties is trying to convey to people just what the advantages of text are. You can say things like "Increased depth" but that's pretty nebulous and doesn't really convey excitement, especially when many gamers would look at WoW as a really 'deep' game.

--matt
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